depression

Depression — This is Really What It’s Like

in Anxiety / Counselling / Depression / Emotions / Encouragement / Mental Health / Psychology  by Paddy Ducklow 0 comments

I have written about depression on this blog. It is my familiar experience like a noisy and nosey relative, and the recurring onslaught of many of my client friends.

In my practice I hand out questionnaires, teaching outlines and recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy books. I listen as deeply as I can as well.

But sometimes I discover something that just says it all while making blog everything else redundant and does so without all the clever and self-important diagnostics that psychologists seem to need. I love this blog and I hope you do too. Congratulations to Allie Brosh for making it through and leading others in her wake.

Finding Optimism: an App

in Anxiety / Counselling / Depression / Emotions  by Paddy Ducklow 0 comments

This note is not my normal reflection about your life and mine. It is about an app for your smartphone and for your computer as well. If you experience depression, anxiety, bipolar and the like, I think that you ought to consider this. And the good news — its free!

At the core, the Optimism applications are mood charts, designed to help with managing mental and emotional health. They are used as self-help or self-improvement tools for depression, bipolar disorder, and other real life health concerns.

The core of the apps is to help you discover what sets up mood swings, depressions, fears or other experiences, to find the warning signs of a decline in your well being, and learn strategies, often specific to you, that help you to remain well.

The Optimism apps help you to be more in charge and less dependent on your biology and your emotions. A continual feedback loop, in the form of charts and reports, improves your understanding of who you are, what you are going through and the things that are helping or hindering you.

You can find this at Finding Optimism.

Now a small warning: this app is going to take you 10 minutes or so to figure out and if you are not super “techie” you might get frustrated and quit. I hope that you will persevere with it, learn the program and use it as a resource for your growth. There is a neat “notes for the day” section that can function as an emotional journal.

Also check out the CBTPad (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). If you are working with me on your emotions, you will be familiar with the concepts and this app takes the understanding even further. Very helpful indeed!

“Shit! I Think I’m Depressed Again!”

in Depression / Emotions / Mental Health / Psychology  by Paddy Ducklow 0 comments

Depression is a word to describe feeling bad or frustrated or sad or fed up or mad and all kinds of other emotions and circumstances. Marriages get depressed and so do churches and businesses. Cities get depressed as when the Canucks lost the final game of the Stanley Cup (June 15, 2011) and hooligans rampage. It is such an encompassing term and confusing experience that any sensible person will misunderstand when someone says “Shit! I think I am depressed” (as a client friend said to me the other day).

So… here is some of what I see when a person says that they or their family are “sick of being sad.” (It’s like when…)

  • Persistent sameness and consistent sadness (like when a couple watch TV most nights to avoid conversation or conflict)
  • Heavy tiredness and sapping of energy (like when a young Mom can’t get out of bed to care for her newborn)
  • Zapped self-confidence (like when a real estate salesman avoids meeting people for fear of rejection)
  • Difficulty concentrating (like when the at-home computer consultant who does everything and never completes a task)
  • Not being able to enjoy things that are usually pleasurable or affirming (like when couples are too bored to make love)
  • Finding it hard to function at work (like when the restaurant server who keeps getting fired for flipping off guests)
  • Worrying about suicide and death (like when a church teen wonders excessively about heaven and hell)
  • Self-harm (like when a preteen girl is compulsed with avoiding food)
  • Undue feelings of guilt or worthlessness (like when the OCD who figures only 100% is ever good enough)
  • Feelings of helplessness and hopelessness (like when a grade 4 boy who is scared of school)
  • Avoiding people (like when a friend is afraid of getting hurt or harmed so keeps away from even closest friends)

So what do you do? Find someone (a pastor, a counsellor, a friend) who will listen and care and maybe pray. Or contact us to see if we can provide some direction or a referral.

Creating Space — Loneliness

in All Entries  by Paddy Ducklow 0 comments

“When we feel lonely we keep looking for a person or persons who can take our loneliness away. Our lonely hearts cry out, ‘Please hold me, touch me, speak to me, pay attention to me.’ But soon we discover that the person we expect to take our loneliness away cannot give us what we ask for. Often that person feels oppressed by our demands and runs away, leaving us in despair. As long as we approach another person from our loneliness, no mature human relationship can develop. Clinging to one another in loneliness is suffocating and eventually becomes destructive. For love to be possible we need the courage to create space between us and to trust that this space allows us to dance together.” (Henri Nouwen)