During both periods of depression I’ve experienced, discouragement played an outsized role. For various reasons, I was confused about what God was doing and why he was doing it, and what God was not doing and why he was not doing it. In one way or another, and whether or not a person is depressed, [ Read More ]
I remember the moment when I thought it might be a good idea to end it all. I was in my mid-twenties, experiencing what I now know as PTSD symptoms, had little hope for the future, and couldn’t experience happiness no matter what I tried. These thoughts had been on loop for months with no [ Read More ]
Recently, I came to the sad conclusion that I would need to sell my beloved Jeep Wrangler. Over the course of a couple of months, the warning light formation on my dash display had started to look a lot like Clark Griswold’s house in Christmas Vacation. One light in particular concerned me: the light that [ Read More ]
In John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, fictitious British secret service officer Alec Leamas concludes that spies are a “procession of fools, traitors, and pansies.”[1] If Leamas is correct, this article ends abruptly before it even begins. Are the various actions of a nation’s intelligence agencies (e.g. espionage, counterintelligence, covert political [ Read More ]
Here are the top seven books I recommend on the topic of depression. Some of the books relate directly to the depressed person, while others communicate more directly to the caregivers of depressed persons. I will describe each book and then rank its level of difficulty on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the [ Read More ]
During the last three years, I was engaged in the fight of my life—concerning depression—and I failed in significant ways. I had endured an extended depressive episode earlier in life, but in retrospect, had not learned the lessons from that episode that I should have learned. Thus, in my more recent episode, I was not [ Read More ]
Depression does not happen in a vacuum. It affects not only the depressed person, but many other people—including, especially, family members and friends. As a depressed person continues to struggle for months and often years, friends and family members struggle to offer wise counsel and practical help: What should they do or say? What should [ Read More ]
The first therapeutic assessment in my record, from July 2021, reads: “47 y.o. M with history of trauma and anxiety, with symptoms of PTSD, GAD, and depression.” In other words, some of this and some of that: post-traumatic stress disorder, general anxiety disorder, and depression. With a tip of the hat to my recent crisis, [ Read More ]
During my forty-eight years, I have experienced approximately eight years total of deep depression. The first episode lasted for about six years and stretched from my twenties into my early thirties. The second episode lasted for about two years during my mid-forties. During those years, I felt trapped and didn’t see a way out. In [ Read More ]
Loosely defined, the phrase “liberal arts” refers to courses in Western philosophy, theology, literature, art, and history, with science and foreign languages playing a real but secondary role. For the ancient Greeks and many modern Westerners, the liberal arts have been thought necessary to cultivate good citizenship in a government of the people, by the [ Read More ]