I got all wrapped up chasing my wife's illness and the disasters that her meds brought on .. and then I bought a new set of golf clubs and take off several times a week .. or I study a foreign language .. read .. we go for a walk .. we work in the garden .. we go to the mall and walk around .. we do whatever we can to get out of the house.

I try and give Nancy as much time out .. out of the house that is .. as I get and we invent new things to do. We just went to town to get feed .. then to the Thrift Store to look through their books and down the street to the ice cream outlet of our local dairy .. long haul truckers know that place.

You can't get depressed unless you give up. Five years ago, I wondered how many tons of manna fell on the slaves fleeing Egypt .. it was the size of a coriander seed so I looked that up and found out how much a bushel weighted .. how many people I thought a bushel would feed .. and then read about four different accounts of how many million people there were and finally how many tons a container ship can carry to feed 4 million people for 40 years .. I was up in the ship loads of food that the Israeli's didn't have to carry around with them, raise, use animals of burden, feed animals of burden in the desert.

Then I "got into" studying Hebrew .. I'm German .. read from right to left .. consonants only .. vowels hung underneath with dots and dashes. You know what Hebrew taught me .. 1. not to give up .. 2. that using my brain and winning every odd twist and turn of Hebrew widened my thought processes so much I could figure out and think so much better I couldn't believe it at a time when according to everybody .. I should be "going stupid."

In schools all over our nation education officials are finding that teaching a foreign language of any type jumps the whole schools SAT score 20 to 25 points .. even under funded poor school districts. So, yes, if you feel picked on and like you are on the loosing side of the bell curve of depression or feeling sorry for your self .. read, study pull your ___ out of the ditch. Our US government surely isn't going to do it for you, know what I mean Vern?

Tell us what you have invented to destroy depression without getting arrested.

Destroy? No. Cope? Definitely. The S/E I got from every antidepressant they prescribed (and there were a lot of them) were so bad that the depression was the "lesser evil". I finally got so angry/mad about the whole situation that the depression began to melt away. Anger can actually become a positive powerful motivator if/when the adrenalin/energy can be focused into/toward something productive. "Fix the problem - not the blame." (and all that...)

http://tinyurl.com/2c642oa

Doc