Recover Life from Depression
Once you have a depression diagnosis, what does it mean to you? I’ve heard a lot of reactions, ranging from a feeling of comfort to dismay to a shrug of the shoulders.
A diagnosis is simply a name given to a set of symptoms, but it’s usually wrapped inside a number of messages, whether spoken or implied. Your response could depend on a specific message that’s delivered with the diagnosis. Given the authority of psychiatrists and other physicians, it’s easy to confuse the two.
A depression diagnosis usually marks a turning point in your experience of the illness. Up to that point, you may have downplayed the seriousness of mood problems, or you may have been less aware of feelings and focused instead on pain or insomnia or some other physical symptom.
When things get so bad that you can’t lead the life you’re used to, then you know you need help but may still have no idea what the cause is. So you head for the doctor’s office – whether it’s your primary care physician or a psychiatrist – and hope they’ll be able to tell you what’s wrong and do something about it.
Recovery should aim at restoring psychological well-being as well as ending the symptoms of depression. Naturally, you get into treatment to stop the pain of those symptoms. It’s a huge achievement if the treatment works, and you can keep depression from ruining your life. But so many people relapse after initially getting better that full […]
How can we draw on the power of our own minds to heal depression? As I’ve tried to answer this question, I’ve had to rethink my beliefs about recovery. This is the first in a series of posts to describe what I’ve been learning. Like everything else I’ve been writing about here, this search starts […]
How can you activate yourself to get anything done when you’re depressed? Several readers have asked about this basic need to keep functioning when your mood, mind and body do not want to cooperate. I’ve written before about working when depressed, but it’s not only about work. It’s about self-starting when depressed so that you […]
I’ve been wondering: How could it be that I have recovered from depression but still deal with symptoms almost every day? Can both things be true? Recently I’ve come across new ways of thinking about well-being and psychological flexibility that help explain this paradox. Finding these ideas couldn’t be more timely because doubts about recovery […]
A lot of people think of recovery from depression as an unending process of managing the symptoms. But I have always hoped that recovery is more than remission of symptoms. Before imagining full recovery, however, there’s the enormous task of getting the most crippling effects of depression under control. I don’t mean ending them altogether, […]
When I started learning about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the idea that I was doing depression rather than having it as an illness didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I could understand that avoiding painful situations could worsen depression and that I often acted in self-defeating ways. But weren’t those the effects […]
