These stories are a selection from my blog, Storied Mind. They summarize what I am going through to live with major depression. This story hasn't yet had an ending, but I keep on fighting back to claim more space and time for the rest of life. www.storiedmind.com

Photo Credit - stewart charles - Fotolia.com

What can I do when depression is closing in? How do I manage to fight its effects and avoid taking it out on my family?

First - Recognize what's going on. I feel a roiling in my gut, and my anger rising. Every detail that catches my eye is wrong, and I'm starting to want to blame my wife, my dogs and cats, my neighbors, the world, anyone for each ugly fact. I've been here before - I'll be raging inside and tearing myself up as my mind takes in an ugly mess in my house and gardens where yesterday I saw their beauty. I know I'm projecting my own self-hatred out there, and I struggle to keep that awareness in my mind. Otherwise, I'll tear off in rage at the drop of another crumb from the kitchen counter and want to scream either at my wife or myself.

When I'm like this, I'm constantly tense and trying to anticipate each detail of any action I take. If I miss something, I tighten immediately. I'm always under this pressure to get it right, whatever it is, and perform each action smoothly knowing what's coming next, no surprises. Those will make me explode. You'd think it would be hard to miss what I'm going through, but I have to keep telling myself: This is not reality, this is depression.

Second - I have to tell my wife that I'm in the midst of this again. She's already sensed how tense and jumpy and withdrawn I'm getting. My face turns worried and frowning before anything else starts happening, and the danger is that she will interpret this as aimed at her, at something she's done. I have to keep telling her what I'm going through and ask her to try to remember that when I'm becoming intolerable to be near.

Third - I am struggling to remember what I've learned. This recurrence has no cause in anything I've done or experienced. Believe me I've been through many years of therapy looking for causes, finding them, feeling relief and wonderful self-knowledge, but still falling into one depressive spell after another, some of them months-long. I have to keep telling myself that this is a condition I have, it's not just the sum total of worthless me. That kind of thing is depression talking, and this will pass. There is another me here somewhere.

Fourth - I can work with CBT, meditation, whatever I can still remember when I'm in this state. But when depression turns angry and aggressive, it's hard to keep those calming thoughts straight. They tend to blow apart like everything else.

Fifth - I have to physically work off the anger that's storming inside me. Depression doesn't always strike with this powerful mix of aggression, rage, blaming, but when it does I have got to go out and work my body into a state of near-exhaustion.

Today, a storm has knocked down a couple of trees, and there's plenty to do. I'm out trying to vent what I'm feeling in hard labor. The chain saw is my perfect mate, grinding its nasty teeth through all this fallen timber. I can cut things up, smash all the debris, toss things into piles, and feel all the satisfaction and release of hard work. Believe me, men need to do that.

Sixth - I have to write this down. If I just think all these things - they won't stick - I'll forget them in my next burst of rage, and I'll be fighting and miserable with my wife all day and burning up inside with the anger that grows from self-hatred. And I can feel right now that writing it down is really helping me to get the distance I need from depression.

Photo Credit: Derek Benjamin Lilly - MorgueFile

Depression is a strange thing. No one seems able to explain exactly what it is, yet there is no doubting the reality of its pain. I've had it with me since boyhood, though at that time, I was years away from even hearing the term, let alone getting treatment.  I grew up with it, not only experiencing my own moods, headaches and gradual isolation but also watching my mother succumb for years without ever seeking help. In those days, either you had a "nervous breakdown" (something I could only imagine as a kid as writhing and thrashing about on the floor) or you were fine. I was clearly fine - the top-of-my-class kind of fine. It was bizarre hearing people praise me often when I knew damn well that it was all phoney. Those grown-ups might be fooled, but I knew deep down how worthless I was. I lived in fear that this fact would be discovered.

Socially and culturally, the messages made it seem so wrong to be depressed, as if it were a moral failing, and that only reinforced my worst fears. I wound up having to choose very carefully who I talked to about this condition. But it was still hard not to believe that on some level I was using depression as a rationalization for my own weaknesses, a cover for the knowledge that I was just no good.

What I came to realize, after too many years, was that in accepting the reality of those beliefs, I was still lost in depression itself. I had to get to a place where I could finally look around the edges of that thinking, to grasp that self-contempt was a symptom and that as the depression lifted, what I believed about myself and the possibilities of life could also change. And the trick was to understand this not just on an intellectual level (that was the easy part) but on the deepest level of _belief_. How do you change belief? I'm still not sure how it happened, but I know it did. As a line in a film said about everything coming together on stage for a play, It's a mystery.

Mystery or not, that was the turning point for me, the missing piece that suddenly made all the treatments I was getting begin to work in a more lasting way. That belief gave me the one tool I could always use, even in the worst despair. And it gave me hope that I could learn how to fight back.

As I read through the web for conversations, questions, ideas about depression, I am struck by how many people who write to forums and blogs are desperately asking for help not for their own depression but for that of their spouses, partners, loved ones. So often, they report bewilderment. They feel stunned to find anger and rejection in place of love. How can it be that the person I have known so well is suddenly different, alien, hostile and wants to break out of the relationship that is so precious?

