There’s a symptom of my depression that I never hear anyone talk about. Depression has completely destroyed my confidence. And it’s not just during a depressive episode. I lack confidence even when I’m feeling good. This is a fairly recent development, in the last ten years or so. It dates to just before I was…
One of my least favorite symptoms of depression is the intrusive thoughts. (For the record, I don’t actually have any favorite symptoms.) Intrusive thoughts probably happen to everyone from time to time. I can’t be sure because of the problem of other minds and such, but psychologists claim it happens to everyone sometimes. There’s a…
One of the odd things about depression, for me at least, is the way it robs me of any kind of attention span. I’ve always had a very long attention span. Even as a little kid I would get absorbed in things and spend hours and hours on them. I can’t even count how many…
I use prescription medication to help treat my depression. I find medication may be the most poorly understood subtopic in the mental health conversation. On some level, that’s totally natural. Most of us don’t know enough chemistry and biology to understand even the basics of what the drugs do and how they work. We are…
I had a bad day yesterday. It prevented me from writing about what I had intended writing about. Instead, I just tried to describe some of the feelings I was having. I didn’t think it was very good, but a bunch of people reached out with words of support. That was nice even though it…
I’m not having a good day. It sucks. There’s the obvious reason it sucks, you know, because I’m having a bad day. But it also sucks because I’ve started this little mental health project and I don’t want to stumble and lose all my momentum after only a few days. But I’m not capable of…
When I started this post yesterday, I wasn’t intending to write a two-parter. I was talking about the reasons the mental health conversation is so hard to have, even in an ideal world where everyone is kind and supportive and wants to understand. While talking about how the symptoms of depression make depression hard to…
If we’re going to have the big mental health conversation, there’s something that we need to get out of the way first. It’s a hard conversation. I mean really hard. And I’m not talking about all the baggage that comes with it like the embarrassment, stigma, shame, resentment, and all that. Those are real and…
Last year, I wrote a piece for a friend’s website called “The Conversation Around Mental Health Is Long Overdue – and We’re Screwing It Up“. I said we were making two mistakes. The first was that we are focusing too much on celebrity in this conversation. I talked about Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles in…
Every holiday season, at least since the advent of social media, I see people asking other people to be aware of people who struggle during the holidays. They want us to be sensitive; to watch what we say and do. As far as I can tell, the requests for sensitivity rarely come from people who…
