I remember wondering what exactly was it that I was feeling and why. An overcast day wasn’t just overcast anymore, it felt like an external manifestation of what was going on inside of me. A nagging feeling that something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t nail down what it was that was wrong, just that a storm was coming and it was inside of me.

Like a lot of people I wanted things to be different than they were. One of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism states that life is suffering unsatisfactory. I was feeling that and then some.

There were a few hints over the years. Moments of awkward self awareness, self doubt, feeling uncomfortable not just in certain situations, but in my own skin. Stress made it worse but in the ebb and flow of life it was easy to dismiss it as a reaction to life’s rough spots. Dismissing it was preferable to acknowledging it and dealing with it head-on . . . or so I thought.

The clouds grew thicker during my first marriage. We had gone through a lot in a short time - death of a grandparent, marriage, moving, new jobs & grad school, financial problems and then childbirth. Life seemed to be picking up steam.

The next several years brought a flood, the destruction of my art portfolio and hence my career, a lawsuit, job loss, birth of another child, divorce, parental alienation & loss of my daughter, suicide of a good friend, death of my best friend from cancer, both parents having Alzheimer’s and being moved to a nursing home and death of my mother. In the midst of trying to deal with this, I found the low dose tranquilizer I’d been assured was safe, was actually causing me to go through withdrawals when I tried to taper off. I felt overwhelmed by loss and on the edge of losing control of my life. What could I do?

My wife encouraged me to do what I needed to do to get help. We’d come close to divorce before and this was straining things.

The psychology department at the University of Kansas was running a program they called Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes or TLC for depression. I’d read about it in the Lawrence Journal World and I applied. They screened me and determined that I’d be a good candidate which I took to mean that I wasn’t ‘too crazy’ for their help. My interviewer left the room to put me in the rotation of one of the three groups they were starting. The groups consisted of two who would actually go through the therapy program and a third one that was the ‘control’ group and who would not get therapy. Guess which one I got? Yeah, life still had a head of steam. I’d be in the control group until the next go round when I’d be eligible for the program. Now if I could only hang on for three months.

The gist of the program is based on the almost unheard of cases of depression in more primitive or agricultural societies. When people get up with the sunrise and go to sleep when it goes down, spend time outside, live in families and villiages where there’s group support, eat a healthy diet, etc. maybe these things would help people with depression change their lifestyles and thus eliminate or at least manage & lessen their blues.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 7:32 pm and is filed under therapeutic lifestyle changes T.L.C..