Dan's Blog Archives - Page 2 of 17 - Lawyers With Depression

Wired: Anxiety Strikes at Harvard Law School

Freud was of the opinion that in fear a person is responding to a specific and immediate threat to physical safety while in anxiety a person is responding to a threat that is objectless, directionless, and located somewhere far off in the future—ruination, for example, or humiliation, or decay. Daniel Smith, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

I spoke at Harvard Law about the challenges of living with depression and the epidemic of poor mental health in the legal profession. It was a memorable event.

Days before I am scheduled to talk, my sleep goes cuckoo. I become incredibly anxious about my speech. What if I fall flat on my face? I graduated from some third-tier law school, after all. I don’t belong lecturing at Harvard. My churning nighttime ruminations now seep into my days as the event gets closer.

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Real Men Cry: Men & Depression

“A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes a lot of depression to get tumbleweeds moving.” – Robert Bly, Morning Poems

Growing up the son of a WWII vet, my dad’s parenting style could best be described as minimalist: punishment at his leisure as alcoholics are prone to do; hard, physical labor built character; and praise came from athletic accomplishments like football which prized hitting.

Crying? Only once as a young child. Dad’s reaction? “I’ll give you something to really cry about if you don’t knock it off. Only girls cry!” Looking at him through the eyes of a child, the message was clear: Crying (or any display of sadness) was never to be done again if I wanted his approval (In essence, his love which never came). As I grew older, he added this maxim: Pain, physical or emotional, was to be endured, if not conquered.

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Living with Depression: A Commercial

SAMSHA in Washington, D.C. asked me, and others, to be in this PSA about living successfully with mental illness and how important support is in recovery. I am proud of what they produced, but it’s often not easy for me to talk about living with depression. I don’t want to be defined by it. More importantly, I don’t want others to define someone else who is, likewise, struggling with a mental health problem. I hope this commercial helps.

You Don’t Have to Go It Alone: Finding Support When You’re Depressed

Strong, supportive relationships are one of the best safeguards against depression. In fact, studies have found that good social support helps to protect both our psychological and physical health. Sharing our lives with others is pleasurable and helps us feel better at times when we feel down. The process of talking about our problems and being listened to by someone who cares can be healing by itself.

Friends provide us with many important things such as emotional support, practical assistance and information, a different perspective on our problems, a sense of personal worth and belonging, and ideas for solving problems.

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Change Your Thinking, Change Your Anxiety and Depression

Catastrophizing is an irrational thought a lot of us have in believing that something is far worse than it actually is.

It can generally can take two different forms: making a catastrophe out of a current situation, and imagining making a catastrophe out of a future situation.

Decastrophizing means mentally bringing the problem back to its proper perspective.

We may end up recognizing that a situation rates only a “5” or “10” on our awfulness scale and not the “95” that we currently perceive. Decastrophizing means more than purely acknowledging that our feared situation is unlikely to arise. It means considering the consequences if it should arise. It means considering the consequences if it should arise, and recognizing that in any event, we would cope.

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How To Get Things Done When Depression Hits

Have you ever noticed that depression can distort time?

It’s really good at making a day seem like a year that will never end.

You may think, “Only five hours until I can get in bed.” On other days, the day might rush by and you realize you’ve done absolutely nothing. A lot of this has to do with the fact that depression tells you that you can’t complete projects anyway, which makes you not even try to focus on the amount of time you have to get something done.

If you’ve ever seen a chess match, you know that each player’s time is limited. When you have unlimited time to think, you often take as much time as possible to ponder all the possibilities. But with a depressed brain, unlimited times could easily stretch to forever.

It may take forever – or at least feel like it – to do something.

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The Other Country: Depression

My life has been a journey. Much of it spent in wonderful places, with awesome people I deeply love, and transcendent experiences. I’ve also had my share of the topsy-turvy curveballs of life’s tribulations that happen to everyone: loved ones dying, friendships fizzling, and adult children leaving home.

But depression doesn’t happen to everyone.

A Dream

I’m in a dream of driving my car through a countryside landscape. My window’s open and the fresh air is blowing in. It’s sunny, and the road is sharply winding. I arrive at a border crossing and drive from the land of a healthy life into one of darkness that is depression. The air is stale and lifeless, hanging down like a musty drape. I close my car window. Looking through my windshield, I see only murky clouds. The landscape is barren and absent of people. I turn to make a U-turn to make it back across the border, but something blocks my path. I’m lost in this place. I don’t have a map. All signs and traffic signals make no sense. It’s hard to think straight. I drive around for hours, maybe days, and eventually make cross back into this sweet land of the living where I hope, live, and love.

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Bottoms Up: My Drunk Dad, My Depression

My dad was an alcoholic.

He died at age 56 from too much drinking. Almost 40 years ago.

I was 19 at the time, a sophomore at a local state college. I lived upstairs from my Polish grandma who, was a big woman with arms as strong as an elephant’s trunk.

One morning, my Aunt Clara, who, with her husband Eddie (who was genuinely cross-eyed), lived with grandma downstairs, came up to tell me, “Your father died today.”

I had never heard my dad called “father.” It sounded formal, like, “The President of the United States died today.”

My dad had been ill for months. The year he died, 1981, Hospice wasn’t around. Most people, as sick as my dad with cancer and cirrhosis of the liver, met their end in the hospital.

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Too Much Depression, Too Little Sleep: 3 Things You Can Do to Get a Better Night’s Slumber

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to. – F. Scott Fitzgerald

When first diagnosed with depression, my sleep became fragmented in a way I had never experienced before.

Before this time, I, like most frenzied lawyers, had periods of restless sleep tinged by stress and anxiety. But my sleep would return to normal after a lengthy trial or round of contentious depositions.

But this was different.

Lots of Depression, Little Sleep

I was always tired, but couldn’t sleep through the night. I went to bed early, exhausted from trying to make it through another day with depression. Trouble sleeping is a symptom of major depression. Kay Redfield Jamison, M.D., a psychiatrist, writes:

The body is bone-weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, and nothing at all seems worth it. Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable, gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action.”

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The Suicide of a Law Student Hits Home

When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.’ – Kay Redfield Jamison, M.D., “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”

A second-year law student at the University at Buffalo School of Law, Matthew Benedict, died by suicide earlier this week by leaping from the Liberty Building he had been clerking at according to the Buffalo News. Another account of Matt’s life and suicide was reported in The New York Law Journal.

Matt’s funeral is tomorrow. By all account’s he was a tremendous, loving, talented, bright young man.Matt was kind-hearted, passionate and driven.

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