Even though I’ve written a great deal about recovery from depression, when I decided to pull my experiences together in A Mind for Life ebook, I ran into a lot of problems. It’s so much easier to write about the miseries of the condition when it’s controlling your life than about the slow, stumbling process […]
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Mapping Recovery-5: Does Your Life Support Depression?
Mapping the full scope of your depression requires a searching look beyond symptoms to include the way you’re living your life as a whole. When tracking symptoms, the focus is on what’s wrong, what you can no longer do. Following daily life means focusing on what you do, the specific actions you take in response to the situations you run into.
By following your daily actions, it’s easier to spot the patterns of depression’s impact on the way you’re living. You can see more clearly when the illness seems to drive everything you do and when you feel have some room to maneuver. Those are the openings for change that let you begin a recovery process.
Mapping Recovery-4: Matching Therapies to Your Symptoms
If you’ve been tracking your symptoms for at least a month, you should have a fairly detailed picture of your particular variety of depression. You understand the full range of symptoms, when they occur, what other conditions in your life accompany them and which ones you’ve got to deal with first. Now comes the hard […]
Mapping Recovery-3: Reviews of 4 Web Apps for Tracking Depression
The best way to understand depression is to track your symptoms and triggering events each day. The question is: How to do it. To start with, you might use a written diary, or just a list on note paper. But the more symptoms and triggering events you follow and the longer you keep up with […]
Mapping Recovery-2: Tracking Your Symptoms
Tracking your symptoms as part of mapping recovery might sound like one of those good ideas you’ll do for a while but eventually drop. It could be like all those computer programs for organizing your work into projects, goals and actions. The method itself becomes a big project and takes so much time that you […]
Mapping Recovery-1: The Big Picture of Depression Symptoms
This post is the first in a series about how you can help yourself begin recovery. Depression can be a powerhouse of misery that leaves you feeling helpless, but it’s not one massive force, whatever it may feel like. Depression is a combination of several conditions, and there are effective ways to deal with each […]
Is There a Roadmap for Recovery?
Let’s say you’ve committed yourself to do whatever it might take to recover from depression. But then what? There are many forms of treatment to choose from, chief among them these days are medication and cognitive therapy. There are also other forms of psychotherapy, mindfulness meditation, changes in nutrition, regular physical exercise – and those are just the beginning. They always seemed to me like puzzle pieces. No one of them let me see much, yet I needed a big picture to understand how to fit them together.
