The subtitle of Storied Mind used to be Writing to Recover Life from Depression, and I’ve often wondered why it is specifically that writing can help heal depression, especially when so many other approaches to treatment have failed me. When I was just starting this blog, I wrote about the fear of writing or even […]
trauma
Patterns of Recovery from Depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
I started learning about patterns of recovery when my mother survived two heart attacks but died twice before her death. That’s the way she saw it. Her heart stopped both times, but she fought her way back. The second heart-stopping attack occurred during an operation for a different problem. She was 94. I only learned […]
How Lasting is the Impact of Emotional Abuse in Childhood?
I’ve worked for a long time on rebuilding self-esteem, though I’ve never been sure whether the lack of it contributed to depression or the depression killed off the self-esteem. It hardly matters. When I was a kid, that confident, robust me, sure of who he was, feeling like a whole person, apparently never made it […]
Depression and Anger: A Destructive Partnership
It took me a long time to understand the connection between depression and anger. One psychiatrist I visited would often ask a simple question toward the end of a session: How’s your anger? I couldn’t understand why he asked. I hadn’t been talking about anger. Depression was my problem. I’d usually respond with a puzzled, […]
Recovery Stories: Tony Giordano
Every story about depression is a little different. But when you can see the big picture, a lot of parallels start to appear. Although I had gone through some rough spots here and there, my life was moving along alright overall until depression struck in my mid-forties. When I learned I was clinically depressed, I […]
Psychological Abuse and Depression
There have been many times in the past when I’ve run into someone at work who could twist my words to suit his own purpose. If I’d challenged him in some way, he would launch a subtle verbal assault that built gradually to convince me he’d been the victim and I’d been the one who […]
A New Post at Health Central on Combat Trauma and PTSD
Some Rights Reserved by Will Lion at Flickr I’ve published a new post at Health Central, the second in a series on depression and related problems among veterans. This one looks at PTSD from the perspective of soldiers who’ve been through combat and also at innovative approaches to treatment. I hope you’ll have a look […]
Real’s Men and Depression
The other day I looked back at a couple of posts by Therese Borchard at Beyond Blue about the behaviors that distinguish men and women in their responses to depression. She quoted two different studies in posts she published about a year apart, and that’s how long I’ve been mulling over writing about this subject. […]
