The Black Dog: 6 Books to Understand Depression
Jennie Yabroff acknowledges that “‘Depression’ remains a catch-all phrase to describe a variety of conditions ranging from the occasional bad day to paralyzing inertia”:
To truly understand the disease, and not just the treatment, you need to look to writers with sensitivity and compassion about the real nature of the self in despair, be they novelists or doctors, contemporary writers or playwrights dead for hundreds of years.
She recommends these books for help in understanding depression, a state commonly known as the black dog:
- Ordinarily Well by Peter Kramer
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Darkness Visible by William Styron
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon
- An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
These Instagrammers’ Bullet Journals are organizational masterpieces
The newest craze for keeping oneself organized is the Bullet Journal. Check out this article for examples of bullet journals as well as some links about how the system works.
Why Handwriting Is Still Essential in the Keyboard Age
Despite our current dependence on keyboards, there are some definite cognitive benefits to learning cursive writing.
‘Pronoia’ and other emotions you never knew you had
Here’s an article about Tiffany Watt Smith, a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London:
[It’s] the subjective experience of emotions — that Smith explores in her charming new book, The Book of Human Emotions. It’s a roundup of 154 words from around the world that you could call an exploration of “emotional granularity,” as it provides language for some very specific emotions you likely never knew you had. “It’s a long-held idea that if you put a name to a feeling, it can help that feeling become less overwhelming,” she said. “All sorts of stuff that’s swirling around and feeling painful can start to feel a bit more manageable,” once you’ve pinned the feeling down and named it.
Doctors Say Your Word Choice Can Hugely Change Your Brain
Every word counts:
Be careful because the next word you say could determine how your day is, or the rest of your life might pan out. Doctors at Thomas Jefferson University explained that the choice of our words could actually have more impact on our lives than we actually think.
© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown