John Folk-Williams, Patient Expert

Stress is turning up more and more as a contributor to health problems of all kinds, including anxiety and depression. The problem isn’t so much the worst traumas, such as the death of loved ones, divorce, or losing your job. It’s also the constant s...

Whenever I’ve written about my experience of recovery, many readers comment that turning their lives around, as I’ve been able to do, is not going to happen for them. They’ve accepted the fact that their depression will last for the rest of their liv...

Whenever I’ve looked for depression treatment, I’ve always wanted help with one basic thing: Stop the pain And that’s what most therapies for depression try to do. They focus on what’s wrong and try to get those symptoms into remission. If it works, ...

I have to admit that I haven’t always followed the advice I give others about therapy. It only works, I say, if you tell the therapist the truth of what you’re going through. If you don’t trust the therapist to be completely honest, find a new one. Y...

I’ve written earlier here about the risk of talking to friends when you need support - or just someone to listen. It’s risky because you may find that even good friends might turn away when it comes to depression. Worse than that, they might tell you ...

She’s in her eighties and suffers from congestive heart failure and crippling arthritis, among other problems. She’s also been depressed off and on for many years. Her daughter, a good friend of ours, takes her to the weekly doctor’s appointment, thi...

In the last post, I described ways of talking about depression to my wife and close friends that have helped me get through to them. But there’s another side to the story, as I’m sure you know from your own experience. You often face members of your ...

Aside from what it’s done to me, recurring depression has inflicted the greatest hurt on my wife and children. Most people dealing with depression say the same thing - that their closest relationships are hit hard, and often don’t survive a long cris...

I’ve been thinking about a question that Donna asked in a comment on this post about recovery. "Can “I am recovered” include the feeling that the old mental problems are just waiting for me around the corner? How do you abandon that feeling – wh...

As I described in my last post, having little or no self-esteem has led to a habit of comparing myself to other people. I always come up short. The other person is always better than I am. But those self-comparisons are only one part of the problem. ...