Nothing To Live For

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1. Mindful Depression “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” -Rollo May Time is a funny thing. On one hand you have Western psychologists shouting “It’s all about the future! You’ve got to have goals and aspirations!” and on the other hand you have Buddhists replying “The only thing that matters is the present!” The mindful attitude […]...
2. Depression Versus Anxiety Depression and Anxiety Are Incompatible States We’ve heard many people complain about having depression and anxiety at the same time but that’s impossible because the states are fundamentally incompatible with one another. In the existential sense, to inhabit one precludes the possibility of inhabiting the other. Where depression is blunted affect anxiety is heightened affect. […]...
3. Hopelessness Many of us feel ill-equipped when confronted by hopelessness in our lives or in the lives of people we care about. Comfort and encouragement seem like inadequate allies against despair and the firm belief that the world no longer offers and will never again offer anything worth living for. Some common approaches are to try […]...
4. Less Obvious Symptoms Of Depression The common conceptualization of depression includes sadness, hopelessness, a loss of interest in activities that used to be pleasurable, and suicidal ideation. These symptoms are pretty easy to diagnose, even for non-professionals. If a family member looks like they’re constantly on the verge of crying, or ceases to be interested in doing anything fun, or […]...
5. Depression And The Inability To Make Decisions People who have become depressed tend to find it difficult to make decisions, even small, relatively insignificant decisions like what clothes to wear or where to go to get food. Without understanding the deeper existential psychology this uncertainty doesn’t make any sense, it seems kind of pathetic and can be really exasperating for friends and […]...
6. Nostalgia We all know the feeling. Our memories wrap around us like a warm blanket, we are instantly transported backwards, and for a brief time our present disappears, replaced by powerful, pleasant sensations that allow us to relive some of our best experiences. What’s wrong with a little nostalgia once in a while? From a psychological […]...
7. Depression And Power Depression and power have a paradoxical relationship. On the surface it seems like those suffering from depression are powerless. They certainly feel powerless in the face of that malignant, happiness sucking, energy sucking, life sucking force. But at the same time they enjoy a position of power, disguised as powerlessness, when it comes to their close relationships. […]...
8. Depression Versus Grief Depression and grief are both total responses to a given life situation. To use a poker analogy, we could say that whether you’re depressed or you’re grieving you’re all in. And the two syndromes have many symptoms that overlap, symptoms like despair, hopelessness, guilt, diminished interest in activities that used to seem pleasurable, inability to […]...
9. March of Years The most difficult realization for a human being, as Rollo May and Irvin Yalom would put it, is that life is not a never ending upward spiral. Decline, old age, and death wait for us all. You spend all this time climbing the mountain only to realize when you reach the summit that going up […]...
10. The Difference Between Depression And Feeling Sad There’s a massive difference between clinical depression and feeling sad. It’s actually important to make the distinction since ‘I’m depressed’ has become an integral part of the lexicon, something people say to express negativity in the face of all manner of unwanted happenings. One of the major differences between clinical depression and feeling sad actually […]...
11. Working Through We can define working through as the process of talking out difficult past experiences in order to achieve a sense of closure. It involves telling the same basic story many times from many different angles. You’d think this process would get repetitive and boring, maybe it does for some therapists, but for clients who are […]...
12. Losing Interest One of the criteria for diagnosing depression is diminished interest in activities that used to seem pleasurable. We will delve further into this idea to help show how depression, rather than being extreme sadness as is popularly assumed, is better conceptualized as a lack of emotion. Emotions are symptoms of a person’s engagement with life. […]...
13. Acceptance as a Substitute for Hope Most mental health professionals will tell you that hope is a vital ingredient for well-being and an important factor in giving people who are struggling the strength to keep going. And of course hopelessness is correlated with depression and suicide, so it seems pretty obvious on the surface that hope should be encouraged and hopelessness […]...
14. Cognitive Triad Of Depression Aaron Beck and his colleagues, who have used CBT to reliably treat depression and relieve many of its symptoms, discovered three patterns of maladaptive thinking that are common in people who are depressed or susceptible to becoming depressed. The Self This person usually has low self-esteem and a generally unfavorable impression of his abilities and […]...
15. Shaking Off Emotional Detachment Our conceptualization of emotional detachment is based around the premise that it’s a chosen response to adverse environmental conditions in childhood. After laboring under the yoke of emotional and psychological abuse for some time, the conscious or unconscious decision taken is “Better to feel nothing at all than to feel this. Caring deeply, opening myself up, only […]...
16. Getting Through The Rocky Periods Of Life Challenging The Non-Change Bias Life is full of ups and downs but many of us fall into what we might call the non-change bias. While in the midst of being ‘up’ we think we’ll be up forever and while in the midst of being ‘down’ we think we’ll be down forever. So really getting through […]...
17. Cannot Live Without You The thought process behind the expression ‘I can’t live without you’ is toxic for relationships and is a form of abuse. The idea of needing someone else to fulfill vital functions is ingrained in popular culture and we rarely stop to think about what the words actually mean or the tremendous pressure they put on […]...
18. Dark Times “If one candle is brought into an absolutely dark room, the darkness disappears, and there is light. If ten or a hundred or a thousand candles are added, the room will become brighter and brighter. Yet the decisive change was brought about by the first candle which penetrated the darkness.” – D.T. Suzuki It is […]...
19. Keep Hanging On And Things Will Change Suicide is, at bottom, a strategy to change an unwanted situation that feels unchangeable. It was Rollo May who said “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” In severe cases of depression there is no future, just intolerable, interminable present, a hopelessness stemming from the belief that things will be this way forever. In […]...
20. Light At The End Of The Tunnel We have been writing a lot lately about how to help people struggling with hopelessness. In this post we’ll talk about appealing to the rational side rather than the emotional side, addressing faulty thinking in order to cultivate the hope that things will improve. Rollo May once wrote that “Depression is the inability to construct […]...