Pushing Back Against Depression

Depression will push our backs up against the wall. It often seems bigger than us: a bully. If we let it, it will pound us down. So, we’ve got to push back.

If we don’t fight back, together with the help of others, depression can consume our lives leaving only our pulse and some air in our lungs, but precious little else. The vitality, the passion and full array of emotions that make life worth living may be sucked up out of us as if by an alien ship from above.

There are many tools to fight depression. They can certainly help us regain our footing and make our lives functional and productive again. But isn’t life more than just about a return to “normal”? We all have dreams and aspire to live them. Theres’s something wild about dreams.  So often, they are outside our “normal”. And regaining them is a big part of recovery for it is these passions that bring us most fully alive in the cosmos. And we have to fight for our dreams.

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Just like fighting a bully, pushing back against depression takes courage. We have to reach deep down inside ourselves to listen to that part of our life force in us all that gives us the grit to say to depression,“no more”. We must say to ourselves, “I’m sick and tired of being ‘sick and tired’”.

When we’re ready to make some changes, we push the bully back. A small push in the beginning will do. We gain some space and separation from this goblin. We stop defining ourselves as a “depressed person,” as if our identity were wholly made up of our affliction. We are not our depression. It is a part, albeit a very painful part, of our lives. But it need not be all of it.

To fight back against depression, we need to empower ourselves to level the playing field. One of the best ways is learn mindfulness. With it, we gain detachment from our negative thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness teaches us that pessimistic thoughts and disturbing emotions are clouds passing in the sky, not reality.  Check out the excellent book, The Mindful Way Through Depression to learn more.

If we don’t buy into the depressed stories our minds spin out, we can begin to see them for what they are: puffs of cerebral and neurochemical smoke. We don’t have to buy into them.  We don’t have to live by that script.

This takes a lot of practice and we have to start slowing. This is, by no means, a quick “fix”. But in detaching ourselves from our mental jumble and the over reactive emotions that accompany my anxiety and depression, we gain freedom. We again have choices in life. We need not walk in the deep ruts of depression anymore.

And this is empowering.

Poet, Mary Oliver in her poem, “The Journey,”beautifully captures the sense of determination we need to recover from depression:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

 

 

 

How Magnets “Reset” Depressed Brains

The Washington Post reports that magnetic pulses from a device applied to the head appear to “reset” the brains of depressed patients, according to a new study from the United Kingdom. The circuitry in a part of the right prefrontal cortex is known to be too active in depressed patients, causing excessive rumination and self absorption and impaired attention. When the TMS was applied to healthy subjects in this study, the activity in that region slowed.

Read the News

 

Depression Study Seeks to Predict Treatment Response

Treating depressed individuals and figuring out who will and won’t respond to antidepressants is mostly trial and error, but a new study from Vanderbilt University may shed some light on predicting the response of a group of depressed individuals age 60 and older. Read the News

Coping with Adversity and Depression

Blogger Liz Smith writes, “Dealing with depression is difficult enough when everything in your life is going swimmingly but what about coping with depression and adversity? How do we cope with adversity and depression at the same time?” Read her Blog

One Woman Lawyer’s Journey Through Depression

Acknowledging my depression for the first time during my third year of law school was as terrifying a realization as it was liberating.  Between finishing up final classes, getting ready for the bar exam, and preparing for the first semester of my LL.M degree program, I fought every day to simply get out of my own way, and I fought even harder to hide it.  I would wake up in the morning in tears, yet by the afternoon I was at school, going through the motions, and relieved to just make it to the end of the day.

This contradiction of being in law school and living with depression was an unbearable secret.  At my core, I was beyond ashamed and embarrassed. I would beat myself up over and over again with the same though: how did I mange get myself to law school only to end up feeling this way?  I was so lost, and I was experiencing a pain that was as indescribable and unfamiliar as it was pervasive and present.   I convinced myself this that feeling this way was the price I had to pay to become a lawyer, to live up to this expectation I had created about myself.  So just get through it, I told myself.   This is the way it’s to be done.  Suck it up.  Survive.

