10 things you shouldn't say to someone with Depression - Emily Hartridge

                                                            http://youtu.be/vyp85TJ1uqY

           10 things you shouldn't say to someone with Depression  - Emily Hartridge

Everything We Know About Depression Crammed Into A Colourful, 3-Minute Animation

Whether it's "episodic" or "chronic," depression is a big deal that affects millions of people every year. But it can be just as hard for the family and friends of people dealing with depression. When you haven't experienced it, it can be beyond perplexing, so here's a quick primer.
 

 

http://www.upworthy.com/everything-we-know-about-depression-crammed-into-a-colorful-3-minute-animation?c=ufb1

Why ‘Just Get Over It’ Is Never the Answer to Depression

Why ‘Just Get Over It’ Is Never the Answer to Depression

http://www.brobible.com/life/article/just-get-over-it-never-the-answer-depression/

Sometimes When A Friend Is Depressed, You Want To Say Snap Out Of It...

Sometimes When A Friend Is Depressed, You Want To Say 'Snap Out Of It.' But This Is Better.

Talking about any sort of illness feels awkward. But talking about mental health and mental illness feels even more awkward. What are you supposed to do? What are you supposed to say? You're not a doctor, how can you help? Here are five tips that can really help, and you don't need a Ph.D. for any of them.

http://www.upworthy.com/sometimes-when-a-friend-is-depressed-you-want-to-say-snap-out-of-it-but-this-is-better?c=ufb1

The Effect Of Positive Emotions On Our Health

http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/the-effect-of-positive-emotions-on-our-health/

The Effect Of Positive Emotions On Our Health

The Effect Of Positive Emotions On Our Health

The Effect Of Positive Emotions On Our Health

 

 

“The best way to overcome undesirable or negative thoughts and feelings is to cultivate the positive ones.” ~ William Atkinson

Its important we recognize our thoughts and emotions and be aware of their effect not only on our health but also our relationships and our surroundings. Positive emotions makes you feel happy and joyful. Everything around you seems beautiful, you enjoy the moment and things seem to fall into place.

Barbara Fredrickson, one of the long-time researchers and author on positive emotions, has shown how cultivating positivity can transform us at a cellular level and actually shape who we are.

Fredrickson’s theory of positive emotions, ‘Broaden-and-build’ suggests that positive emotions lead to novel, expansive behavior, and these actions, over time, lead to lasting emotional resilience, flourishing and meaningful social relationships.

Positive emotions or behaviour – like playfulness, gratitude, awe, love, interest, serenity, and feeling of interconnectedness to others – broadens our perspective, opens our mind and heart as we feel completely in tune with our environment. Like the flowers that open up when the sun rises, the same way positive emotions bring light and joy back in our lives.

According to Fredrickson, “Negative emotions are necessary for us to flourish, and positive emotions are by nature subtle and fleeting; the secret is not to deny their transience but to find ways to increase their quantity. Rather than trying to eliminate negativity, she recommends we balance negative feelings with positive ones.”

Shakespeare said, “Frame your mind to mirth and merriment, which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.”

Lets see the physical and emotional benefits of positive emotions -

• Faster recovery from cardiovascular stress
• Positive emotions have also been shown to benefit individuals with cardiovascular disease.
• Lower blood pressure and risk for cardiovascular disease
• Better sleep, fewer colds, headaches, aches and pain, and a greater sense of overall happiness
• Expands our perception of what lies in our peripheral vision
• Research suggests that even more abstract positive emotions like hope and curiosity offer protective benefits from diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes.
• Studies show that positive emotions help a person to overcome negative emotions faster and be more resilient and be able to cope with a difficult situation.
• People are more playful when happy, so that leads better physical fitness, regular exercise or increased flexibility. (so its important to engage in an activity that makes you happy)
• People who experience warmer, more upbeat emotions may have better physical health because they make more social connections

When you delve in that happy space, more possibilities and new ideas emerge and our creativity flows. Happiness and joy transform us, although you might not stay in that state all the time. There will days when you feel down and out, but if we observe our emotions and divert our mind and think of the happy moments, you will find the negative emotion fading away.

Don’t forget negative, repressed emotions can have detrimental effect on our body, mind and spirit. It takes control over you and makes you feel down, gloomy, unhealthy and its a unpleasant state to be in.

