John Folk-Williams
Patient ExpertJohn wrote for HealthCentral as a patient expert for Depression.
Latest by John Folk-Williams
Reducing Stress to Help Heal from Depression
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...
Do You Believe Your Depression Is Permanent?
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...
Putting Well-Being at the Center of Therapy Rather than Depression
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, ...
Do You Always Tell Your Therapist the Whole Truth?
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...
Can You Accept the Support of Friends?
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 ...
Treating Depression in Elderly Parents
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...
Trying to Talk about Depression When They Just Don't Get It
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 ...
Trying to Save Relationships Despite Depression's Impact
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...
Doubts about Recovery - Can it Last?
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...
Self-Esteem and the Habit of Comparing Yourself to Others
All the lists of depression symptoms include the loss of self-esteem, but reducing it to a phrase says nothing about how it affects daily life. For me, constant self-comparisons to other people make it all too real. In this post, I’ll describe what I ...