Article has some good stuff, but misses some points: 1. Some "Depression" is a genetically-inherited (familial) brain imbalance issue. For that minority of people, telling them to Be Resilient is worse than useless, it's heartless.
2. Other "Depression" is the result of childhood "faulty programming" -- either neglect or abuse by people who should never, ever have been parents. Most people don't just "cheer up" and walk away from 18 or so years or horrendous "training." They need years of emotional AND spiritual work, to unravel the ways in which THEIR brains were (yes physically) mis-formed by worse than bad treatment. Even "normally" incompetent parenting (50%?) can do this to some extent. So, JUST "being resilient" for this larger minority is only ONE Of several necessary ingredients.
3. A third unnamed source of "Depression" is an actual, horrendous real-time loss (death of a beloved spouse, of a child, other Big Time loss). In this case the ONLY remedy for THAT kind of depression (which is actually GRIEF), is active, dive-right-in GRIEVING. For that I would offer: "suffering" (depression) is a passive refusal to face monumental loss, whereas "grieving" means continually hitting the pinata of one's grief with a loving stick.
It may be glib to notice a correlation between those who are "resilient" and/or have learned the profoundly powerful art of being Grateful -- and those who are not Depressed, but the three points above are sorely missing in the article -- but hopefully not in the professional repertoire of its psychologist-author.
On Aug 23, 2015 BurnWitchesBurn wrote:
Article has some good stuff, but misses some points:
1. Some "Depression" is a genetically-inherited (familial) brain imbalance issue. For that minority of people, telling them to Be Resilient is worse than useless, it's heartless.
2. Other "Depression" is the result of childhood "faulty programming" -- either neglect or abuse by people who should never, ever have been parents. Most people don't just "cheer up" and walk away from 18 or so years or horrendous "training." They need years of emotional AND spiritual work, to unravel the ways in which THEIR brains were (yes physically) mis-formed by worse than bad treatment. Even "normally" incompetent parenting (50%?) can do this to some extent. So, JUST "being resilient" for this larger minority is only ONE Of several necessary ingredients.
3. A third unnamed source of "Depression" is an actual, horrendous real-time loss (death of a beloved spouse, of a child, other Big Time loss). In this case the ONLY remedy for THAT kind of depression (which is actually GRIEF), is active, dive-right-in GRIEVING. For that I would offer: "suffering" (depression) is a passive refusal to face monumental loss, whereas "grieving" means continually hitting the pinata of one's grief with a loving stick.
It may be glib to notice a correlation between those who are "resilient" and/or have learned the profoundly powerful art of being Grateful -- and those who are not Depressed, but the three points above are sorely missing in the article -- but hopefully not in the professional repertoire of its psychologist-author.