On one of my therapeutic albeit expensive trips to the bookstore, I was arrested by a book entitled Undoing Depression. What I found unique (in comparison to the many books about depression that I have browsed through) is that the author writes as someone who simultaneously helps other people with their depression, being a psychologist. At the same time, he is dealing with his own problem. He is a fellow sufferer, and yet he does have some practical suggestions that might help. It’s a lot more cheering than various books that describe the author’s depression simply from the point-of-view of suffering (and on occasion, overcoming it.) Mainly, this is because the author has the other perspective of taking care of people who are depressed. And it works better than all those books written by people who may never have been depressed. While they say things that are really no different than what the author of this book says, the fact that they don’t identify as a sufferer of depression makes it, I think, harder to swallow. But maybe that’s just me.

In any case, while reading through this book, I completely identify with what many depressed people go through: latent self-destructiveness, horrific perfectionism that prevents me from ever starting anything, an insane desire to control things I have no control over, an inability to be honest and let my feelings show. I am amazed at how I’ve managed to survive life this long without recognizing the disease process I’ve been experiencing. Some of my old blog entries are completely pathognomonic for depression, and yet I think that deep down inside, I still haven’t accepted the fact that I am experiencing a disease process.

But the whole premise of the book is that medication and psychotherapy can only get you so far. Without changing the way I go about life, I won’t ever snap out of this. And, akin to the mantra of “small, non-threatening things,” it is important that I chunk this transformation into actually accomplishable steps. That way, instead of never getting started because of a vertiginous feeling of being overwhelmed, I can make slow, yet lasting, progress. It’s the whole “a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step” thing.

Let’s see if I can actually pull this off.

Already the self-destructive part of me is laughing.