Excerpt from Choosing to Live

So, how shall we view suicide? Here’s what we recommend:

1. Get rid of the stigma
2. Adopt a problem-solving point of view.
3. Keep an open mind.

Excerpt from Choosing to Live

You may ask, "Well, shouldn’t suicide and suicidal behavior be stigmatized? Isn’t it sinful, after all? Besides, we surely want to do everything we can to discourage self-destructive behavior."

We want to do all we can to prevent suicide and suicidal behaviors, but it is unlikely that laying guilt trips on depressed people will be helpful. Aren’t depressed people already some of the guiltiest-feeling people around? If guilt were an effective strategy, we would expect depressed people rarely, if ever, to commit suicide. Most depressed people already feel bad about themselves. A threat of moral condemnation is unlikely to have any positive impact on someone who already believes he or she is bad.

Excerpt from Home Without Going Crazy

Shaming signals, quite naturally, bring us to the topic of guilt, which is the internal version of shame. Guilt lock explains one of life’s great mysteries: how you can feel so bad about a given event and still do nothing about it. Guilt lock is the emotional equivalent to gridlock, and it is just as paralyzing.

Excerpt from The Mindful Path through Shyness

That we have emotions is a given. How we react or respond to them is a matter of choice. Victor Frankl offered the important insight that there’s a space between stimulus and response, and if we can pause and bring the full light of our awareness into it that space, we can free ourselves from automatic reactions that are often dysfunctional. Mindfulness practice will allow you to recognize that space and use it to respond to your emotions with clarity, compassion, and skillfulness.

by guest blogger Judith L. London, Ph.D., author of Connecting the Dots

Hope. That is not a word that people often associate with Alzheimer’s. However, for the five million people in the U.S. with this illness, over 10 million unpaid caregivers and the many millions more involved in ancillary care, there are bright spots.