In the months to come, however, my depression worsened.  Despite having passed the bar exam, started course work toward my LL.M degree, and a relationship with a man who said he cared for me, I crashed.  I spent entire days in bed, with no one to the wiser.  I stopped answering my phone and emails, and I wasn’t going to classes.  Getting out of bed felt like stepping off the edge of a cliff.  Life having any sense of forward momentum and progress was something that seemed to happening for other people, and I was left struggling, trying to figure out how to keep up.

Something inside me managed to articulate clearly and loudly that something was wrong with me that went beyond telling myself to suck it up.  One morning, moved by forces that to this day are still a mystery to me, I found my way to the university’s student counseling services.  A social worker took me in a back room for an intake interview.  Directly and clearly, I was honest for the first time about what was happening to me.  The next thing I knew I had a calendar filled with multiple weekly appointments with a psychiatrist who immediately put me on an anti-depressant and talk therapy.

Believe me when I say that those talk therapy sessions in the student counseling center changed my life.  My therapist saw through me with kindness and compassion in a way I didn’t think was possible for another person to do, and she understood the how and why of what was happening to me.  She helped me put words to emotions and thoughts that existed only in my head.  I learned that I could say I was dealing with depression, and that with work it was something I could learn to manage.

But my therapist also told me this was only the beginning for me with understanding and successfully managing my depression.  She said we had only scratched the surface. Her words were profound and prescient.  As my experience with law evolved from getting through the competitive and pressure filled environment of  law school to the demands of practice, so did my experience with depression and its affect on my ability to know and to listen to love myself.  For a while, I felt good, and depression felt like memory.  I found I was more comfortable with and better at being a working lawyer than I was a law student.  Practice requires you to touch more upon your true nature more, I think, than law school.  There was less posturing and more action, and I am more suited for that reality.  I still, however, had a lot to learn about asserting myself and holding my own in intense environments.   As the red flags of my depressive behaviors and thoughts would pop up, I realized that no matter what anti-depressant I was on, or what words of wisdom I tried desperately to recall from a therapy session, I was still out of sync with myself emotionally and my surroundings.  This was a powerful insight, but I still could not in the moment handle the stresses I experienced on a daily basis successfully or in a way that felt true to myself.  Sexism, cutthroat competitive colleagues, long hours, bitter partners who saw heaping insult upon you as affective training and as lawyerly karmic right.  The romantic ideal of the practice of law as noble and worthwhile was elusive and false.  The reality was all too much.

Even as I become more successful in advancing my career, obtaining a Federal clerkship and a Big Law job, my depression didn’t dissipate and disappear, as I had naively hoped it would (because as all lawyers know, the right job and status fix things, right?).  Instead, its presence became more insidious, because when I felt it, I immediately knew it meant that something was dreadfully wrong, and the fear of where it could take me became all-consuming.  The energy it took for me to hold my own with colleagues and clients and still at the end of the day deliver good work took over, and any healthy sense of self-care I had learned when I first acknowledged depression in my life was pushed aside.  I now felt like a failure at the most fundamental level because I couldn’t control my depression.  Even as my experiences with depressive tendencies became more insightful and clearer to me in their meaning, I was still at a loss as to what to do, and I brutally beat myself up for not being able to fix it.

After completion of a project I was on in 2009, I left my job, and I left life as a working lawyer.  And again, I crashed.  For a time, I swung too far in the other direction, internalizing depression to the point where it became my identity.  I didn’t know where depression ended and my sense of self began, and concluded that the entirety of my life would be determined by its presence.  Therapy and medication again were options, but this time, I knew in my gut what I needed was beyond the relief they would provide.

Only with time and by stepping back from thinking of myself as both a lawyer and as someone with depression have I have learned that ultimately I am neither one of those things.  I have learned that when I fight and ignore my intuition is when I get into trouble.  That is what depression at its worst takes from me.  It takes away my voice.  When outside noise and pressure and people are too loud, and are in turn amplified in my mind by my depressive thinking, I, in the most glorious sense of the word, am gone.  The “I” whose evidence of worth is proved by mere existence; the “I” that only has to live and breathe to be worthy, is nothing to me.  All I can see is worry and striving and other people’s judgments, and my own judgments, and angst and pain.

