Someone in recovery circles once told me that if you have one foot in the past and another in the future, you are essentially peeing on the present. I try to remember that when I’m engulfed in regret—obsessing about all the things I did wrong in the past and wishing to God I had made...

I thought I had it all figured out. I even had a book title picked out: Whole-ish — On Healing Myself Naturally from Depression and My Messy Path to Well. And I had outlined some of the chapters: Why restoring your gut health and generating good intestinal bacteria will improve mood The science behind optimal...

Stuck thoughts. Painful ruminations. Unrelenting obsessions. They are the curse of depression — among the most excruciating symptoms, in my opinion. “When a child gets lost, he may feel sheer terror,” explains Byron Katie in her bestseller Loving What Is. “It can be just as frightening when you’re lost inside the mind’s chaos.” I can usually...

The standard advice you’ll hear if you express suicidal thoughts is to call a suicide hotline or check yourself into the hospital. Trained volunteers, such as those at The Samaritans, provide an invaluable service to severely depressed people who call or email them in desperation. But for some of us, suicidal thoughts can be present for many...

For anyone who has ever been debilitated by severe depression, there is nothing more frightening than the feeling that he or she is relapsing into another episode. We chalk up the first few days of angst to a bad stretch and hope it gets better from there. But by the time we have hit six...