LY #49 Late and Dark

How autumn feels.

It's Tuesday morning.  I took most of yesterday, Monday, off.   This is the post I would have written.

Dark, dark, dark.


For the past, hmmm (mumble mumble) years I've been on antidepressants by this time of the fall .  This year I'm making an experiment and trying to go without.  Today was a challenging day as it was overcast all day and then night dropped like a rock before 5:30.

Is the depression biological or a response to self-caused stresses in the day to day?  That's the question I've been asking about my experience this year.  I don't really know because the dark times also coincide with my work schedule as a teacher and the first major depression I experienced in 1978 had a lot to do with my life and lifestyle of the time.  I also know that some of the depression has to do with logical fallacies (what folks in the substance abuse recovery programs call "stinkin' thinkin'").  Just last week in the online interpersonal class we were looking at these illogical thoughts: the fallacies of helplessness, shoulds, perfectionism, and others that focus on the idea that the world and the humans in it should be held to impossible standards and that if life doesn't live up to the standards one sets for it than one should be upset.

Albert Ellis from Institute Website

These ideas, of course, are from the work of Albert Ellis and his Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.  There's a pretty good depression workbook on the Albert Ellis Institue Website. 

Will I be able to get through the winter without sertraline?