8 thoughts on “Stuff”

1. Read the Cavette piece and identified. The quandary remains, however, when is it depression and when is it a justifiable paralyzing kind of despair at how so much is going so wrong for so many of us.

   On that note, one of my brothers who’s in the shrink business sent me a cartoon. Drab room, back-to-back doc in a chair, patient on the couch, patient says, “Could we up the dosage? I still have feelings.”

2. when is it depression and when is it a justifiable paralyzing kind of despair

   They feel different, actually, but it’s hard to explain how.

3. The story about the Obama email is interesting. Amazing that most of the uninformed and disingenuous political hate seems to come from the right? Obama is Muslim, swiftboats, McCain’s love child, Vince Foster, etc. Oh those right wing Christian conservatives, they are a sunny lot, makes me want to run right out and repent!!!

   I have thought this whole Obama is a Muslim angle sort of silly. I would think that generally if someone was stupid enough to believe anything contained in a chain email, and so biased against the Islamic religion, they probably where not going to vote for a black man in the first place. I have run across a few of these people and the “Obama is Muslim” crap is just a seemingly more accepted way of hiding behind their own overt racism.

4. Yes, they do. For me, depression is fortunately much rarer and affects me physically like sitting on the floor in a fetal position. Paralyzing despair merely means a dirty house, no food in the fridge, bills unpaid, friends unseen and un-phoned. (And of course stuck in a fetal position on the floor doesn’t pay the bills… either.)

5. felicity — oh, ok. Well, per your description of paralyzing despair, I’d say there’s no meaningful difference. It’s probably just a matter of degree. At times I’ve limped along with low-level depressions that left me functional in a limited way but not really living.

6. McCain is a just ball of laughs with his wife beating jokes. Everybody loves a good wifebeating joke,especially those of us who have lived through domestic violence as children and have seen our mothers battered senseless. It’s a great experience to see your mother laying in a pool of blood while you beg your father not to kill her..how can anybody not appreciate the humor in a good wife beating joke?

7. McCain is just so out of touch. He reminds me of men I knew in the 60’s and 70’s, when it passed to be uncaring about the feelings of women. As a current candidate, combined with his apparent ignorance of world affaits, he really alarms me.

8. Read the Cavette piece and identified. The quandary remains, however, when is it depression and when is it a justifiable paralyzing kind of despair at how so much is going so wrong for so many of us.

   Really, paralyzing despair is never justified. It might be awfully normal, and perfectly human, but it’s never exactly *justified*.

   More importantly, once you have certain symptoms, you *are* depressed, whether the circumstances that brought it about make it likely, or not.

   Hm. An example: if you get a leg cramp, you’ll probably have a strained muscle where the cramp occurred. On the other hand, if you overexert that same muscle through exercise, you’ll have a muscle strain. It doesn’t matter if it “just happened” or if there was a cause; you still have a strained muscle which needs treatment. (“Treatment” might mean “take it easy for a while”… I don’t mean “medical treatment” necessarily.)

   There are some really good talk therapies to help with depression these days, and they more-or-less ignore causation. (That’s not to say you can’t talk about the miserable breakup and loss of your job. It just means that the treatment isn’t based upon, e.g, resolving issues specifically about the breakup or job loss.)

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