imagination

Yes, there are such things as comedies about depression. Sort of light, often romantic, oddly funny, definitely quirky, and probably not for everyone. Perhaps depression has given me a strange sense of humor, but laughing at a deadly serious illness helps me from time to time. You need to have a pretty good imagination and […]

Some Rights Reserved by a whisper of unremitting demand at Flickr Merely Me wrote a wonderful post on the importance of bringing play back into everyday life. It is the forgotten tonic among adults in general and depressed adults in particular. She paints a vivid scene of a group therapy session where she coaxed recovering […]

I’ve tried to use the creativity of writing to engage depression, to take away its power and release my mind from its prisoning obsessions. I want to offer a few notes about how these basic elements help in my experience. Each of us responds differently, and what works for me may not work for another. […]

Some Rights Reserved by jairo at Flickr Marissa wrote a post at Wellsphere that made me pause. She was objecting to the idea found in Richard O’Connor’s book (Undoing Depression) that “I am not my depression.” She interpreted this as an evasion of accountability for one’s actions. The depressed behavior that harms relationships, for example, […]

I’ve been looking back at the way I’ve thought about depression and my stance toward dealing with it, and I’ve started to wonder: Could I imagine and adopt in my life a different approach to this illness? What starts me on this track is my encounter with the experiences of so many other thoughtful fellow-sufferers […]

Patrick has written a comment packed with ideas about his responses to depression. I’m especially interested in three points he makes about creativity and imagination. First, he notes that his years of experience of therapy led him to see it as a “misguided enterprise, that of creating and recreating ‘narratives’ to explain events of Mind.” […]