Storied Mind

Recover Life from Depression

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Healing

How Does Depression Change You? Can You Ever Be Yourself Again?

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Have you ever wondered if multiple episodes of depression change you so much that you’ll never get back to your old self? Most people I hear from say: I want to be myself again. That’s their definition of recovery. Can it happen?

I found an interesting discussion about long-term changes in an online journal called Medicographia. The editors posed a question to psychiatrists and researchers from around the world and printed their responses together.

Here’s the question: Is the patient really the same after a major depressive episode?

The Labor and Life of Gardening

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My wife keeps expanding and adding variety to the gardens at our house. For her, they’re a labor of love, rewarding and fulfilling for the work they require. But growing hundreds of different plants calls for constant attention. The basics demand hard labor. There are the piles of plant remains to be turned and sifted. […]

Writing to Heal – 2: Getting Started

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In the first post of this series (and I urge you to read it if you haven’t done so), I talked about the healing potential of writing and a few do’s and don’ts to make it as helpful as possible. That’s important to know, but the general concepts don’t tell you how to get started. […]

Writing to Heal – 1

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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.