by guest blogger Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D., author of Listening to Depression

If you have been depressed for a long time, you may encounter the obstacle that you forgot what it feels like to be not depressed. Paradoxically, healing from depression may be uncomfortable to you because it may represent new territory for you. In this way, depression becomes like a habit, and may be hard to break. One way to prepare for this obstacle is to remind yourself that you deserve to be free from this habit and that you would rather be afraid than depressed. As in the fear of losing control, even positive changes will bring with them fear and a sense of losing control. As you bring awareness to the threat of changing your life, the choice you would make between comfortable depression and the unknown will be obvious.

excerpt from Is He Depressed or What?

One method to use when you want to communicate your feelings, meanings, and intentions in the most direct and respectful way possible is by using the “Asking for Change” model. The use of I messages in this approach is specific, nonjudgmental, and focused on the speaker.

Excerpt from Biting Anorexia

That’s it. That’s it. My hair is stuck to my cheeks with tears. A whole part of me has finished. A feeling of heady liberation and utter redundancy. Speech night: over. School: over. My speech as head prefect to two thousand parents and girls and teachers: over. To all those who failed to support me, who told me to just give up and drop out of school to save myself the effort, who cared more about asking me to “pull up my socks” than how I was, as I stumbled, bone-thin and gray, down school corridors… this speech was as much for them as it was for anyone else.

Excerpt from Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder

In my work with people with bipolar disorder, I have found it quite common that they know very little about their illness. Often this is because receiving such a diagnosis can be overwhelming, and people frequently don’t know what questions to ask to best help themselves....

On the other hand, perhaps you are a person who accepts the diagnosis, but you don’t have an accurate understanding of what it means. You might be unsure about what bipolar symptoms are, what might be symptoms of a separate, co-occurring disorder such as anxiety, and what is “normal” and completely unrelated to any disorder. This knowledge is extremely important in order for you to learn what you need to do to prevent relapses (the recurrence of symptoms) and to cope with manic, hypomanic, and depressive episodes. To help you understand what form of the illness you have, I have outlined the current categories of the illness below, as defined by the DSM.

Excerpt from Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder

Part 2 answers:

• What Is Depression?
  
  
• What Is Mania?
  
  
• What Is Hypomania?
  
  
• What Is a Mixed Episode?
  
  
• What Is Psychosis?

Excerpt from Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar disorder is a biological illness that causes unusual shifts in your mood, level of energy, and ability to function in different aspects of your life. This illness used to be called manic depression, because it was thought that people with the illness would fluctuate only between episodes of highly elevated, euphoric moods and episodes of major depression. More recently, doctors have realized that the illness is not quite that black and white—that there are many moods that actually occur on a spectrum. Rather than just experiencing episodes of depression or mania, people with bipolar disorder can in fact experience various moods and symptoms that fall in between these two extremes, and this is why the illness was renamed bipolar disorder, implying that symptoms occur on a spectrum between the two poles of mania and depression.

Excerpt from Biting Anorexia: A Firsthand Account of an Internal War by Lucy Howard-Taylor.

My name is Lucy Howard-Taylor. I am eighteen years old. I have starved myself silent. I have slipped through people and out of sight, into black. Rigid at night from fear, curled against another day, I fell: unmoved by the landing.

But this is not the exposé of an individual. This is a chronicle. Of anorexia. Of depression. Of you and me, perhaps. And a stumble back into the light.