work

My latest ebook, Depression Present Tense, is now available at Amazon and the other major online retailers. Like Surviving Depression Together and A Mind for Life, it draws together a number of posts from Storied Mind and weaves them into a book to capture the immediate feelings, sights, sounds, terrors and joys of living with […]

Simply getting to work when you’re depressed can feel like an impossible task. Dealing with people in the workplace and doing the most basic parts of the job seem to take more energy than you have. The routine becomes hard labor, and the stress and depression feed off each other. Over the past year, several […]

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 […]

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 […]

A few months ago, I found a picture of myself from college years that gave no hint of the turmoil of inner beliefs I held at the time. There I was, a lean young guy, sporting a cigarette for a role I was acting. The strange thing about this is that at the time I […]

Accepting the past is hard work. Avoidance of any part of the past that makes me uncomfortable used to be my go-to strategy, even though it never worked for long. I guess it’s the opposite of the tendency to obsess about everything I ever did wrong. (For example, reliving that humiliating interview 43 years ago, […]