Nothing like a good humour to drive the negativity away, always works for me. So increase your daily diet of positivity or engage in activities that bring about happy feelings either meditation, exercise, yoga, laughter clubs, walk, painting, and so on. Love your life and yourself.

Positive feelings also help us live in the present moment and believe in oneness and interconnectedness with everything around us. To sum it up, Marcus Aurelius said “Remember this, that very little is needed to make a happy life.”

Shakespeare said, “Frame your mind to mirth and merriment, which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.”
Lets see the physical and emotional benefits of positive emotions -

• Faster recovery from cardiovascular stress
• Positive emotions have also been shown to benefit individuals with cardiovascular disease.
• Lower blood pressure and risk for cardiovascular disease
• Better sleep, fewer colds, headaches, aches and pain, and a greater sense of overall happiness
• Expands our perception of what lies in our peripheral vision
• Research suggests that even more abstract positive emotions like hope and curiosity offer protective benefits from diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes.
• Studies show that positive emotions help a person to overcome negative emotions faster and be more resilient and be able to cope with a difficult situation.
• People are more playful when happy, so that leads better physical fitness, regular exercise or increased flexibility. (so its important to engage in an activity that makes you happy)
• People who experience warmer, more upbeat emotions may have better physical health because they make more social connections

When you delve in that happy space, more possibilities and new ideas emerge and our creativity flows. Happiness and joy transform us, although you might not stay in that state all the time. There will days when you feel down and out, but if we observe our emotions and divert our mind and think of the happy moments, you will find the negative emotion fading away.
Don’t forget negative, repressed emotions can have detrimental effect on our body, mind and spirit. It takes control over you and makes you feel down, gloomy, unhealthy and its a unpleasant state to be in.
Nothing like a good humour to drive the negativity away, always works for me. So increase your daily diet of positivity or engage in activities that bring about happy feelings either meditation, exercise, yoga, laughter clubs, walk, painting, and so on. Love your life and yourself.
Positive feelings also help us live in the present moment and believe in oneness and interconnectedness with everything around us. To sum it up, Marcus Aurelius said “Remember this, that very little is needed to make a happy life.”
- See more at: http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/the-effect-of-positive-emotions-on-our-health/#sthash.JHoreqRn.dpuf

Great poster- very inspiring

http://9gag.com/gag/a2NXEze?ref=fb.s

Depression explained

http://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/public/depression/depressionexplained/index.cfm

Depression explained

Depression is a common experience. We have all felt 'depressed' about a friend's cold shoulder, misunderstandings in our marriage, tussles with teenage children - sometimes we feel 'down' for no reason at all.

However, depression can become an illness when:

• The mood state is severe
• It lasts for 2 weeks or more and
• It interferes with our ability to function at home or at work.

Signs of a depression include:

• Lowered self-esteem (or self-worth)
• Change in sleep patterns, that is, insomnia or broken sleep
• Changes in appetite or weight
• Less ability to control emotions such as pessimism, anger, guilt, irritability and anxiety
• Varying emotions throughout the day, for example, feeling worse in the morning and better as the day progresses
• Reduced capacity to experience pleasure: you can't enjoy what's happening now, nor look forward to anything with pleasure. Hobbies and interests drop off
• Reduced pain tolerance: you are less able to tolerate aches and pains and may have a host of new ailments
• Changed sex drive: absent or reduced
• Poor concentration and memory: some people are so impaired that they think that they are becoming demented
• Reduced motivation: it doesn't seem worth the effort to do anything, things seem meaningless
• Lowered energy levels.

If you have such feelings and they persist for most of the day for more days than not over a two week period, and they interfere with your ability to manage at home and at work, then you might benefit from getting an assessment by a skilled professional.
Having one or other of these features, by themselves, is unlikely to indicate depression, however there could be other causes which may warrant medical assessment.
If you are feeling suicidal it is very important to seek immediate help, preferably by a mental health practitioner. See Getting Help and Emergency Help.
How to tell if you or someone else has depression

The 12 Stages of Burnout

http://99u.com/workbook/25941/the-12-stages-of-burnout

The 12 Stages of Burnout

We often don’t realize that we’re suffering from burnout until it’s too late. Here at 99u, we write a lot about burnout, a serious subject concerning many creative professionals. Recently, we discussed the 3 Kinds of Burnout as well as 11 Ways to Avoid Burnout. We also explored How Overachievers Stay Sane and briefly touched on How to Spot Burnout (and Recover).

