Back in the mid-twentieth century, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—and they stuck. Heck, I just wrote about them last month. According to Susan Berger, researcher and practitioner in the health and mental health fields for over twenty-five years, those five stages may work well for the dying...

In his insightful book, “The Addictive Personality: Understanding the Addictive Process and Compulsive Behavior,” author Craig Nakken explains why, even after an addict has given up the bottle or the weed, she will never be done with recovery:   Addiction is a process of buying into false and empty promises: the false promise of relief,...

I have stopped describing what depression feels like to the person with no experience of this “black dog,” as Winston Churchill called it, or even an occasional bout of melancholy, because my inability to express the physical and mental deterioration, the frustration at trying to articulate my madness, tends to make my black dog growl...

Some of you may recognize my dream, but I like to repost it every now and then to keep it alive and give it legs. In celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.: I have a dream that one day I won’t hold my breath every time I tell a person that I suffer from bipolar...

A classic that I like to post on Beyond Blue every now and then … One day I decided to quit…I quit my job, my relationship, my spirituality…. I wanted to quit my life. I went to the woods to have one last talk with God. “God”, I said. “Can you give me one good...