Finding purpose in life that goes beyond your personal needs is often mentioned as a major step in overcoming depression. That’s a hard thing to imagine, though, when you’re in the middle of a severe relapse, and survival is the only goal in sight. Yet, one of the hallmarks of depression is loss of motivation […]
Martin Seligman’s Approach to Cognitive Therapy
Many people with depression believe that nothing good will ever happen for them. The norm is failure and disappointment, the exception is success, and when something good does happen, it doesn’t count. This is just the sort of inner belief and self-talk that cognitive therapy addresses, and one of its leading advocates is Martin Seligman. […]
How Depression Spreads
Depression spreads through the closest relationships almost like a communicable disease. I learned the hard way that the illness didn’t happen to me alone. It happened to my children, my friends, and most of all to my wife. The pull of depression took me away from her and everyone else. I often felt I was […]
A Wheel of Emotions
There are many models for capturing the range of human emotion, but one that caught my eye was this highly original classification captured in the wheel of emotions. This image is the work of Robert Plutchik, a psychologist who saw emotions, as Darwin did in his groundbreaking The Expression of the Emotions in Man […]
Self-Starting When Depressed
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 […]
Psychological Flexibility, Well-Being and Doubts about Recovery
I’ve been wondering: How could it be that I have recovered from depression but still deal with symptoms almost every day? Can both things be true? Recently I’ve come across new ways of thinking about well-being and psychological flexibility that help explain this paradox. Finding these ideas couldn’t be more timely because doubts about recovery […]
