There’s a story on this site that never, unfortunately, gets old. It’s about depressed men breaking up their relationships as a misguided way to get well and find fulfillment. The psychotherapist, David Wexler, has good ideas about how men can change the experience of their closest relationships without leaving. He looks at the problems of […]
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The Loss of Feeling in Depressed Partners
Living with depressed partners can mean living without the feelings of love that are at the heart of every relationship. What is it about depression that could turn intimate companions into cold and blaming strangers? Readers ask about this over and over as their partners start blaming them for their own unhappiness and want out […]
How Depression Spreads
Depression spreads through the closest relationships almost like a communicable disease. I learned the hard way that the illness didn’t happen to me alone. It happened to my children, my friends, and most of all to my wife. The pull of depression took me away from her and everyone else. I often felt I was […]
Becoming an Active Partner in Depression Treatment
Most stories about getting life back from depression describe how each person had to become an active partner in treatment in order to recover. I know it’s not easy to think about being active when you’re deeply depressed, but there’s a lot of support for the idea. Dozens of research studies indicate that if you can take a leading role, your chances of improving are better. There are at least three ways an active role can help you.
Can You Be a Therapist for Your Depressed Partner?
A couple of readers have asked me to comment on whether it’s possible or advisable to try to act as a ‘therapist’ for your depressed partner. This idea came out of responses to one of the posts on relationships that has attracted the most attention on this blog: How Can You Communicate After Your Depressed […]
When Depressed Partners Blame and Leave
Part of running Storied Mind is responding to a steady stream of emails and comments from readers, and most of them concern the collision of depression and close relationships. They are mostly from people who have watched their depressed partners turn into angry strangers who leave. It’s a theme I’ve written about many times, but […]
If Your Partner’s Depression Returns
When a partner’s depression ends, a couple may feel happy disbelief as they emerge into the light again from a long darkness in the relationship. They’ve been desperate to understand how an intimate partner could possibly have grown silent, angry, emotionally never there, reluctant to touch or talk about anything. Then suddenly they’re back, feeling […]
How Couples Stay Together
Many couples manage to survive depression with the help of marital therapy, even though most relationship therapies aren’t designed to deal with the added problem of a mood disorder. I’ve been doing a little research and have found that most therapy and counseling for couples doesn’t have a good track record. In fact, research links […]
