Like many i found the depression thread a good place to visit. i gather the originator chose to remove it, and so i have started this thread to let such exchanges continue. in the spirit of my own convictions i have given it a more positive title, but would not wish to suggest that it is always the case that one can be positive in the face of loss, anxiety and separations; not to mention employnment issues!

However just to kick off on a somewhat positive view of the prospects of coping with depression this is a part of a slightly longer text that describes how effective approaches first developed for tackling depression.

"In the late 1950s, when Beck began his investigations, depressive illness was commonly viewed as a form of introjected anger. Freud had argued that depressed patients feel hostile and angry toward someone they love. Because patients cannot deal with negative feelings about someone who is important, needed, and valued, they handle those feelings by repressing them and unconsciously directing them against themselves. It is this self-directed anger and hatred that leads to low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness.

Beck tested Freud’s idea by comparing the dreams of depressed patients with those of patients who were not depressed. He found that depressed patients exhibited not more, but less hostility than other patients. In the course of carrying out this study and listening carefully to his patients, Beck found that rather than expressing hostility, depressed people express a systematic negative bias in the way they think about life. They almost invariably have unrealistically high expectations of themselves, overreact dramatically to any disappointment, put themselves down whenever possible, and are pessimistic about their future. This distorted pattern of thinking, Beck realized, is not simply a symptom, a reflection of a conflict lying deep within the psyche, but a key agent in the actual development and continuation of the depressive disorder. Beck made the radical suggestion that by identifying and addressing the negative beliefs, thought processes, and behaviors, one might be able to help patients replace them with healthy, positive beliefs. Moreover, one could do so independent of personality factors and the unconscious conflicts that may underlie them.

To test this idea clinically, Beck presented patients with evidence from their own experiences, actions, and accomplishments that countered, challenged, and corrected their negative views. He found that they often improved with remarkable speed, feeling and functioning better after a very few sessions. This positive result led Beck to develop a systematic, short-term psychological treatment for depression that focuses not on a patient’s unconscious conflict, but on his or her conscious cognitive style and distorted way of thinking.

To evaluate systematically the effectiveness of this mode of therapy, Beck and his associates initiated controlled clinical trials comparing cognitive behavioral therapy with placebo and with antidepressant medication. They found that cognitive behavioral therapy is as effective as antidepressant medication in treating people with mild and moderate depression; in some studies, it appeared superior at preventing relapses. In later controlled clinical trials, cognitive behavioral therapy was successfully extended to anxiety disorders, especially panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorders, social phobias, eating disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

What was next needed is a biological approach to psychotherapy. Until quite recently, there have been few biologically compelling ways to test psychodynamic ideas or to evaluate the efficacy of one therapeutic approach over another. A combination of effective short-term psychotherapy and brain imaging may now give us just that—a way of revealing both mental dynamics and the workings of the living brain. In fact, if psychotherapeutic changes are maintained over time, it is reasonable to conclude that different forms of psychotherapy lead to different structural changes in the brain, just as other forms of learning do.

The idea of using brain imaging to evaluate the outcome of different forms of psychotherapy is not an impossible dream, as studies of depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder have shown. Helen Mayberg had earlier found that Area 25 in the cerebral cortex is overactive in depressed patients. She then went on to find that this overactivity is reversed by cognitive behavioral therapy if, and only if, the therapy is successful."


It comes from here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kandel07/kandel07_index.html

Oh, no Millie, we are not bored with your posts. I feel priviledged to have a little window into your life and I feel connected to you and to people this way.

I feel that long repressed anger and frustration is very bad for us. It builds up and it drains of energy. Never the less it is not possible often to come to terms with life and one's lot. I protest inwardly very often. The best thing is when one can make oneself at least somewhat calmer and comfortable.
It is not good for us to grumble too much and to be unhappy too long as our bodies can not take it for too long. We were made to be happy most of the time and have some challenges and disappointments in moderation.

I often think about people during Bach's time (1700 - 1800) and how they accepted their lot. There were deaths very often. Mothers did not get attached to their babies, because they didnot expect them to survive. And so many deaths were from deseases and child births etc. It seems to me that people at that time accepted that easier. I can not marvel at their vitality. I think that it is because they were more religious than we are now.
May be it is only seems this way. When I read that Mozart and his wife lost so many children I don't know how they found strengh to go on.