What is this longing to leave that so many depressed people feel? I have no simple answer to that, but I can describe my own tortured experience with an almost irresistible drive to break out and start a new life.

I was often on the verge of bolting, but there were two threads of awareness I could hold onto that restrained me invisibly. One was the inner sense that until I faced and dealt with whatever was boiling around inside me I would only transplant that misery to a new place, a new life, a new lover. However exciting I might imagine it would be to walk into that new world, I knew in my heart that it would only be a matter of time before the same problems re-emerged.

The other was a question I kept asking myself - What is it that I am leaving for? What was this great future and life that I would be stepping into? Could I even see it clearly? More often than not, the fantasy portrayed a level of excitement I was missing.

Some buried part of me knew that a life based on getting high - on non-stop brain-blowing excitement - wasn't a life at all. Maybe it wasn't alcohol or drugs that lured me, but it was surely the promise of intense and thrilling experience, the perpetual opening scene of an adventure film without the need to wait for the complicated plot to unravel. There was no real alternative woman out there waiting for me, only a series of fantasies with easy gratification, never the hard part of dealing with a complicated human being in a sustained relationship. And inwardly I knew that after the initial burst of energy wore off, I would still face the fears, depression and paralysis of will that had plagued me for so long.

That bit of consciousness kept me from breaking everything up and leaving the wonderful family that I'm blessed with.

Photo Credit: JesterArts - Stockxpert

If you're dealing with depression and you realize it's affecting your work, who should you tell? Your employer or supervisor? - or your clients if your self-employed? Why might you need to do that, and how might they react? Would they be understanding and helpful? Or would they no longer trust your abilities because they thought you were "crazy?" And if you tell someone, when should you do it - during a bright spell when your job performance is fine or during a dark time when you need to take a leave of absence? And what exactly should you say?

These are some of the questions that Working in the Dark: Keeping Your Job While Dealing with Depression tries to answer. I wish I had read this book when it came out in 2002. It would have been an important resource in dealing with my own "crisis at work":/articles/2007/10/21/support-or-defeat. Not that I was looking for such a book at that time. Even though I had been dealing with depression for years, I couldn't bring myself to make the visceral connection with problems in my work life until the situation blew up in my face. This is a guide to prevent that from happening.

The inspiration for Working in the Dark came from co-author Fawn Fitter's own experiences with depression and her struggle to preserve her business during a severe episode when she had difficulty meeting commitments to clients. When she looked for help, she found it difficult to interpret the scattered information she could find, both about depression and about workplace issues. So she developed this brief guide specifically aimed at workers struggling to understand how depression might be affecting job performance and what they can do about it.

The result is part how-to manual about depression and workplace rights and part sensitive discussion of practical decisions that depressed employees need to consider.

The idea is to offer hope for change to people who are confused, fearful of losing their jobs and seeing no way out except abandoning work they seem no longer able to do.

The core of the book is a thoughtful discussion of what employees who have learned about their condition can do when dealing with employers, supervisors and coworkers. The focus is on two elements: the Americans with Disabilities Act (and related laws) and the difficult human choices about how to talk to people on the job about what you're going through. The writers understand quite well that many resist the idea of labeling themselves either as "mentally ill" or "disabled," but they want people with depression to know what their options and rights are whether or not they want to make use of them.

The most nuanced discussion addresses the very human problem of figuring out who to talk to and what to say about your condition and its impact on job performance. The writers know well how tricky and risky this can be. It may be OK to talk with a knowledgeable and sympathetic employer, supervisor or client, but the problem is you can't tell ahead of time what their assumptions, judgments, prejudices might be. Yet these are people holding your economic lifeline so you have to think carefully about exactly what you should reveal.

Working in the Dark gets right to point and clearly moves you through the issues. When I first read it, I thought, Oh, it's too basic - what can I learn from this? But then I put myself back where I had been when it first hit me that I was in trouble at work. This would have been the perfect thing to read. I hope others can pick it up before their work issues start to get out of hand.

Photo Credit: Eric Gevaert

Today gave me a lesson in the value of anger. I've been moving along at a nice clip for the past week, getting a lot done, full of a sense of well-being, as if (dare I think it) I might be done with depression and all the life saboteurs that keep it company. Then today, I'm sitting in my office, and - wham - I know I've got to get out of there. I just have to pack up and leave. Now!

I have to focus, though, even to move. I can't think - so work is out of the question - and I know I have to get out of this 12 X 12 room box. And that's all I know. I grab what I can, step out of my office, get past the poor guy in the hall who has been waiting to talk to me about a problem, apologize in mid-flight for suddenly having to leave, reach for that handle, push, out, open air. Where's the car? Got it. Get in and drive on auto pilot straight home, maybe fifteen minutes away at 1;30 pm. Thank God there are still times of day when you can move in a hurry on the freeway.

