This post is from my archives. For National Nurse Appreciation Week! A major survey by Nursing Times found that eight out of 10 nurses feel they are under more pressure at work than they were 12 months ago, with seven out of 10 suffering the side-effects of work-related stress resulting in physical or mental health...

Depression is different from other illnesses in that, in addition to the physiological symptoms (loss of appetite, nervousness, sleeplessness, fatigue), there are the accompanying thoughts that can be so incredibly painful. For example, when my Raynaud’s flares up, the numbness in my fingers can be uncomfortable, but it doesn’t tell me that I am worthless,...

We’ve come a little way in reducing the stigma that’s associated with mental illness, but not nearly far enough. Consider these results pulled from a public attitude survey in Tarrant County, Texas, conducted by the county’s Mental Health Connection and the University of North Texas in Denton to determine the community’s view of mental illness:...

Living with depression — and especially coping with chronic depression — demands courage over any other virtue: the courage to incorporate the lessons we’ve learned from the past in our strategies for better health in the future; the courage to ask for help when we need it, and to persevere in new directions of healing; and the courage...

Tracy Thompson begins her thoughtful book The Ghost in the House with two brilliant sentences: “Motherhood and depression are two countries with a long common border. The terrain is chilly and inhospitable, and when mothers speak of it at all, it is usually in guarded terms, or in euphemisms.” If depression happened in a vacuum,...