I don’t know that I will work in law again, but I entertain the thought now and then.  This thought isn’t without a realistic notion of what it will take to get back into the profession, so, equally, I honor the thought that I may never find a fit for myself in law.  I’ve also accepted depression in my life as a siren meant to warn me I’m headed for trouble. This clarity isn’t without fear.  I’ve had hard times since I left my last job as a lawyer, but I can honestly say that what I’ve learned about myself and life since has so far been worth it all.

By Anonymous

 

Can Creativity Help Depression? An Interview with Carrie Barron, M.D.

Dan: Why did you write The Creativity Cure?

Carrie: I felt that the solutions out there for people with anxiety and depression were partial solutions, incomplete remedies. The way we live now causes stress for many people – the pace, the lack of rest or leisure, the relentless striving. Our technological, cerebrally focused culture has taken us out of our bodies and ourselves. Addiction to devices causes an imbalance and a malaise. When you are tied to a device 24-7 you may not be experiencing the fullness of all 5 senses, the things that make you feel energized. The primal satisfaction of making things and using the hands are slowly slipping away from us. For wellbeing, we have to make a conscious effort to maintain them. When my patients make and fix things, they feel better. Research shows that manual effort and creativity are antidotes for malaise. The Creativity Cure was written to help people find another way.

Dan: I deal with lawyers with depression and other professionals that are on their phones and computers a lot. What kinds of things would you recommend that they do with their hands for physical?

Carrie: It’s about getting out of your head. There are many cerebrally oriented people, but “ I think therefore I am” (Descartes) may not be the answer in the current culture. It is really becoming I think therefore I’m not. Too much thinking at the exclusion of physical and manual activity can make us depressed. Physicality, creativity and using your hands – – cooking or washing cars or crafting, painting walls or using watercolors — honor anatomical intent. Long ago manual action in everyday life was necessary for physical survival. Now we need these actions for psychological survival.

The need to create is primal. Paint a wooden board or do Legos with your child. Do that thing you were always drawn and do it clumsily, imperfectly. You don’t have to have any experience as an artist or a maker of things. You don’t have to have a fine result. You can just explore, begin and build. The beauty is in the inner experience. Research has shown that meaningful hand use decreases depression.

Dan: In your book, write about the unconscious mind. What do you mean by that?

Carrie: The unconscious mind, the deepest most hidden layer of our mind houses our , primal self, our instincts, our intuitions and our truth. The unconscious is a treasure trove of clues about our natural self, our unique self.  We can get in touch with the deepest layer of our mind via dreams and seemingly random thoughts. Noting where our minds naturally drift helps us learn about where we need to be and what we need to do. The unconscious is a very powerful resource.

Dan: What is our unconscious trying to tell us for people who suffer with anxiety and depression?

Carrie: Depression can have many different causes: biological, situational, genetic or hormonal. It can also be the result of trauma. Self-knowledge and insight – knowing what resides in your unconscious mind – helps with depression because as the saying goes, the truth sets us free. Talking to a pastor or a mental health professional can elucidate information that moves you forward. Understanding yourself: who you really are, what your instincts are or what you are actually upset about is key for positive change. Sometimes you think your concern is one thing and your deeper self tells you that it is another. Following unconscious clues helps you live more truthfully and happily.

Dan: You mentioned “clues” from the unconscious. Can people that are dealing with anxiety and depression unearth these clues themselves? If a person did receive such clues, how would a person know, without talking to a therapist, know what to make of these clues?

Carrie: Writing is helpful. Keep a journal. Take walks, try yoga, breathe, self-reflect, fiddle with paint, doodle, just let. Important material bubbles up when your mind slows down. Be curious and wonder, “Who am I that I love that, what does this leaning say about me, how can I this passion be part of my regular life?” Paying attention to the feeling that accompanies certain thoughts can help you. Certain involvements can make you unhappy but they are habitual so you just keep on. Acknowledging your true inner responses enables you to change. Breaking through denial is key.

Dan: In my work helping lawyers with burnout, anxiety and depression, many of them that seem to contact me are middle-aged. Do you find that a lot of the people, the clients you see are coming to you in midlife?

Carrie: Yes, and midlife can be the best time of life. Loss and disruption, while initially causing depression or anxiety, can lead to positive inner transformation. If we learn to seek pleasure, solace or a feeling of elevation from friendships, family, creativity, and tending to those we love, we are empowered. If you are dependent on an outside institution for your self-esteem, you are less in control of your life and more vulnerable. Define yourself; don’t let it come from the outside.

