Why do depressed people wake up exhausted?


Filed Under Improve your sleep, Media, Overcome Depression | Oct 27, MDT 12:21 pm

 
This little video addresses an important issue — why do people who suffer from depression often wake up feeling exhausted? The answer that this video advances is rather interesting.  It turns out that depressed people dream more intensely and have longer periods of REM sleep then people who aren’t depressed. Expectation fulfillment theory helps explain why the depressed spend more time dreaming.

Dreams, according to this theory, help people act out undischarged emotions. The more emotions we haven’t acted on, the more intensely we dream.  Eventually, if we’re not careful, we end up with a backlog of unresolved emotions that our subconscious simply can’t cope with. We wake up feeling tired because our minds have spent a good chunk of the night trying to resolve issues we didn’t take care of during the day.

That of course, is my spin on the subject. I haven’t read the book yet, but I find the ideas discussed in the video fascinating, and I look forward to learning more about them.

Tales of Mere Existence


Filed Under Media | Oct 13, MDT 10:22 am

 
Sometimes, the people in your life … aren’t going to understand where you’re coming from. If you tell them about your depression, you might get the kind of advice found in this charming little video by Lev Yilmaz.

I can’t emphasize how important it is to get professional help when dealing with mental health issues. And be sure to get a few opinions, since not all doctors are created equally.

Ten Illusion Clips


Filed Under Media, Round-ups | Oct 8, MDT 10:00 am

 
Our mind has a way of playing tricks on us. In this collection of videos, what you see won’t meet up with what really happened. Your eyes will say one thing, but nature will have said something else entirely. Our eyes aren’t the only thing deceiving us — it’s our minds that are at fault. For various reasons, we have evolved a capacity for self-deception, an inability to properly assess the world for what it is. This deception isn’t limited to magic tricks that entertain us. Our feelings, our beliefs, our states of mind are often built on a very flimsy fabric of make-believe, conjecture, and blind faith.

If your mind can convince you that a rubber hand actually belongs to your body, as scientists have done in one the videos below, then it’s reasonable to assume that your emotions themselves can be twisted in ways which separate you from reality. I’m providing you with this list of videos to offer you some food for thought. What illusions are you trapped by, what deceptions have you accepted? We are all prisoners to one set of lies or another — being able to suss out our captors can help us assert at least a limited degree of control over our lives.

1. Ten Optical Illusions in Two Minutes

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Our Time Is Up


Filed Under Media, Personal Stories | Oct 6, MDT 10:06 am

This has to be one of the best short movies I’ve ever seen. It’s the story of Dr. Stern, a therapist who, after learning he’s about to die, decides to provide his clients with a different form of therapy.

In a way, Dr. Stern only started living when he realized he was about to die. Most of us are the same way — we hide from our mortality, and in the process, we lose the courage to face life head on. Hiding is no way to go through life.
 

An Unquiet Mind: Personal Reflections on Manic-Depressive Illness


Filed Under Personal Stories | Jul 15, MDT 12:53 pm

This is a video of Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison discussing her battle with mania and depression.  She gave this speech while on a book tour for her memoir “An Unquiet Mind“.

It’s not often that you hear a psychiatrist talk about their own struggles with a mental illness; often times, as Dr. Jamison attests to in the following video, psychiatrists can diagnose an illness, they can offer drugs for it, but they rarely understand what it feels like to have it.

I remember meeting one psychiatrist who was, to put it bluntly, incapable of empathy. This inability made her more of a menace to her patients than an instrument for their recovery. I do think that doctors who share a deeper understanding of their patients are more likely to be able to offer them real and lasting help.

Dr. Jamison covers a fair amount of territory in this video, from her experiences with lithium to her travels to Saturn.