Recover Life from Depression
Writing about depression can be an important self-healing technique, and you don’t have to have great ambitions about being a writer to benefit from it. As a form of therapy, keeping journals and diaries has been popular for years.
But there are pitfalls in this approach, and it’s important to know what they are and why they prevent writing from helping with recovery.
The psychologist James Pennebaker has come up with useful explanations about why this approach can work and how it can go wrong.
Thanks again to isabella at moritherapy and her post about Mental Health Camp, I’ve been reading Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing. She discusses at length not only the healing power of the writing process but also the need for a writer to care for the creative self. Her own breakthrough in becoming […]
Some Rights Reserved by tore_urnes at Flickr Thanks to isabella, and her recent posts on writing and healing (like this one), I’ve been thinking more about the way writing, creativity and healing fit together. From the beginning of this blog, I had no doubt that creative expression of all kinds, and writing for me, could […]
There is a lot to explore in the idea of changing the mindset of recovery to that of finding purpose for the future. Just as I could undo the belief in my perpetual illness, I could also undo the belief that there had been little meaning or value in what I had done in the […]
Understanding what work means for my sense of personal identity, for a basic acceptance of who I am, has been a central issue in making progress in recovery over this past year. Yet it seems strange that both my identity and feelings of self-worth should so depend on what I do. I spent a long […]
Some Rights Reserved by Thomas Hawk at Flickr This is a revision of the first post I wrote for this blog. It came from a journal that I worked at daily for a time, and that experience convinced me that writing about depression was one way I could fight it more actively. I will be […]
