Beyond Blue

Yeterday I mentioned Talia Mana’s blog, and now I’ll share that she just interviewed me on blogging about depression. Her website, the Centre for Emotional Well-Being, is full of interesting research, commentary, and discussions. She and I have decided to swap stories and collaborate in order to cover as much material as we can.

This just in from “Time” magazine: the brain can be rewired. Replacing the dogma that the adult brain is immutable, recent research in neuroscience has discovered the brain’s capacity to change in structure and function according to experience and thoughts. In last month’s cover article, “How the Brain Rewires Itself,” Sharon Begley, author of “Train…

Okay. I get all of it. The scientific evidence that we can, in fact, change our brain with our thoughts. But this very study almost killed me last year. I tried for months and months and more months to stop thinking about death and how to get there–to turn my thoughts instead to the pink…

I want to reiterate that I am a huge supporter of mindful meditation and cognitive-behavioral therapy. It’s just that they alone weren’t able to treat my depression. Here’s a great website on mindfulness-based cognitive-behavioral therapy, an effective blend between mindful meditation and cognitive-behavioral therapy for treating depression. I found the site on Talia Mana’s blog,…

In order to move beyond their dark days, most depressives master the lesson on how to make lemonade from lemons. For Valentine’s Day, here’s a romantic tale on just that: how a friend of mine turned an embarrassing situation into the best thing that ever happened to her…. Back when I began my writing career…

Granted, most marriages don’t start out (or if they do, they don’t stay for long) in that Disney-type “the universe has aligned now that we’ve met and as long as we’re together there is only sunshine ahead” mentality. Which is why I love to read how Anne Morrow Lindbergh described love relationships in her classic,…

If preschool Valentines are any measure of a mother’s performance (which they are around here), then I’m in much better shape this year than I was the morning of my first Cupid competition. Three years ago, I was a sleep-deprived, hormonally whacked-out mom (like I am today) who had enrolled two-year-old David in a co-op…

Learning to read the daily newspaper as a depressive is like learning to feed the ducks in Annapolis without getting crapped on by the seagulls: it demands good timing, a certain strategy, and an obnoxiously wide hat (to shield your head). I can’t check CNN.com every half hour for the most recent headlines like Eric…

This passage from Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” is where I’m going with this wide hat, container lady, Michelin Man stuff: “You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief, But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above…

Sometimes the headlines can work to your advantage. Take the bizarre story about the astronaut love triangle. After reading how Lisa Nowak (a Naval Academy grad) drove cross-country in diapers, I thought to myself, maybe I’m more normal than I had guessed. I know it’s not nice to laugh at someone else’s expense, but that…

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