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I have gained an unbecoming amount of weight. I get weird hives for no apparent reason. I sweat more. My memory, never very good, is mildly impaired: I frequently forget what I am saying in the middle of a sentence. I get headaches a lot. I get occasional muscular cramps. My sex drive comes and goes and my sexual function is erratic: an orgasm is a special occasion nowadays.
“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness.
To have an immutable sense of self through the outrage of manic-depressive illness attests to a great strength.
Human consciousness may be seen bound by the sides of a triangle: the theological, the psychological, and the biological.
Formal systems of religion lie outside my upbringing and experience, but I find it hard to stave off the sense of intervention that characterizes one’s decline and one’s rise. It is a matter too deeply felt to be a godless act.
Individualism, this breaking of ourselves away from everything else, has denigrated modern life.
The power of prayer is probably good for a person suffering from depression but how can anyone believe in something that is so biased? It seems so unjust!
“When you say a prayer at a moment of anxiety, of overstriving, it can be like pushing a button and letting out parachutes to stop you from crashing, full force, into a brick wall, or falling down so hard and so fast that all the bones in your emotional body will crush,”
“Labour must be the cure, not sympathy—Labour is the only radical cure for rooted sorrow,” wrote Charlotte Brontë;
Happiness itself can be a grand labour.
“No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise. ‘Cultivate happiness!’ I said briefly to the doctor: ‘do you cultivate happiness? How do you manage?’”
My favourite came from a woman in Tucson who wrote simply, “Did you ever consider leaving Manhattan?”
the effects of formaldehyde poisoning can in fact be similar to the symptoms of depressive illness. So too can the neurotoxicity of mercury poisoning from amalgam fillings in teeth. Low blood sugar is linked to depressed mood.
one might credit any sustained useless or useful activity with its eventual amelioration. It is my absolute belief that in the field of depression, there is no such thing as a placebo.
considerable control can be achieved through good regimes of fitness and nutrition.
transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS);
eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy; massage treatments; survival courses; hypnosis; sleep deprivation therapy; the plant Saint-John’s-wort; S-adenosylmethionine or SAMe; homeopathy; Chinese herbal m...
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Sugar and carbohydrates appear to raise the absorption of tryptophan in the brain, which in turn raises serotonin levels. Vitamin B6, which is found in whole grains and shellfish, is important to serotonin synthesis; low levels of B6 may precipitate a depression. Low cholesterol has been linked to depressive symptoms. The studies aren’t in, but a good diet of lobster and chocolate mousse may do much towards improving one’s state of mind.
“The twentieth century’s emphasis on a physically healthy diet,” says Watson, “has probably given us a psychologically unhealthy one.”
Depressed people often have low levels of zinc (which occurs in oysters, endive, asparagus, turkey, and radishes),
Low levels of zinc have been especially strongly associated with postpartum depression, since all reserves of zinc pass from the expectant mother to the baby at the very end of pregnancy. Increasing intake of zinc can elevate mood.
The evidence for beneficial mood effect from omega-3 fatty acids is the strongest of all.
“People who are depressed fool themselves into thinking that coffee is the one thing that provides energy,” Edgson says, “but in fact it leaches energy and stimulates anxiety responses.”
repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), which uses magnetism to create metabolic stimulation much like that caused in ECT, but at lower levels.
Norman Rosenthal discovered seasonal affective disorder (SAD) when he moved from South Africa to the United States and began getting rounds of the winter blues.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy originated in 1987 for the treatment of
I always came out of my EMDR therapist’s office reeling (in a good way); and the things I learned have stayed with me and enriched my conscious mind. It’s a powerful process. I recommend it.
I believe that extensive massage, which reawakens the body that depression has cut off from the mind, can be a useful part of therapy. I don’t think my Sedona experience could have done a thing for someone in the depths of major depression, but as a tune-up technique it was pretty terrific.
“Without self-discovery,” Hahn wrote, extending an idea of Nietzsche’s, “a person may still have self-confidence, but it is a self-confidence built on ignorance and it melts in the face of heavy burdens. Self-discovery is the end product of a great challenge mastered, when the mind commands the body to do the seemingly impossible, when strength and courage are summoned to extraordinary limits for the sake of something outside the self—a principle, an onerous task, another human life.”
Hypnosis, like EMDR, is a tool that can be used in treatment rather than as a treatment itself.
“Grief, which leads to depression, disrupts your sleep one way; falling in love, which can lead to mania, disrupts your sleep another way,”
Almost all people who suffer from depression feel worse in the morning and better as the day goes on.
Even though depressed people seek the oblivion of sleep, it is in sleep that the depression is maintained and intensified. What kind of horrible succubus visits during the night and brings about that transformation?”
Saint-John’s-wort has been a psychological panacea in northern Europe, SAMe has been the most popular treatment in southern Europe,
Homeopathy is occasionally used to counter depression: Practitioners administer tiny doses of various substances that might in larger doses give healthy people depressive symptoms.
Reinhard Lier then choreographed a kind of elaborate dance using these people as physical markers, placing one in front of the other, moving the subject around, and retelling the story towards a better resolution.
depression support groups
Depressives are not great dressers, and they often find that bathing uses up too much energy.
Lobotomies, first performed at the turn of the century, became popular in the 1930s and, especially, after World War II.
cingulotomy.
I guess being depressed all the time was actually a relatively safe place to be. I didn’t have the real-world worries that everyone else has because I knew that I simply couldn’t function well enough to take care of myself. What do I do now?
People travel from all over West Africa, some from even further, for the mystic ndeup ceremonies for mental
Genetic information may help us to control certain kinds of depression, but the chances of eliminating depression through genetic manipulation any time soon are, I believe, thinner than thin ice.
For reasons variously attributed to chemistry and external conditions, about twice as many women as men seem to suffer depression.
Women are likely to experience lower levels of depression around menopause, which strongly suggests a hormonal factor in women’s depression—
The overlap of some feminist theory’s manipulation of scientific reality to achieve political goals, and most medical theory’s insensitivity to social reality, has tied up the matter of gender and depression in a Gordian knot.
Self-loathing may cause people to want to make themselves as small as possible until they nearly disappear.
The feminist critic Dana Crowley Jack has systematized these ideas as components of women’s loss of voice or loss of self. “As these women fail to hear themselves speak to their partners, they are unable to sustain the convictions and feelings of ‘I’ and slip, instead, into self-doubt about the legitimacy of their privately held experience.”
Jack states, “Women undertake massive self-negation as part of their search for intimacy.”
This is one more of depression’s seemingly endless run of chicken–egg scenarios: depressed women are less able to defend themselves against abuse and are therefore abused more, becoming more depressed as a consequence of abuse, which makes them even less able to defend themselves.
“easy targets for depression, a depression bound by patriarchy and robbed of its organic, mythic nature and consequently, its healing properties.”