Dan: I’d like to follow up on a point you make in your book when you talk about people not being in contact with their physical bodies and a visceral since of being alive. I spoke recently with Richard O’Connor, a psychologist in New York City who wrote the book Undoing Depression. He said that depression really wasn’t really about the emotion of sadness – – but about the absence of all emotion. Is that something that you see with the depressed patients you treat?

Carrie: I think it was Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, who offered that beautiful juxtaposition: the opposite of depression is vitality – – not happiness. That really captures it.

Dan: In your book you make a distinction. You indicated that The Creativity Cure is a good fit for people with mild to moderate depression anxiety, but maybe not major depression. Why?

Carrie: For those who suffer from major depression and feel that their depression is well managed, The Creativity Cure is a great option for finding more vitality. Those who at baseline have mild to moderate depression and find that meds do not help enough can discover ways to unleash creativity and happiness in the book. It takes some motivation, but once you get going, you will have more energy and a greater number of happy moments.

Dan: What percentage of your patients would you say depression plays a role in their maladies for which they’re seeing you?

Carrie: Eighty percent.

Dan: Wow – -that many. And to actually put The Creativity Cure into effect, how long do you generally work with somebody to get to the point where they can do it on their own?

Carrie: We start right away by finding out as much as we can about who that person is and what makes him or her feel alive. We think about what is working and what is not, why certain choices were made and ways to redirect the self. Through the Five Part Prescription: Insight, Movement, Mind Rest, Using Your Own Two Hands and Mind Shift people can uncover their true leanings and find more vigor, inspiration, passion. For positive change, integrate the methods into your lifestyle over several weeks. Little steps! True change is all about a little at a time and building.

Dan: In your career as therapist, have you treated lawyers with depression?

Carrie: Yes, yes.

Dan: Have you found anything about their life style that contributes to their depression?

Carrie: I think its three things for lawyers, especially those in high-pressure positions. My client Marnie comes to mind. She is a 28 year-old lawyer who has to give up her personal life at the drop of a hat when she is needed. It is tough. Number one, she is often exhausted because 17 -hour days are not uncommon. Number two, there is a lack of autonomy because this 17 -hour day can be thrust upon her at anytime and continue for weeks. Marnie, professional, committed and with good attitude, has to be available in the moment, late nights, on weekends.

But, compliance takes a toll. It makes her depressed to be in the office and not see sunlight. Not being in control of her time is hard. Even if the work is interesting, she has to give up other important involvements. Marnie feels lonely and isolated because she has little opportunity to be with old friends or to develop new ones. We are working on ways she can maintain friendships, even in text message or email shoot-outs if an in- the- flesh visit must be delayed.

Number three is that living in your head all the time, no matter how brilliant you are, is not healthy. Smart as a whip with facts and numbers, Marnie garners much more pleasure from aesthetics. She likes design but has not felt free enough to develop this interest. Colors, shapes, proportions – thinking about these things makes her happy. It is a sensual, visual way of moving through the world. A big part of the treatment is making her interest in design part of her ongoing life.

I think lawyers in general are really smart people who are great at using their minds. They have been reinforced for this all their lives, but for a richer, higher, happier state, many of these cerebral people need to get out of their heads and start using their hands. Go into a creative world. Balance mind, hands and body.

Dan: I have given many talks around the country on the topic of lawyer and one of the things I like to say is that lawyers have the most active fantasy lives of most professionals I’ve ever spoke to, where they dream of doing something else than lawyering. Can those be clues that would fit in with The Creativity Cure?

Carrie: Fantasizing is a sign of mental health. It’s a good thing. Learning about your inclinations through daydreams might lead you to change your life in a big way or make it better in small ways. Tiny steps allow for big changes because they foster consistency and this builds a new self in a solid way. If you’re interested in learning how to make beautiful cupcakes you can do that for an hour on the weekend. Play guitar, write poems, tend tomatoes in a vegetable garden and do it for a few minutes a day. Start small and make it part of you. Keep dreaming and keep doing. Contentment is about maintaining an identity that integrates your creative

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