Posted by badhaircut on May 27, 2005, at 16:29:46
In reply to Re: conflictedness » badhaircut, posted by fires on May 26, 2005, at 22:51:49
As pegasus says, it is a very interesting issue.
Depression seems to me to be something other than thoughts and feelings. I don't just mean that it involves a physiological problem: it surely does, in various ways. But I suspect that central, even causal, in depression is a particular kind of interior, conscious attitude toward thoughts and feelings. An attitude of unwillingness to have certain feelings and of needing to control what we think.
Perhaps depression is a state we get into when this central unwillingness makes for a terrific struggle against unwanted feelings and thoughts and that struggle ends up being impossible. Maybe that state is in fact physiological (in a nontrivial way). At this point, I would guess so.
Maybe this state of depression, in addition to bringing all the physiological & neurological destruction that Peter Kramer talks about, also brings still more ugly, scary thoughts & feelings. When we also start struggling against THOSE in the same fruitless, impossible ways, we get trapped in a vicious, increasingly bad cycle.
This theory is still a little unformed in my mind, although I'm basing it on some books I've read (and posted about in other threads). I'm not sure how I think meds fit into it.
But even when a depression has past (because of meds or time or whatever), we still have many "distorted," "illogical," "conflicted" thoughts. Maybe a Mindfulness type of attitude, in which we see thoughts & feelings as having a free existence separate from us, might help avoid relapse or other destructive states.
poster:badhaircut
thread:501224
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050521/msgs/503769.html