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Treatment Resistant Depression, Thankfulness and Gone with the Wind

I learned that I have a thanksgiving deficit. I’ve had it for a long time. I had (have) good parents who taught me better than to be ungrateful. They taught hard lessons that should have stuck with me but didn’t. One of the clearest was the night they decided to take us to see Gone With the Wind.

In our little town we only had a few theaters with one movie showing in each. The Visualite, The…

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Healing: Robinson Crusoe Seeds

I re-read Robinson Crusoe recently and I have to admit it bored me. When I was a kid I must have speed-bumped over the tedious descriptions of his domestic life after surviving the shipwreck. Cannibals and treasure were big when I was little, now the book reads like a guide for end-of-the-world prepers, including pages and pages about agriculture.

But a particular turning point in Crusoe’s…

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Healing: Input, Thermometers and Thermostats

I was sitting on the couch watching an episode of Breaking Bad when my wife sat down next to me. The scene was intense. It was important to the plot of the whole show. The kingpin drug lord was making a point to one of his underlings in a brutal manner. While the underling watched the drug lord motioned for a thug to shoot the man’s brother in the head. In the style of the show, there was no…

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Healing: distractions vs distractions

I told you last time about Spirit possession and how it (He) is helping me recover from treatment resistant depression and anxiety. I also promised to share a bit more of my story. These two things fold together nicely in this article.

After I decided to make the big change of leaving my job (the idea I shared in the article titled Making Space for Healing) I found myself working in a very…

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How to Keep Going

So far in this series of articles about chronic, untreatable or barely treatable depression and anxiety, I’ve spoken in terms of things anyone can understand and apply. In the remaining articles I’m going to shift more to my specific journey and how I found help. The funny thing is I believe many of the articles I’m going to write will involve habits and/or methods you can apply outside the…

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Bad Words and Good Days

Bad Words and Good Days

“How was your day?” My wife asked me, looking into my eyes hopefully. I didn’t say anything. I just looked back at her and thought of how to answer. And then I cried. It wasn’t an unusual day. Nothing happened. It was no different from the day before and no different from 15 minutes before she asked. Why cry? It is not enough to describe depression as a long series of bad days. Depression is…

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Everything Sad is Coming Untrue

Everything Sad is Coming Untrue

I was mowing the lawn when a friend called and shared some bad news. I should say he shared some morebad news. I hung up the phone and went back to mowing. I love my time in the yard. After many years of relentless depression it has become a place of joy. It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when I could barely function. The grief was so heavy and I felt so useless that I retreated to the…

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Making Space for Healing

During the quarantine of ‘20 we cleared out two crawl spaces, the attic and the shed. We found a lot of things we had forgotten; most of it went to Goodwill, a little to the landfill, a few items went back into storage, and fewer still returned to the land of the living. It was therapeutic, getting rid of useless stuff in the attic, but the most practical thing we cleared out was the shed. We use…

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Depression & Emotional Bandwidth

Depression & Emotional Bandwidth

For many years we hosted Chinese students who lived with us while going to high school in the States. We seem to be a family that can adapt to having people in our home and, for the most part, it did not create disturbances in the way we lived. We just treated them like they were our kids and they treated us with respect. Two of them grew to be what we now call our “Chinese sons.” We’ve been to…

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Placid Stones

I had a vision of the storm Jesus calmed. I saw him stand in the bow of the boat. He spoke. He didn’t shout. He said simple words; few words. The words fell out of his mouth onto the face of the sea. The sea went flat. It was as if he had a placid stone; a stone that could do the opposite of stones we drop into the sea that create waves. And in my vision I saw us as those new stones falling into…

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Addicted to Medicine

If you feel bad and you expect medicine to fix you, it changes the way you relate to medicine. I don’t mean pills; I mean the capital “M” Medicine. The term used to describe the huge swollen mass of accumulated knowledge and practice that educated folks allude to when they say things like “look at all the amazing advances in Medicine over the past fifty years.” The system. There have been some…

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The Pharmaceutical Rabbit Hole

The Pharmaceutical Rabbit Hole

Q: How do you know you’re depressed?

A: Someone gives you antidepressants.

Does that sound right? Part of my story is the long term use of psychotropic drugs. I’ve been on SNRI’s, SSRI’s, antipsychotics, methylphenidate, and some others that don’t fit into neat categories. I’ve been on them in combinations and for varying lengths of time and doses. I’ve been on some of them more than once…

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Healed

Today is the start of something new. For over ten years (maybe closer to fifteen – it’s hard to track) I struggled/fought with depression. I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder (mdd) – there’s a reason I don’t capitalize that. Eventually I found myself in a category of depression called treatment resistant depression (trd) – also no caps. Can you guess how you end up with treatment…

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Try a Little Bitterness

The guy tailgated me up the freeway. When I got to the merge lane and patiently eased into the flow of traffic with everyone else – one car yielding to the next in the polite morning ballet we all participate in – he screeched around me and pushed into traffic at the very limit of the lane. And I mean the very limit, because that merge ends at the mouth of a two lane tunnel. I gaped at this. He…

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Acts 1:1

In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach,

 First book… began to do and teach

Luke is the author of the book of Acts.  He is also the author of the gospel of Luke.  He is conducting a research project that takes him from the birth of Jesus to the birth of the church.  Theophilus is the person to whom Luke wrote both books. 

We know that Luke was a…

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Don't Be A Jerk: The Solution to all Microaggression

Don’t Be A Jerk: The Solution to all Microaggression

“Microaggression” is the newest label the establishment, elites and educated have given to anything that a normal person says or does that offends them.  It is a brilliant use of language along the lines of substituting the word “choice” for being pro-abortion.  Anyone who opposes abortion now has to fight off the accusation of being something inherently anti-American; being against freedom to…

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Microaggression in an Aggressive World

Microaggression in an Aggressive World

While we have debates and seminars and create safe spaces for victims of microaggressions it seems few liberals want to discuss the real and increasing use of naked aggression all over a world in which safe space shrinks daily.  The educated and elites spend hours discerning how many offenses can dance on the head of one phrase that commoners have used for ages.  Steve Martin is twitter shamed…

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