Then I'm home, fear now spreading out and settling in, and the bottom drops right out of me. I'm only the host of the depression beast, after all. That body-like substructure holding me up during the day, feeling so solid and secure - now it's a burst and bloody mess. Gone! Big D is walking around in my place, and I'm somewhere else, sinking away, as a towering wave of bleakness hits and washes over me, catching me up in currents, pulling me out deeper, inviting me to drown. For a while that's how I feel, sunken, sodden, weighted with water-heavy clothing, sad beyond belief that everything exciting has all at once vanished. There's grief in this water, and misery - oh hell, who cares what it is? I can't care about anything anymore.

And then it hits. Good old anger! Truly, _I just can't take it any more_. So much of my life has been lost to this mess, I can't let go of another minute without a kicking screaming fight. STOP. NOW. Suddenly, I've taken back that body, I can stand on solid ground, I can feel strength returning - I can feel. I am in this corner, I have no where left to run and I am throwing myself right back at Big D. And with my strengthening arms I shove that mass of deadness right out the window - or into some sort of mixed metaphorical hell. (After all, the drop from a ground floor window isn't all that serious.) At least I can lift my brain up in self-respecting anger if not exactly in the fullness of living, and I can stomp to my computer, sit right down here - and ... _write_! Now that may not seem all that heroic - in fact, it may seem downright anticlimactic. _But that's what I do_! At least, I can get down a few words, my mind starts to wake up, energy and buzz return.

What is anger after all but the rebellion of your deepest being against a threat to its survival? Thanks to anger, I'm coming back! At least, today.

I have a hard time being a patient or thinking of myself in that role. In one sense, to be a patient means to be sick, to be under treatment by a medical professional, to be undergoing all sorts of tests and therapies. See the trend there - the intolerable passive voice says it all. I am having things done to me - I am leaving it to others to cure me. Of course, they ask for my cooperation (be a good patient), which means I should do what they tell me to do. So, what's wrong with that, especially if you seek out the best treatment you can find?

The problem is that none of the treatments I've encountered can get the job done. I can't wait around for treatments to work on their own. If I don't take an active role in treatment, then nothing will help for long. That's because the human factor, the will to heal, makes such an enormous difference. As I found in dealing with cancer years ago, I have to function as a partner with each new treatment I use and see it as one element of an overall strategy for getting better. As is true of every depressed person, though, there are those times when I am so severely ill that my active contribution to healing fails. Standing up can be hard enough, let alone trying to wage a campaign against the illness. The hope then is that whatever external treatments are applied will soften the impact of depression so that I can get back enough energy and presence of mind to activate myself once again. That's the partnership.

The only way I can deal with treatments is to maintain the skeptical mode of the activist. Try what has been proven to be effective for some people but don't imagine for a moment that any single treatment is going to restore all the functioning I have lost to the disease.

I have learned to be skeptical of the claims of new treatment approaches because I have tried so many and have found that nothing lasts. A few have restored me in some ways, usually exacting a price in side-effects, but made no difference at all to other symptoms. I have to keep exploring each new claim, each insight offered by clinical experience, the latest research, the various therapies and my own experience and observations about what I'm going through.

What have you found that works for you?

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Photo Credit: Jane M. Sawyer and MorgueFile

Recently, I've started asking myself a basic question: Why get well? What do I really want in fighting depression? After all, if I'm working on recovery, I ought to be able to see what I'm aiming for. I thought for a long time that what I wanted was to be free of depression. That would be tremendous, of course, but then what? What do I expect my life would be like? I tend to hear several formulations of this. One person wrote to me and mentioned happiness as what he's looking for, and I'm sure that's what most people would say.

Saying I want to be happy seems like a self-evidently true thing. A person with major depression can mean by this that he or she wants the ability to think positively and hopefully about life and about self. It's possible to imagine a life free of depression and all the harm it causes oneself and others. But happiness goes beyond simply not being depressed. There are plenty of unhappy people who don't suffer from this mood disorder. So if happiness is the goal, it means a lot more than just getting over this illness.

But when I think about that goal or the idea of happiness as what I might aim for, I am reminded of a startling book I read many years ago at the suggestion of a marriage counselor my wife and I were seeing at the time. A Swiss psychologist (Adolph Guggenbuhl-Craig) wrote in Marriage Dead or Alive that happiness had nothing to do with this bond between two people. In his Jungian view, the purpose of staying married was not at all to be happy or to achieve a state of well-being. Instead it was the much deeper goal of "individuation." That Jungian term refers to the process of personal growth by which you work to achieve integration of often clashing psychic drives. I think of it as self-discovery and the completion of the spiritual as well as psychological journey at the heart of living. Guggenbuhl-Craig also calls it salvation. It's the attainment of a kind of psychic wholeness. Was it possible to think of dealing with depression as another step in the struggle toward self-realization?

So when I think of how to answer the question Why Get Well? I have to question if getting well is what this fight against depression is all about - and if "just being me" is as simple a matter as getting rid of the illness and becoming my old self once more.

My goal is to become the person I was put on this earth to be, but who should I become other than the person I already am, illnesses and all? Depression is one of the conditions woven into my psyche. There's no wishing it away. It confronts me every waking hour and pushes me to fight for who I am. I'd better make the most of it. Depression doesn't seem to be going anywhere without me so I might as well focus on the daily struggle. That's where I'm discovering what I'm all about. And that's what I'm aiming for.

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