depression and creative expression

Perhaps the patterns of self-defeating behavior or depression and despair persist. Perhaps both the client and the therapist see the client as resisting or as a chronic case...a "help-rejecting complainer" and no forward movement occurs.

My belief is that only by opening up the complex of the feeling of remorse can forward movement be made.

D

We know, indeed, that Dürer thought of himself as melancholic and frequently experienced dejection and a sense of "powerlessness" in the face of the staggering intellectual and technical demands he placed on himself.  ..

Five hundred years ago, an imbalance in the four "humors" that influence temperament was thought to be the basis of mood and physical disturbance. 

This concept of four humors or bodily fluids - yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm - goes back to ancient Greece. A predominance of black bile was thought to cause melancholy and madness. 

Because it involved cogitation and introspection, the state of melancholy became associated with the creative person. The philosopher Plato first postulated the notion that melancholy often followed "the Divine Frenzy" of creativity.

In modern medicine we speak of "imbalances" in neurotransmitters as the cause of many illnesses, both emotional and physical. Our current diagnostic criteria for a major depressive illness, whether "bipolar" (manic depression) or "unipolar" (depression), include a depressed or irritable mood; markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all or almost all activities; fatigue; sleep and appetite disturbances; psychomotor agitation or retardation; feelings of worthlessness or excessive inappropriate guilt; diminished ability to think and concentrate; and recurrent thoughts of death or suicidal ideation.

    From article: Clinical Depression Then and Now - by Patricia Waldron, M.D.

In the fall of 1977, she worked feverishly, obsessively, as long as 10 hours a day, drawing and writing powerful commentaries about her views. Over a period of nine months, her creativity and search for inner peace resulted in a lifting of her depression. 

from "Elizabeth Layton: Life-Long Depression, with Healing Through Creativity in Later Life" by Sara Epstein, MD, a chapter in the book Creativity and Madness   //  painting by Elizabeth Layton - from Profile site

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When she wasn't allowed to marry older guy Roger Vadim when she was fifteen, she tried to asphyxiate herself. She was allowed to marry him at eighteen. 

Vadim is the one who liberated her on-screen image, told her to pout, and put her in tight jeans and bikinis. ...

Vadim called her "the last of the sex symbols," but said she had "anguish, fears, and a talent for unhappiness that often took her to the edge of tragedy."

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"I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life," she has said, "death was like love, a romantic escape. I took pills because I didn't want to throw myself off my balcony and know people would photograph me lying dead below."

A major animal rights activist, she founded The Brigitte Bardot Foundation, and at age 70 (in 2004) is still actively working for change of global issues such as whaling and seal hunting.

My family is notorious for having highs and lows, but I've addressed the problem through the environment. I don't believe in the so-called Hemingway curse. 

I keep drugs and alcohol out of my life and keep my blood sugar stable. I'm trying to stay balanced.

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Larry King : Do you, Mariel, fear the genetics of it [depression]? Do you fear your family got it, you're going to... 

Mariel Hemingway : I no longer fear the genetics of it, but I've battled it through my lifestyle, through not -- I'm not a drinker. I don't -- I've never taken drugs because I've watched...

Mariel Hemingway : Because of the fear. Absolutely. And I tell my own daughters, who are 15 and 13, that they run the risk of possibly having that [genetic predisposition for depression] in their system, so that they need to have a lifestyle that....

You know, I'm not saying that that will prevent it, but I certainly think that, in my case, it helps it because... many people who suffer from depression and bipolar disorder and those kind of things mask it through substance abuse. 

And that's very.. normal, but it's also -- it's hard to tell when somebody is.. depressed or they've got an abusive tendency. ///

I think there's a lot of young people that suffer from depression. ...

It hit our family when my eldest sister, Joan, was in high school. And it was triggered by some drug abuse, but there's a lot of depression in schools.

I intended for Prozac Diary to be a book about cure, not illness. Thus, I self-consciously set out to avoid a linear illness narrative, a structure that would have placed as much weight on sickness as on health. 

Instead, I chose to give quick glimpses of the illness -- enough, I hope, to convey its essential character, but not so much that it obscures my main purpose: to write about an emergence, not a descent. ....

The hardest part for me was, and continues to be, my concern that I have lost some of the honesty and intensity that illness, which by its nature places one at the periphery of society, brought to my life. 

In Freud's famous essay "Mourning and Melancholia"he articulates this conflict extremely clearly. "The depressive has a keener eye for the truth than people who are not melancholic... we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can come to truth of this kind." ///

This "sense"for me is rooted in moral conviction. We are, I believe, morally obligated to navigate the complexities of living with as much grace and courage as we can muster. 

So yes, my spiritual leanings certainly helped me adjust to the adventure that was, and is, Prozac.

Lauren Slater has a master's degree in psychology from Harvard University and a doctorate from Boston University, and teaches creative nonfiction writing. Her work was chosen for The Best American Essays of 1994 and 1997.

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"It's hard to find something that poets are not higher on pathology -- alcoholism, suicide, drug abuse, depression," Mr. Simonton said. 

He also theorized that it was just more of a struggle overall to be a poet than to be something else, which could lead to problems like depression and drinking.

The actor says, "You can be at the bottom of the barrel, you can be depressed and suicidal, and there's always hope." 

"I've been through severe depression. The song Private Radio pretty much spells it out.

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"There's a fear of putting our business in the street... of somehow revealing too much," said Latonya Slack, executive director of the California Black Women's Health Project... "Black women can perceive going to a therapist as something we don't do," she added.

Gloria Morrow is a licensed clinical psychologist in Pomona, Calif., with a private practice in which 90 percent of the patients are African American women. 

Having heard the collective grief, pain and worry of her patients, she said these efforts to highlight their mental-health needs are crucial because "there's nothing worse than suffering in silence." 

She says that, for many of her patients, racism and sexism play out in the workplace, in their relationships with men and often lead to low self-esteem, depression and anxiety.

"This whole notion that racism is dead is a falsehood because people continue to suffer," Morrow said.

We depressives become shaped by our disease as well; the skills that we develop with depression in a vain effort to save ourselves pain -- skills like emotional control, isolation, putting others first, being overresponsible -- prevent our recovery. We have to give up the depressed habits that keep us down and make us vulnerable to relapse. 

from Introduction to book - posted on author site undoingdepression.com

*Richard O'Connor, PhD. Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

 "Harris's fascination with Pollock matched his physical similarity; the actor chose to direct and star in this impressive film biography. And his devotion assured a work of singular integrity, honoring the artist's achievement in abstract expressionism while acknowledging that Pollock was a tormented, manic-depressive alcoholic...

The film also suggests that Pollock's success was largely attributable to the devotion of his wife, artist Lee Krasner, played with matching ferocity by Marcia Gay Harden in an Oscar-winning performance.    [Amazon.com review] 

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, 
and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain 
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply, 
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain 

For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. 

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, 

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: 

I cannot say what loves have come and gone, 

I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.