How to Use Writing to Ease Your Depression

After receiving another round of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which she’d been receiving every other day, Elizabeth Maynard Schaefer, Ph.D., lay in a hospital room and felt hopeless. In the past ECT had “worked wonders” in treating her deep depressions, the devastating lows part of her bipolar disorder. But lately it’d seemed futile. As she writes in her beautiful, thoughtful, inspiring book Writing Through the Darkness: Easing Your Depression with Paper and Pen, “Desperate, I reached for an empty notebook. My brain was too flat and blurred to put together sentences, so I scribbled a list of words about my situation and slammed the book shut. Immediately, I felt some lifting of the black cloud of depression, so bleak that it scrambled my thoughts and choked my breath.” Over time, Schaefer accepts the ups and downs of her illness. And in addition to receiving ECT and taking medication, she joins a women’s writing group and takes writing workshops and classes. “…I realized that this was potent medicine for me too, helping my emotions to stabilize and my thoughts to clear. As my confidence grew I became certain that I’d keep writing in this personal way. Writing was as healing to me as all my medical treatments—this did matter. Writing helped bring me back. Writing saved my life,” Schaefer writes in Writing Through the Darkness. Since 1998 Schaefer has taught her own class on creative writing for people with mood disorders at Stanford University....
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Books Creativity Depression Disorders General Habits Mental Health and Wellness Self-Help Creative Flow Depressive Episode Journaling Sadness writing Source Type: blogs