response 12 of 170:

Jun 27 18:26 UTC 2002

My grandmother says that about divorce.  People didn't have the time to
examine if their marriage was good - they were too busy working.

response 14 of 170:

Jun 27 18:48 UTC 2002

People my age grew up facing the real possibility of global nuclear war 
and the expected result of most or all life on the planet being 
destroyed.  We had bombing drills when I was in elementary school.

My parents grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, then 
brought me into the world to face the aforementioned nuclear war.

Their parents grew up when smallpox and polio killed and crippled many.

The generation preceding them worked 15 hours a day on farms, every 
day.  They came here from various places around Europe, for the most 
part, so they could enjoy that kind of luxurious lifestyle in relative 
peace.

I don't think young people now have it all *that* tough.

response 16 of 170:

Jun 27 18:56 UTC 2002

That's an interesting comparison.  I like it because it says something about
the way we look at depression.  Everyone, I think, will agree that something's
wrong if you're too busy to tell how your marriage is going.  But I'll bet
that "too busy to be depressed" sounded pretty good to you, at least at first.
It sure sounded good to me.  

response 18 of 170:

Jun 27 19:05 UTC 2002

Something I've noticed about mild or moderately depressed 
people is that they spend a whole lot of time thinking about
themselves.  They are doing this moment to moment thing measuring
how they are doing in this situation and what is that person 
thinking about me and why in the world did I do that, etc. 

I'm not sure what comes first, they get depressed because they
see themselves under such a microscope (who wouldn't) or the
depression draws them into a "me" circle.

response 20 of 170:

Jun 27 21:16 UTC 2002

Good point, Mary.  Yeah, I find that my mood goes down when I'm not working
with kids as much, probably because when I'm working with a roomful of them
I don't think of me nearly as much as I do when I'm not.  The post-camp
depression is the worst.

response 22 of 170:

Jun 27 21:44 UTC 2002

Isnīt it a chicken - egg question?
I honestly canīt tell which comes first.
But, Mary certainly has got a point.

response 24 of 170:

Jun 28 00:15 UTC 2002

emotional modes i excel at when displaying include: glee, scorn, contempt,
lust, adoration, giddiness, anxiety usually of a contorted type, and
depression; i can do depression like a scarecrow of honey and suet coming
apart on the davenport; i can do depression like digging a dustbowl in my
stomach with a broken bottle of wine; i can even do a depression rich enough
to give my reflection in the mirror halitosis.
despite my talents in this latter modality, i gave it up. the reason i exude
these emotions with significant clarity (minimal disparity between interior
& exterior) is because i've been expressing them longer, more often, and more
freely than emotions i either tend to not have (like pity, remorse, and
boredom) or have in some way been restricted from expressing (such as sorrow,
anger, and pride). when i adore an object, or when i'm stimulated into (a
shallow wet bag of) anxiety, i don't make a mistake about how i feel, my body
responds along a thread woven back uninterrupted to early years. i'm better
at glee than at contempt; better at contempt than at lust. i was a gleeful
kid. i didn't take up contempt until 4th grade, when friends mike + stephan
and i entered personal competition making models of the solar system from
scratch. (i don't know where they are today, but if stephan isn't dead from
drugs -- he had an atrocious pair of parents to raise -- i expect and hope
he's excelling in some esoteric corner of some branch of science. about mike
i'm too unresolved to comment.) lust began occurring when i was 10, but i
didn't figure out how to display it until i was 17. frequency of occurrence
and opportunity for display has given me the chance to better learn
displayment in a shorter period of time than some other feelings.
i took up depression -- the optional, easy to swallow grape-flavored
child-formula depression -- when my family moved from the comfortably shitty
ranch house and trailer trash hood to the two a story subdivided
gentrification project, where we lived in a house of cards that rained down
quicker than i could keep the mawn lowed, so that'd be age 13. it was long
preceded by anxiety. anxiety is useful: it can be entertaining, funny, and
you can get work done. even sadness (i'm told, although i've tried out this
modality a handful of times only in the last year) can turn to song.
depression is like a nightmare spent eating spoonfuls out of a 5 lb bag of
quicklime.
by 'giving up' depression (oh if it were so), i mean, i think, that i replaced
it. suppose for sake of an argument that depression isn't itself an emotion
but a complex of sincerely beheld emotions gone unexpressed, thus a bilious
residue of stifled feelings, their potency choked and reduced to crap coating
the inside of your skull. imagine that every sincere emotion is NOT not-like
an orgasm; now attribute individual character and livelihood, here in the land
of make-believe, to each emotion and imagine the complaints of those
within you who never get to come, or at least not as much as the others
get to, or AT LEAST not as much as they get hard up for a pop. fucking
inhumane treatment of one's self, i'd believe.
is this an excessively cartoonish depiction of that oddball social enemy,
Depression -- an umbrella state of mind pushed open by complexes of
malnourished feelings? i don't go in for -- i'm not so far convinced of --
physical theories of mind, in which, say, every state of mind in an
individual ("in" an individual? a topic for another time.) corresponds
with a quantifiable brain-state; so i'm also not convinced that
depression, well and workably alleviated by rest, pharmaceuticals, and
exercise on sunny days, is solved (unknotted? discord!) other than by
expressing repressed thoughts and feelings. (belatedly noteworthy: i don't
think i want to include the phenomenon of depression in cases of clear
physical brain trauma, debilitating psychosis, and other messy odds and
ends, in the preceding exploration. not because i have some dividing line
in mind between these 'errors' or 'broken' people and the 'properly
working' humans to which the exploration applies -- i would have to accuse
myself of dense solipsism, nobody likes that. rather, instead, that the
capital-D depression much in the headlines yesterday and today is
something like an epidemic, which is of normative concern, mysterious in
origin But that we are human. possibly even contagious -- have you ever
caught a case of depression? answers below.
this is still murky, i think, but i don't intend to tell a man with a
butchered cortex that he just needs to let it all out to get rid of the
blues and expect it to work, even in cases where he could comprehend me. i
do wonder, though: people with life-changing brain injuries, and certainly
those with emergent psychosis, are probably disoriented (scared) enough
that without the ability to express it molts into depressed spells. this
is grossly speculative without being necessary but it occurred to me to
mention it.
so eat well, get plenty of exercise and rest, and strip yourself of all
self-censorship and inhibitions if you'd like to leave the poppy fields of
depression. and no, i'm not on meds delizia, you cocksucker.

