Discovering the gifts of depression Situational depression arises when some aspect of your life is already unworkable or dysfunctional; depression stops you for a vital reason. When we looked at the gifts of sadness, I talked about what I call the fundamental correlation error that I see with many emotions — which is that people blame emotions for making them feel bad, rather than understanding that … Read More
When suicides are in the news, people tend to talk more about depression. Medical and psychological researchers (and news outlets) focus a great deal of attention on depression, and it seems that every week brings a new story about what does and doesn’t work for depression. This is great; it’s a positive movement that is helping to make depression more of an everyday topic (instead of … Read More
Hey! Thanks for all your help! We’ve got some excellent and articulated emotion lists to help us become fluent in the language of emotions. Let’s take a look at our updated emotion lists now that we’ve discussed them and organized the categories. In this post, I’ll give you the vocabulary lists without any of the explanations or caveats we had in the original posts (post 1, … Read More
There are a number of saddening stories out this week on a topic close to my heart: Depression. Some drug companies are giving up on antidepressant research, many natural cures are not working, and yet another doctor has clambered onto the anti-medication soapbox. Sigh. I have early-onset double depression (major depression and dysthymia), and I can tell you that antidepressants are certainly helpful, and that the … Read More
Emotional hygiene is an idea I developed about seven years ago (the phrase is not original to me, though) when I was dealing with depression and one of my best friends was dealing with anxiety. As it turns out, the two states aren’t very compatible! My friend and I had been very close and emotionally in sync for many years, and we were very used to … Read More