Depression Present Tense Now Available 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 depression and struggling to heal despite its pervasive presence. Depression Present Tense opens with childhood memories about the origins of family trauma and early signs of isolation and loss of self-esteem. It goes on to detail ..read more

Storied Mind Ebooks Ready to Go! Well, it took a little longer than I expected, but the two Storied Mind ebooks are now available at most of the major online sites, including Amazon, Apple iBooks, Kobo, B&N Nook and a lot of others I’ve only recently discovered. All the formatting of the old PDF versions had to go, and I dropped the images since I didn’t want to get into the weeds of permissions for artwork and photos I first used over ten years ago. The trade-off is that each book can be read on the appropriate device in a number of fonts, layouts and scales. That makes them much more re ..read more

Update on the Storied Mind Ebooks Just a note to let you know that I have finally edited and reformatted the two Storied Mind ebooks (Surviving Depression Together and A Mind for Life) to enable them to be read on Kindle, Kobo, Apple iBooks and other major readers. For various reasons related to this shift, the PDF versions, which have been on sale on this site for many years, are no longer available. It will take a while to get everything squared away with the new online services, put up author pages, and tend to a bunch of online publishing details. Then I’ll set up a new page on this site ..read more

Notebook: Healing the Whole Person In this post (one of several I think of as notebook entries) I’ve put together several ideas about healing that underlie the work of Michael Lerner and Rachel Naomi Remen. What sets them apart for me are their insights about the comprehensive process by which people not only learn to live with chronic illness but often change their whole orientation to life. Their work at the Commonweal Cancer Help Center was featured in the final segment of Bill Moyers’ Healing and the Mind, the book version of the PBS series of the early 1990s. More recently, I’ve been dra ..read more

Why Writing Helps Heal Depression – 2 As I discussed in this earlier post, writing helps heal the depression that dominated decades of my life. That post reviewed James Pennebaker’s research, as summarized in Opening Up, but said little about how I go about writing to confront the most powerful feelings and maintain the progress I’ve made in recovery. For writing is an important activity for sustaining my health as well as for healing. So how do I get the writing done – and how did I manage to do it when life was still dominated by depression? First, I had to get past not just the fears writi ..read more

Why Writing Can Help Heal Depression – 1 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 approaching my desk to get started. I’d sit there writing at a more intellectual level – circling the pain at a safe distance. But each time I closed in to confront, feel and work through it all, I’d start to shut down. Either my mind would bl ..read more

Re-Reading the Story of Depression’s Meaning There are no more beautiful and moving stories of healing than those told by Rachel Naomi Remen. Kitchen Table Wisdom is one of those books I come back to again and again. Each of its brief stories renders a moment of discovery that reveals a life’s meaning to someone lost in pain or rigid routine. As moving as these stories are, I had never thought much about the relevance of such experiences to my own life. It didn’t seem possible that the sudden revelation of meaning – and the strength it provides – could possibly result from my own severe depres ..read more

Depersonalized, Derealized, Dissociative and Disappearing I had a comment on a post at Health Central that described an experience the writer called dissociative. During a therapy session she had become so remote that she couldn’t focus on the discussion or even remember in mid-sentence what she’d been saying. She wasn’t fully present and couldn’t bring herself to come back into the therapist’s office. Dissociation isn’t a condition I’ve thought or known much about, and I rarely, if ever, use the word. So I spent a while looking it up – not that I care that much about psychiatric jargon – but ..read more

A New Model of Mental Health Recovery My understanding of mental health recovery came from experience with the standard treatments: psychotherapy and medication. Until the 1990s, I worked exclusively with psychiatrists for both. In that setting, I can’t recall anyone talking to me about recovery or what I wanted to get out of treatment. The assumption was that I would be in therapy for the long-term. Whenever I brought up the idea of ending treatment, that became another subject for digging into my past rather than discussing what I wanted for the future. After a while, I became very skeptica ..read more

Stories to Explain My Life with Depression Stories can be an immediate and moving way to learn about someone because they evoke the feelings and experience that factual details never can. When told with honesty and sincerity, a story helps establish a bond of trust because the teller has been willing to open such personal insight to the listener. For me, certain stories have served another purpose even more vital than forming connections with other people. Those are the stories I tell myself to explain depression in my life: what it is, how I can live with it, what I can hope for in the futur ..read more