Depression Is A Choice

Thought for the Week
Some personal reflections from the author of Depression is a Choice, A. B. Curtiss

Click on any of the dates for the full article.

September 29, 2007 - I had a badly twisted knee that kept me off my feet for more than a week, during which time I got the flu. Multi-tasking two illnesses at once
April 29, 2007 - We need to avoid hidden “forks in the road” to depression.
March 20, 2007 - Whenever you write something, or do anything creatively and “put it out there” you are forever after open to some type of criticism.
August 28, 2006 - People who feel good seldom think about how they are feeling. Only people who think about how they are feeling all the time feel bad.
October 10 2006 - I was going to watch television the other night while doing some packing. As I looked over the TV guide I found nothing but movies or shows concerned mainly ...
July 1, 2005 - Too many of us, without realizing what we are doing, choose our pain over our life. We might not see it ourselves (although others might be aware of it). This is not necessary. We simply do it because we are not aware that we are doing it.
July 10, 2005 - Stop watching your own depression. Depression needs your attention upon it to continue. Remember, a human being has only one attention. To get out of depression you can learn to withdraw your attention from your depression.
May 07, 2005 -All suffering, depression included, should be understood in terms of what we know about utilizing healthy brain functions, not just
January 17, 2004 - When we are in high spirits is it all right to think about what we are feeling. However, since the mind is essentially
January 25, 2004 - The mind is complex. So in trying to command it, we need to get very tricky sometimes. A depressed person asked me to give them assurance that if they practiced Directed Thinking...
March 20, 2004 - I was doing a workshop with fellow therapists recently and several of them complained wistfully that they didn't seem to feel the same zest
May 14, 2004 - I think it is true for any thinking person that confidence comes and goes. Everyone has failures and regrets that creep into thinking.
May 30, 2004 - The Transition Exercise - Even when we have formed a good neuronal pathway that triggers up to remind us that we can use simple exercises to immediately
July 4, 2004 - We are a herd animal and it is basic survival to belong, to be accepted by others. If we don’t feel we belong
March 5, 2003 - When I started this section I intended to write every week. Then my daughter had triplet girls and I was the main helper. And now I need to finish my next book. So it may be that I won’t
April 13, 2003 - I received a letter recently from someone who offered me another great exercise. So here it is and the credit goes to John Winston Bush....
April 26, 2003 - A short while ago I received the following letter with two great quotes that deserve some contemplation....
May 01, 2003 - A woman wrote online that she lived in fear as a child but that her three siblings did not. She said that she was the only one to suffer....
May 08, 2003 - Any past traumatic event of a person's life must be re-experienced through the
use of imagination....
May 16, 2003 - A human being is not forced to function from emotion and instinct as other animals in nature. A human being ...
May 28, 2003 - This was written more than 40 years ago. "And it seems to be perfectly in the cards that there will be, within the next generation or so, a "pharmacological method" of making...
August 02, 2003 - This I got this email from a long-time email correspondent who is using my book to maintain their equanimity in the face of depression: "I am not doing ...
August 09, 2003 - Fears are terrifying when they are free-floating in our minds. They torture us with their pressures upon us and lead us into anxiety...
November 11, 2003 - We all have our fears and we all must move on with our day despite our fears. There is no one who can make life save for us...
November 20, 2003 - Have you ever considered that there is no reason to pay attention to, much less believe what your brain is telling you...
January 04, 2002 - It’s been almost four months now, and the news programs are still interviewing people whose lives have been changed by the World Trade ...
January 11, 2002 - The mind is a great computer. If we use it wisely we can avoid a lot of stress and add to our efficiency in almost any area of our life. Right...
January 18, 2002 - I feel very superior to the road rager and the drug abuser and wife beater. Why can’t they just control themselves I think, smugly knowing I...
January 25, 2002 - Decisions to avoid temptation are more efficient the further distance from temptation that they can be made. For instance ...
February 2, 2002 - We have to learn to be very clever accountants, emotionally speaking. We should never, for instance, carry the failures of today, however
February 9, 2002 - Any decision made out of fear will be bound to be inappropriate in some way. Whatever decision we make should be made out of courage ...
February 16, 2002 - As I struggled with some heavy guilt due to some over-eating which was very distressing this morning I happened upon the thought "This is the Hundredth Day." ...
February 22, 2002 - When all else fails to get you out of the downs, just get up out of bed and start the day ANYWAY. I have found that I can always get rid of...