Music is a form of therapy and hobby for me as well as my profession.

I marvel and admire how you cope with it all, how strong you for your friends and family and I wish that you love of music will help you to keep helping those who are weaker spiritually and emotionally and to get through all hurdles.

I know it is a gross oversimplification but sometimes I wonder how much that is wrong with the world today could be put right if we all sang more, and sang together?

Thanks for the reminder Tommo - sneaking around the back of my mind when I was typing the earlier post was the idea that there is something intensely visceral and entirely human about making music. That is why I would rather attend a live performance than listen to a broadcast or recording if I have the choice. It is almost like sitting by the communal campfire.

  <- writ large

I just want to second that. It becomes especially apparent in threads like this one (and others on happiness and depression) and is most unusual for internet groups (even the old BBC messageboards weren't like this). Let's all keep it up!

Ian (who has also tried therapy, though have rather ambivalent feelings about it on the basis of experience (also have dated two women who were therapists, for entirely different reasons!))

Well quoted GG; I keep intending to read Marcus Aurelius and never getting round to it. I shall look for the Penguin in the next bookshop to cross my path! Seneca is also a balm, I recall hearing Paul Schofield read his essay/address/letter entitled 'Make Friends of Your Slaves' - this showed me that much of the management literature i was absorbing was simply reworking some much older philosophies.

As a psychologist i have ceased to view optimism as a state of mind or general outlook on life; for some happy few it is. For the rest of us it is a task at which we must become skilled, Marcus Aurelius is close to saying just this in your quotation. If it is a task, it requires skill and can be learned. I believe this is the essence of the cognitive therapies see Seligman 'Authentic Happiness'.

But Millie makes a really important point, it is tough to do this in the midst of a day such as she describes! There are two enemies to tackle; emotional intensity is the first and foremost - it was not until I realised this, that i got myself under the slightest control. Anything that calms you, walk, swim, telly, hugs anything, it must be used to get the intensity of feelings down. The second enemy is reworking the tragedies in one's mind, the evil rumination of depression,  it magnifies intensity. I know i am in trouble in my personal relationships when i am composing character aanalyses of my loved ones in my head! It defeats any prospect of optimism.

There is the reality that traumatic life experiences do scar one, they are injuries; invisible in any physical sense, they are apparent in one's approach to others, beliefs about situations and behavioural styles. There is also a challenge and opportunity in having to become a somewhat new person; i always found it desperately unhelpful to be reminded of this by friends during a bad separation and divorce, and it is no consolation in grief at all. But it is real, and is what the passing of time brings about.

He's definitely a good companion to have around is Marcus Aurelius, Calum. If I've nudged someone to pick up a copy of the Meditations then I've done my good deed for the day. A Roman Emperor, AD something or other not very much, and therefore somewhat unlike my own home life, but he's one of those writers who can stop you in your tracks with one of those "how on earth did you know that I thought like that when I've never told anyone, not even myself?' moments.

Can't resist another quick burst:

'If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

If the cause of the trouble lies in your own character, set about reforming your principles; what is there to hinder you?

If it is the failure to take some apparently sound course of action that is vexing you, then why not take it, instead of fretting?  "Because there is an insuperable obstacle in the way."  In that case do not worry; the responsibilty for inaction is not yours.  "But life is not worth living with this thing undone ." Why then, bid ....[er, perhaps, ahem, we'll omit that bit actually. He was a Roman ]'

Very tempting to say, 'Yeah, well, up to a point Your Emperorness. That's all very well......' but even so  it's a useful reminder and a counter-weight to what we normally tell ourselves.

It's strange that somehow (unless we've been unlucky) we tend to grow up with no knowledge that life is going to be difficult. Either no-one tells us, or we are unable to take it in until we have had the experience ourselves. Yet in my experience very few people have easy lives. If people talk to you on train journeys, for instance, they almost always have dramatic stories to tell. I'm often struck by how many real problems people have.

A young-ish grandma, Milly? My mother was not far from 20 years older than you when she became a grandmother, and I will be quite 20 years older if my children ever get round to reproducing!