My absolute favorite essay on depression is a piece Kay Redfield Jamison wrote for NPR’s “This I Believe” collection of testimonies. It’s about learning to love our jagged edges. I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense...

I know that the fastest way to despair is by comparing one’s insides with another’s outsides, and that Max Ehrmann, the author of the classic poem “Desiderata,” was absolutely correct when he said that if you compare yourself with others you become either vain or bitter, or, as Helen Keller put it: “Instead of comparing...

I can’t remember all the speeches at my commencement ceremony. But I do remember looking up on the stage to see my best friend, the valedictorian of our class, sitting there among all the luminaries, and wondering how in the world she did that when English was her second language. It still blows me away....

Both David Burns (bestselling author of “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy” and Abraham Low (founder of Recovery, Inc.) teach techniques to analyze negative thoughts (or identify distorted thinking) so to be able to disarm and defeat them. Since Low’s language is a bit out-dated, I list below Burns’ “Ten Forms of Twisted Thinking,” (adapted...

I read somewhere that a large number of Nobel Prize winners become depressed after receiving their honor because their sense of purpose has been taken away. They have to grieve their pre-Nobel Prize life and find a new way of being, something to get excited about that will get you out of bed in the...