Photo Credit: Eric Gevaert Today gave me a lesson in the value of anger. Yes, I’ve heard it all: anger bad – positive feelings good. Fine. Too much anger, and I’d better manage it or I’ll be out of a job, family, the whole works. Right. But there are times when the purely valid human […]
work
Support or Defeat?
One of the hardest admissions I have had to make about the effect of depression was to say bluntly to myself, after years of denial, that my performance in my profession had steadily deteriorated under the impact of this illness. The truth had been obvious for some time to colleagues depending on me to be […]
Real Depressed Men Don’t Cry
Not sure where the following came from, but it turned up on my cyber doorstep recently. I guess some men have trouble living up to their fantasies. Ok – everybody knows depressed people have these outbursts of grief and crying for no apparent reason. At least some people do. But certainly not me, a guy […]
Surviving at Work – 1: Recognizing the Symptoms
There are days that begin in difficult moods, and I start writing down what I’m going through to see if I can shake myself loose. Here’s what I wrote one morning last week. ……. I keep sinking away into a deep pool of stillness. Looking outside this morning, I see that the season’s first rain […]
What Depression Can Do – 2: Shame and Despair
Can’t (Rights Reserved) What's it like, the mixing of shame and despair? I am full of the sense that I have no future, there is no point to living. This is no emptiness or lack of feeling, lack of affect, as they say. It is the intense feeling of hitting bottom, overwhelmed with shame, worthlessness, […]
What Depression Can Do – 1: Disappearing
I can’t remember when this started happening. I’m walking about in everyday life reacting to nothing, feeling nothing, and it’s happening now when I’m on the job, running a meeting with 20 people around a table. This is not the self-control I developed as a kid, the bottling up of intense feeling out of a […]
