Lance Moore > Lance's Quotes

“Depression becomes for us a set of habits, behaviors, thought processes, assumptions, and feelings that seems very much like our core self; you can’t give those up without something to replace them and without expecting some anxiety along the way. Recovery from depression is like recovery from heart disease or alcoholism.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Like alcoholism, depression is a lifelong condition that can be cured only by a deliberate effort to change our selves.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“There is clearly a biochemical component to depression, and medication can be helpful for many people, but medication alone is not sufficient treatment for most.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“and relationships in the here and now.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“The real battle of depression is between parts of the self. Depressed people are pulled under by shadows, ghosts, pieces of themselves that they can’t integrate and can’t let go. The harder they work, the more they do what they know how to do, the worse things get. When their loved ones try to help in the usual ways, the commonsense ways that only seem natural expressions of caring and concern, they get rejected.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“They might medicate themselves with alcohol and drugs. Their families didn’t know how to help; neither sympathy nor moralizing seemed to have any effect. In this way, the depressed person gets caught up in a vicious circle from which there seems to be no escape.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“On a human level, helping people understand that they have a disease can free them from much of the guilt and self-blame that accompanies depression. They can learn different ways of reacting to stress”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Psychotherapy and medication both produce similar changes in brain functioning.18 There is a biochemical process in depression, but the individual has been made susceptible to depression through life experiences.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“Alcohol and other drugs may be used to give relief from the depression. But the relief is only temporary, at best, and usually the person just hates himself more for giving in to temptation. Alcohol itself is a depressant, and long-term alcohol abuse may lead to chronic depression”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“People with depression, however, share a whole set of stories about the world that are highly distorted, and because their stories are self-fulfilling prophecies, they maintain and reinforce the depression.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“In our relationships with others, we have unrealistic expectations, are unable to communicate our own needs, misinterpret disagreement as rejection, and are anxious and unassertive in our presentation.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“we can reprogram our own brains through focused practice of any new skill, through attending to ourselves in a mindful, noncritical way.”
― Richard O'Connor, Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

“People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think. Don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome.”
― River Tam - Serenity