“Joy does not simply happen to us,” wrote spiritual author Henri Nouwen. “We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.” I find choosing joy and trying to experience joy to be among the most difficult tasks when you are depressed. And yet it is critical to try to reconnect with those persons, places,...

A substantial amount of research points to the benefits of faith to mitigate symptoms of depression. In one study, for example, researchers at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, found that belief in God was associated with better treatment outcomes. They followed 159 individuals over the course of a year to examine the relationship between a person’s...

It’s that time of year again, when esteemed politicians, bestselling novelists, famous actresses, and luminaries of all kinds address graduating seniors and dole out advice for heading into the real world. I like to read commencement speeches from past years, because I find that much of their wisdom speaks to navigating through the challenges of depression...

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...

This post is from my archives. I have a love-hate relationship with December. Many people do. As a person with an extremely fragile psyche, who has a low threshold for stress, I feel like December adds another 50 percent of things to be scratched off of my “to do” list, and therefore tells my sympathetic...