The burnout process has been divided into 12 phases by psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North. In a Scientific American Mind article, the stages are outlined as such:

1. The Compulsion to Prove Oneself; demonstrating worth obsessively; tends to hit the best employees, those with enthusiasm who accept responsibility readily.
2. Working Harder; an inability to switch off.
3. Neglecting Their Needs; erratic sleeping, eating disrupted, lack of social interaction.
4. Displacement of Conflicts; problems are dismissed, we may feel threatened, panicky and jittery.
5. Revision of Values; values are skewed, friends and family dismissed, hobbies seen as irrelevant, work is only focus.
6. Denial of Emerging Problems; intolerance, perceiving collaborators as stupid, lazy, demanding, or undisciplined, social contacts harder; cynicism, aggression; problems are viewed as caused by time pressure and work, not because of life changes.
7. Withdrawal; social life small or non-existent, need to feel relief from stress, alcohol/drugs.
8. Odd Behavioural Changes; changes in behaviour obvious, friends and family concerned.
9. Depersonalization; seeing neither self nor others as valuable, and no longer perceive own needs.
10. Inner Emptiness; feeling empty inside and to overcome this, look for activity such as overeating, sex, alcohol, or drugs; activities are often exaggerated.
11. Depression; feeling lost and unsure, exhausted, future feels bleak and dark.
12. Burnout Syndrome; can include total mental and physical collapse; time for full medical attention.

When we push our creativity and productivity to its limits, we can easily find ourselves teetering on brink of burnout. And there’s a fine line between being in the zone and falling down the slippery slope of mental, emotional and physical exhaustion. Therefore it’s worth occasionally referring back to this list to self-diagnose.

If you find yourself burned out, Andew Ayres-Deets, a writer at Crew, wrote insightful and practical blog post on how to bounce back after burning out that’s worth a read.

by Hamza Khan on May 14, 2014 - 4:00pm

If physical diseases were treated like mental illness

The Tortured Genius Just Can’t Help It, Or Why Scott And Zelda Went Mad

 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/10/the-tortured-genius-just-can-t-help-it-or-why-scott-and-zelda-went-mad.html

Creative types can’t stop thinking, can’t stop second guessing and revising, and aren’t much fun to be around. But new studies show it’s not like they have a choice. 

Knowing his wife was upset with him for spending more time with his typewriter than with her, F. Scott Fitzgerald hatched a plan. He wasn’t proud of many of his short stories (he only included 46 of his 181 short stories in his published collections), but he knew that in order to win back his wife he’d have to whip up something quickly. Working from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m., he churned out “The Camel’s Back” for The Saturday Evening Post for a fee of $500. That very morning, he bought Zelda a gift with the money he had made. suppose that of all the stories I have ever written this one cost me the least travail and perhaps gave me the most amusement,” he commented in the first edition of Tales of the Jazz Age. “As to the labor involved, it was written during one day in the city of New Orleans, with the express purpose of buying a platinum and diamond wristwatch which cost six hundred dollars.”

 

This was in 1920, and Zelda’s frustrations could still be assuaged with a well-timed gift. (After all, it was only after Scott had the money and prestige from publishing This Side of Paradise that she agreed to marry him earlier that year.) It wasn’t long though until Zelda had grown so fed up with Scott’s drinking and self-isolation that she lashed out, cheating on him with a French naval aviator while Scott was working on The Great Gatsby in the South of France. From then on, their marriage devolved into arguments and a devastating cocktail of debt, drink, and manic depression.
“Zelda’s spending sprees, her ‘passionate love of life’ and intense social relationships, her melancholic response to disappointment and the relatively late onset of her illness (she was born in 1900) point toward a mood disorder, as does the alternation between frank psychosis and a sparkling, provocative personality,” noted a 1996 article in The New York Times Magazine that asked “How Crazy Was Zelda?”

The Fitzgeralds are perhaps the best—or at least the most intriguing—example of writers whose talents, when mixed with depression and vices (like alcohol and spending sprees), burned brightly then collapsed calamitously.

