Call me Moby Jane-- I beat depression

Hello

This is my first blog so I'll tell you something about myself and my ideas of getting started in a (for me)new technology that is a little scary. What to name my blog was, of course, my first task. Then, how to let you know what is the purpose of my blog and some hint of what I'm about. So the first two posts are kind of a hesitant introduction to me and my work. But you'll get the idea, I think, of who I am.

First of all, I have beat depression. I did beat depression. I do beat depression every day of my life. Showing others how to beat depression is my mission in life. I have a website on depression called www.depressionisachoice.com. Or, should I spell it out--depression is a choice.com. I have written two books on how to beat depression which have taught thousands of people how to do what I did--beat depression.

Some say, quite wrongly, that I can beat depression only because I'm a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist. Being a therapist doesn't mean you can automatically beat depression. Therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists suffer as much or more depression than their patients.

The only thing that beats depression is knowledge of how your brain works and practice in managing it. Know how your brain works, understand how you get from one thought to another (neurologically speaking) and practice the exercises that let you walk away from the agony going on in the emotional part of your brain (the subcortex), while you are actively living in the thinking part of your brain (the neocortex.) It is not an easy thing to do at first, but anybody can learn how to do it, if they want to.

I'm not here to tell you depression is "all in your head." If you are suffering from depression you know where it is. It has taken over your whole self, your whole world, in fact. I think I can help you extricate your self from your depression (divide and conquer they always say) and help you move into a different world more to your liking.

So bear with me, as blogging is not like giving seminars, or counseling, or anything else that I am used to. I am a beginner at blogging. So I will hesitantly move into a world totally unfamiliar to me and get my "sea legs" so to speak before I start getting serious about my mission--showing you how to beat depression. If you are in a hurry for a lot of information about depression, you can go to my website: www.depressionisachoice.com. There is quite a bit there to get you started.

So. To begin my blogging experience. This is my first post to my first blog. Do people have more than one blog? I didn't have the slightest idea what to name my blog that would describe what I was about, or should I not even try to describe what I'm about and just get down to it. So the name was my first task, and a daunting one. However, I am nothing if not tenacious, and I'm also a risk taker, so here goes.

Risk taker means I am a person who swims every day in my unheated pool (which I also clean so that makes me a pool cleaner as well as a risk taker) which can get down to 50 degrees. It is always terrifying to jump in during the months of Nov through Feb but I risk it. I am convinced that my twenty-two minute, 20 lap swim (a lap is back and forth), followed by a hot bath (which I draw ten minutes before my swim with no cold water added) and then doing 15 minutes of Yoga has cured my knees of years of arthritis and my back of years of lower back pain.

I thought I would name my blog something exciting and earth shattering and impress all my nearest and dearest. But all those names were taken already. So then I thought I would name it after a character in my favorite book, The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmund Dantes, but he's not a she. Didn't feel right. So on to my second favorite book, Moby Dick. Also a he. Then the old neurons started to crank up, the brain works by learned association, right? Dick and Jane. Moby Jane. Eureka! I know it can't be that good a name because it hadn't been taken yet. But I love the name because it's mine.

In addition to being a psychotherapist, and a beginner blogger, I am a wife, mother, grandmother, cat lover, big dog lover, an author of 12 books. My board-certification in cognitive behavioral therapy was issued by the National Board of Cognitive Behavioral Therapists. I'm also a licensed psychotherapist (Marriage Family Therapist) in the State of California, a certified hypnotist, a certified massage technician, and I also have a current card that says Diplomate of the Board - Psychotherapy. Although I worked for, qualified for, and feel I deserve this title, I'm still not sure what diplomate means. Also I never knew how to pronounce it. Was it diplomatt or diplomate. And, since I didn't know how to pronounce it, I never got the chance to brag about it to anybody in person, so I am taking the opportunity of bragging about it here

The main reason for doing this blog is that my webmaster neighbor (who is an honest-to-goodness rocket scientist, now retired from chasing from one rocket launch to another) no longer has the time or interest to keep current my two websites www.abcurtiss.com and www.depressionisachoice . So people who know about these things told me if I had a blog I could do it myself. So here goes.

One of the things I thought about putting on my blog was some of the hundreds of letters I get from no-longer-depressed people who have read my two books DEPRESSION IS A CHOICE pubished by Hyperion and BRAINSWITCH OUT OF DEPRESSION. I was one of those who went into the psychology field to help myself after I was diagnosed more than 25 years ago (along with my father and brother) with manic depression (they call it bipolar now). It will take me a little while to get these letters organized and on the blog. But I'm no longer bipolar, or manic depressive, and I am horrified at the pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists (I went to them for 20 years and they couldn't tell me how to stop the pain except to take pills) who are forcing their drugs and learned helplessness on younger and younger people. And more and more research is emerging that says a full 70% of people are not helped by taking anti-depressants. And some of the research that says anti-depressants are helpful is necessarily all on the up and up.

For instance, a while ago an article came out saying anti depressants were okay for teenagers after there had been a flurry of suicides. Oh, really? If you investigated the source of the article, it was the NIH, National Institute of Health. Okay, that seems credible, until you check deeper and find the study was funded at NIH by the Johnson Family. Wonderful of the Johnson family to contribute to society, right? That's the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson. This $ milllion dollar contribution will come back to the Johnson Family 100 fold in terms of the greater amount of pills they can now peddle thanks to the article. You can already see I'm on a mission to get people out of depression without years of therapy and drugs--by learning how their brain works so they can control where their brain takes them instead of just riding along, willy nilly, wherever the old habitual neural patterns want to take them.

Well, I think this is enough for my first post. I should start packing for my trip to NYC where I will be signing my book THE LITTLE CHAPEL THAT STOOD (a children's book about 9/11) at St. Paul's Chapel across from Ground Zero, and the WTC Tribute Center (organized by the 9-11 families). I leave at 9:30 this evening, fly all night, and will be there to sign books in the morning. Oh, maybe I can also post an article about the book. I think I can do that on my blog.

This is Thanksgiving Day. My husband and I are having a quiet celebration with our next-door neighbors (he's a nuclear physicist who came from Russia in 1986 and became an American citizen--we went to the impressive naturalization ceremony). My husband doesn't hear so well anymore and the huge dinner parties my children are hosting nearby are so large (they try to limit it to 40 people and set the tables up outside, luckily this is a warm, beautiful day to do it) or far away (2 hour drive) since I am leaving tonight.

My husband says he's not surprised that 2 hours before we must go out for Thanksgiving Dinner I decided to start a blog that I have been talking about doing for 3 years. His joke is "Oh, people are coming over for dinner tonight? Which room are you painting.?" So although I am no longer depressed, I still have that old manic depressive personality where I seem to have more energy than most. Actually, manic depression is great when you learn how to eliminate the lunatic fringes of it, you are left with a very interesting way to live. Love, Moby Jane