response 26 of 170:

Jun 28 05:55 UTC 2002

again, I would that people could be convinced that depression and other 
disorders aren't necessarily temporary states.  Bipolar and some types 
of depressive disorders are chronic, but they can be managed.  Perish 
the thought (but perhaps some would rather remain ignorant than do the 
research) that anyone would seriously believe they are contagious.

response 28 of 170:

Jun 29 06:56 UTC 2002

26
what organizing cause do you suggest underlying chronic cases? or causes.
do the causes of chronic cases lead us necessarily to pharmaceuticals as
method of management? 
my suggestion of contagious depression is pointed at cases where organizing
cause can smoked out with psychoanalysis; the easiest example of adapting
depressive modes of thought and responsiveness to feelings is a depressive
parent to dependent, learning child. if the child grown to adulthood becomes
depressive, what is there to assure us that it's physical illness (mental as
physical) and not complex of neurosis?

response 30 of 170:

Jun 29 19:29 UTC 2002

a friend of mine began RET six months ago. i don't know if she's still doing
it, and i haven't heard any update. between me and my friends (we talk about
our shrinks a lot) this usually means it wasn't successful, but i'm not
prepared to settle on that conclusion. it sounded fascinating as hell when
she told me about it.
i've seen shrinks off and on since i was 14, and, of 8, 2 have been worth a
damn. the first was a fluke, a chill fella who wore hawaiian shirts open at
the chest and his hair long and in a tight braid. (a lot like happyboy,
really.) because i was assigned to him by the court and because he was
changing his schedule to work with alcohol-troubled teens in groups, i had
to stop seeing him. the 2nd good shrink, my current one, was found on referral
from the first one. this, along with the multitude of tales from friends and
acquaintances on the difficulty of finding a decent shrink these days,
combined with the decor of shrinks' offices changing over to pamphlets,
calendars, clocks, inspirational posters, and stress-relief squeeze sponges
all bearing the corporate logo of some pharmaceutical company or another, has
suggested to me a crisis in the current state of american psychological mental
health.
email me if you'd like any contact info for my current so-called good shrink.

response 32 of 170:

Jun 30 06:54 UTC 2002

what's EMDR?

response 34 of 170:

Jul 1 02:34 UTC 2002

EMDR is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.  It's supposed 
to be a way to move irrationally strong feelings from seeming immediate 
to seeming more remote.  My therapist wants me to try this for my anger 
with regard to my divorce.