But of course, it’s not just the Fitzgeralds who battled depression and led lives that eventually spun out of their control. Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Stephen King, Anne Rice, David Foster Wallace, and even J.K. Rowling are just a few of the writers who have been struck by the illness that Hemingway once referred to as “The Artist’s Reward.”

The common theory for why writers are often depressed is rather basic: writers think a lot and people who think a lot tend to be unhappy. Add to that long periods of isolation and the high levels of narcissism that draws someone to a career like writing, and it seems obvious why they might not be the happiest bunch.

A study conducted at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop found that 80 percent of the residents displayed some form of depression.

Dig a little deeper though, and some interesting findings reveal themselves—findings not just about the neuroscience of writerly depression, but about why Hemingway was so awful to Hadley, why Scott and Zelda drove each other mad, and why writers, by and large, are not only depressed people but also awful lovers.

A few months back, Andreas Fink at the University of Graz in Austria found a relationship between the ability to come up with an idea and the inability to suppress the precuneus while thinking. The precuneus is the area of the brain that shows the highest levels of activation during times of rest and has been linked to self-consciousness and memory retrieval. It is an indicator of how much one ruminates or ponders oneself and one’s experiences.

For most people, this area of the brain only lights up at restful times when one is not focusing on work or even daily tasks. For writers and creatives, however, it seems to be constantly activated. Fink’s hypothesis is that the most creative people are continually making associations between the external world and their internal experiences and memories. They cannot focus on one thing quite like the average person. Essentially, their stream of ideas is always running—the tap does not shut off—and, as a result, creative people show schizophrenic, borderline manic-depressive tendencies. Really, that’s no hyperbole. Fink found that this inability to suppress the precuneus is seen most dominantly in two types of people: creatives and psychosis patients.

What’s perhaps most interesting is that this flood of thoughts and introspection is apparently vital to creative success. In Touched with Fire, a touchstone book on the relationship between “madness and creativity,” Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins, reported that successful individuals were eight times more likely as “regular people” to suffer from a serious depressive illness.

If you think about it though, this “mad success” makes sense. Great writing requires original thinking and clever reorganization of varied experiences and thoughts. Whether it’s Adam Gopnik’s first piece for The New Yorker that related Italian Renaissance art with the Montréal Expos or Fitzgerald trailblazing the “Jazz Age” with his combination of Princeton poems and socioeconomic class sensibilities in This Side of Paradise, a writer’s job is to reshape a hodgepodge of old ideas into brand new ones. By letting in as much information as possible, the brains of writers and artists can trawl through their abundance of odd thoughts and turn them into original, cohesive products.
It’s not a surprise then that Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino, and the most wildly creative writers of our generation have such bizarre ideas: they cannot stop thinking, and whether pleasant or macabre, their thoughts (that can turn into masterpieces like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Pulp Fiction) are constantly flowing through their minds.

Although this stream of introspection and association allows for creative ideas, the downside is that people with “ruminative tendencies” are significantly more likely to become depressed, according (PDF) to the late Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema. Constant reflection takes a toll. Writing, editing, and revising also requires are near obsession with self-criticism, the leading quality for depressed patients.

In fact, a study conducted by Nancy Andreasen at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop found that 80 percent of the residents displayed some form of depression.
“One of the most important qualities [of depression] is persistence,” said Andreasen. “Successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.”

While Fitzgerald liked to boast of his raw talent that allowed him to come up with clever stories for the Post or The Smart Set in mere hours, biographers have noted that he spent months poring over drafts—a perfectionist making revision after revision. For better or for worse, creativity and focus are inextricably linked. As Andreasen said, “This type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering. If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”
This mishmash of unremitting rumination and self-criticism means that writers are always working. Even quotidian life is a writerly task. In an interview with The Paris Review, Joyce Carol Oates said, “[I] observe the qualities of people, overhearing snatches of conversations, noting people’s appearances, their clothes, and so forth. Walking and driving a car are part of my life as a writer, really.”