March 1, 2002 - One Saturday afternoon, when I was in college, I walked down the hallway from my room and passed a room where two of the other girls were studying ...
March 8, 2002 - I still have a natural, unfortunate tendency to grade people. Maybe it's part of my caveman genetics for "survival of the herd." Is this person...
March 15, 2002 - The advice for all of us who feel a little "down" since the World Trade Center disaster is to stop watching news shows and television reports of violence, ...
March 22, 2002 - A Beautiful Mind was a beautiful movie. But insidious in a way. The truth is that John Nash never took any drugs after 1971. And it was only after ...
March 29, 2002 - We don't realize how modern life is immersing us in darker and darker images of humanity: starving and drug-addicted children, terrorism, ...
April 9, 2002 - I bought an old framed letter/testimonial in an antique shop about fifteen years ago. I paid $25 for it and have never regretted it ...
April 16, 2002 - It’s not how many times you fall. It’s how many times you get up. It’s not how many times you get depressed it’s how ...
April 23, 2002 - We are getting to be an unforgiving culture because we are not very self-questioning. We can very well see that there is a bell curve ...
April 30, 2002 - I have been asked the question "How do you let people know that they have these terrible faults without hurting ..
May 7, 2002 - How do you change someone’s behavior. You can’t do it directly. You can try to negotiate a change by offering something in return ...
May 14, 2002 - Choose your work carefully because what you get from it is not as important as what you become by doing it.
May 21, 2002 - If we would be more accurate in describing things we would be able to make better decisions about them. If we called ....
May 28, 2002 - We must live the life we have, not the life we would rather have. The to-be-improved life is always in the future. We can’t live ...
June 4, 2002 - The problem with depression is that we have a stronger relationship to our feelings than to the objective reality of our...
June 11, 2002 - Psychological exercises are quite magical because only after we do them do we fully understand what the result...
June 18, 2002 - I do think there is such a thing as right conduct and that it takes precedence over depression in an educated mind. The trick is...
June 25, 2002 - You are not likely to take responsibility for something if you feel helpless to do anything about it...
July 2, 2002 - For a a real sneaky exercise to see how you view yourself at the moment try this. Write your name backwards and then ...
July 9, 2002 - Most of our communication with our mind is one way–our mind telling us what to think, what to do, what to feel. We ...
July 16, 2002 - I received a letter recently concerning an article that appeared in the Chicago Tribune about my book Depression is a Choice ...
August 30, 2001 - Just because we don't direct our thinking to alter our behavior and our feelings doesn't mean we don't ...
September 7, 2001 - The Age of Clinical Depression. How is it that such destructive and expensive methods as drugs and electroshock ...
September 14, 2001 - We Can Change Our Own Brain Chemistry. Daniel X. Freedman, a psychiatrist at the University of California...
September 21, 2001 - Don’t be fooled and intimidated by the sound byte cliché that "depression is biochemically based," as if ...
September 28, 2001 - The idea is just to keep moving. I kept saying that to myself over and over this morning. I was downhearted ...
October 5, 2001 - Sometimes when I wake up depressed, I imagine there are four other people depressed as well, somewhere out there in the world. This thought occurred to me one morning when I woke...
October 12 , 2001 - Happiness is really a discipline. Some people say that we have to love ourselves first before we can do anything worthwhile or feel...
October 19 , 2001 - We have to take our lumps. The only way we can see what not to do is to cross some kind of invisible line where we suddenly get ...
October 26, 2001 - What if I did not have the capacity to be depressed, ever. About anything. Suppose I took everything with a calm view, and nothing ...
November 2, 2001 - Last week I was so struck by the promise of the word, anyway. That no matter how depressed I was that I could get on with my life ...
November 9, 2001 - A young woman said to me the other day that she was hostess at small party and had a much better time than the last party she ...
November 16, 2001 - Thanksgiving will soon be here. We will be gathering together with family members that we may not see too often. We may have ...
November 23, 2001 - One of my quite new understandings is that I have to learn to make myself more accessible to the essential message that is being revealed ...
November 30, 2001 - Once a population believes that self-responsibility is dangerous, those who wish to wield power over them don't have to divest...
December 7, 2001 - There is a big problem with self-help books and, indeed, any information which comes to us as an answer to a question that we have never...
December 14, 2001 - When we consider that the brain is essentially a problem solving mechanism we can see how, when left to its own devices, our mind...
December 21, 2001 - Christmas is a lonely time for some of us. All the more so because we tend to think of Christmas as a time when nobody should
December 28, 2001 - Any plan of action is better than no plan. Just having a plan is sometimes half the job right there. Isn’t that what Benjamin Franklin