Overcoming a Dysfunctional Litter
Recently, my friend’s teenage son asked her if he could go on antidepressants. Alarmed at the prospect, she began researching other ways to deal with depression, which was how she found this book. When she told me about it, I went out and bought it immediately. I don’t get severely depressed like I once did. [...]
I’ve been writing this blog for almost five years now, and I was shocked to see that I haven’t done a proper post about grief. Because when all is said and done, after all the tears, rage, righteous anger, depression, denial, resistance, fear, addiction, and all the rest, I discovered that what it all comes [...]
As I said in What is Depression?, a large part of depression is all the energy required to repress feelings. It’s like having a hole in your foot that drains you of vitality. If you’ve ever spent a day driving, then you know how taxing it can be to expend mental energy. Well, mental energy [...]
In Dead Kittens and Prozac, I use the word sadness to describe the condition for which doctors prescribe antidepressant medication. I did this deliberately, as a way to de-medicalize the reasons people seek out these drugs, all of which fall under the broad category of depression. I did this not because I don’t believe depression [...]
The unexamined life is not worth living. — Socrates I was watching Craig Ferguson the other night, and he did something that really got me thinking. He apologized to viewers who had complained about a cartoon he’d aired of a kitten being eaten by a shark. As he did so, he shook his head and [...]
Why do people continue to go to family for support when all they get is pain? When it hurts and hurts some more, what keeps us going back? Is it masochism? Ignorance? Some subconscious form of self-punishment or self-destructiveness? No. Almost never. It’s numbness. People go back for more because they’ve long ago become numb [...]
The holidays are always a weird time of year for me (I’ve written about this here). I don’t get debilitatingly depressed like I used to (and I’m grateful for that!), and I’ve even found ways to enjoy the holidays on my own terms. Even so, it’s just a weird, weird, weird time of year. When [...]
A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.–Albert Einstein If you’re feeling down, the quickest way to feel better is to get out of yourself. That is, to stop thinking about what’s going on with you and go do something kind for somebody else. This is one of those thing that does [...]
Years ago, I was at an AA meeting where a guy was going on and on about how perfect his life was now that he was sober. His wife was perfect, his job was perfect, his friends were perfect, god was smiling down on him in every way. From my dark funk of emotional pain, [...]
Confucious say, man who fly upside down have crack-up. Everyone is always trying to “hold it together.” Our culture values emotional endurance to the point of stoicism. That can be a good thing in many circumstances: when we have to be strong for a child; to make it to work when all we want to [...]