Now, for just a second, put aside the recent news that journalism/writing was ranked as the sixth most narcissistic job by Forbes. And don’t think about the fact that writing is not only a lonely job, but it is also one that can turn a pleasant walk or a drive into a form of work. Instead, focus on how writing is about being able to create and control a world.
For what is writing, but an amalgamation of our thoughts and experiences finished off with a wax and a shine?
This need for control often translates to real life too, and it comes at the expense of the feelings and wishes of nearly everyone around them. Writers are often such terrible lovers because they treat real people as characters, malleable and at their authorial will.
When Charles Dickens was 24 (and allegedly a virgin), he married Catherine Hogarth, then 21. Almost immediately after they married, he became infatuated with Mary, her younger sister (so much so that she would later become the basis for Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shoppe). Mary died shortly thereafter, which proved a devastating blow for Charles, and for the rest of their marriage Catherine futility tried to live up to her sister. After 22 years and 10 children with Catherine, Charles met Nelly Ternan, a young actress, and deciding that he was quite tired of his wife, tossed her aside in favor of this new mistress.
Like so many authors, from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Ezra Pound to V.S. Naipaul, Dickens wasn’t much of a good person. In fact, he was a rather terrible person and had history not bowed at the beauty of his fiction, he would have been remembered poorly.
Writers can be rather awful people, and their blend of depression, isolation, and desire to control not only their own characters but the “characters” of their real lives has been a relationship-killer for centuries.

(As for the other relationship-destroyer—writers’ infamous penchant for alcohol—Gopnik postulates, “Writing is work in which the balance necessary to a sane life of physical and symbolic work has been wrested right out of plumb, or proportion, and alcohol is (wrongly) believed to rebalance it.”)
Trying to balance vice, borderline mental illness, and a disregard for the real world in favor of fictitious ones is perhaps a noble but Sisyphusian act for many writers. Try as they might, the greatest creatives in history have too much neuroscience working against them, too many ideas fluttering around their minds.

It would be cliché to quote Jack Kerouac in saying, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved”—and yet it is a platitude for a reason. The most fascinating people in history, the ones who make a difference, who create, might be depressed, perhaps miserable romantics, yet they have contributed more to society than many of them ever knew.

In fact, Fitzgerald died thinking he was a failure. He was in Hollywood doing “hack work” while his wife was in a Swiss sanitarium, and he often felt as though he were holding the ashes of his life in his hands. Only 44 years old but looking weathered and much older, he sat in his armchair listening to Beethoven, scribbling in the Princeton Alumni Weekly and munching on a Hershey Bar. It was a wintery morning in 1940, and as if propelled by a ghost, he leapt from his chair, grasped at the mantle piece, and collapsed on the floor. He died from a heart attack.

Zelda was too ill to make it to her husband’s funeral, but only a few months before, she had written to Scott with surprising lucidity, “I love you anyway—even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life—I love you.”

She knew that they were mad, that their creativity and vice and entirely unique perspective on the world would be both their greatest high and their most agonizing low. To the letter, she added, “Nothing could have survived our life.”

5-things-no-one-tells-you-about-taking-antidepressants

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-no-one-tells-you-about-taking-antidepressants/

#5. They Can Make You More Depressed

 Recent studies have found that prolonged use of antidepressants actually promotes depression.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21459521

#4. They Can Make You Suicidal

...all antidepressants that warned of increased suicidal thoughts, particularly in children (later extended to the 18-to-24 age group), and especially in the first two months of use.

#3. Combining Them With Common Medications Can Kill You

"Time gets fuzzy when depression takes you into the valleys".

#2. Finding the Right Medication Is a Guessing Game

Certain types of depression require specific types of medication. Couple that with the fact that each person reacts to those chemicals differently, and you basically have to set up a dartboard, prescribe whatever you hit, and see what happens.

 #1. Meds Alone Often Don't Fix the Problem

Many people don't understand that medication alone is often not enough. Relying solely on pills is usually a disappointment; although they do help relieve some of the anxiety and stress caused by depression, they don't address the underlying mental issues. 

Depending on the cause and severity of the condition, many people need counseling in conjunction with the medication. Because let's face it: Unless you have an incurable, chronic problem, you can't keep taking pills for the rest of your life as your go-to coping device. 

There are often things outside the realm of a physical chemical imbalance that need to be addressed.

But that idea of pills = cures gets us every time, and we end up confused about why we still feel like shit months later. 

Medication will help fight infections after leg surgery, but physical therapy is what gets you walking again. 

Counseling is physical therapy for your brain. Go get it some exercise and then kick the world's ass with it.