A few people lately have reminded me of the Chinese parable “The Old Man and His Horse.” You’ve probably heard it. I publish it here not to say that all your problems are actually blessings. But what can often seem like a misfortune can turn into a very good thing. I’ve seen this happen lately and it gives me hope that there’s more lemonade ahead for me.

The Old Man and his Horse (a.k.a. Sai Weng Shi Ma)

Once there was an old man who lived in a tiny village. Although poor, he was envied by all, for he owned a beautiful white horse. Even the king coveted his treasure. A horse like this had never been seen before — such was its splendor, its majesty, its strength.

People offered fabulous prices for the steed, but the old man always refused. “This horse is not a horse to me,” he would tell them. “It is a person. How could you sell a person? He is a friend, not a possession. How could you sell a friend.” The man was poor and the temptation was great. But he never sold the horse.

Psychologist and mental health blogger Elisha Goldstein quotes a favorite author of mine, Don Miguel Ruiz, in his post “4 Steps to Getting Free from Limiting Beliefs”: “You see everything is about belief, whatever we believe rules our existence, rules our life.”

I’ve been using Ruiz’s book, “The Four Agreements,” to help me process the beliefs of others, especially toward me (i.e. “people who struggle from depression are lazy”). But Elisha is right when he explains that the beliefs we hold about ourselves are just as disabling and disempowering as the ones other folks hold about us.

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing New York Times bestselling author Eric Marcus on the important topic of suicide. Eric is the author of several books, including “Is It A Choice?, Making Gay History,” and “Together Forever.” He is also co-author of “Breaking the Surface,” the #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis. For more information, please visit: www.ericmarcus.com and www.whysuicidebook.com.

Question: Why did you write “Why Suicide?”

Eric: When I started work on the original edition of “Why Suicide?” in 1987, I knew that I wanted to write the kind of book that I wish had been available to my mother when my father killed himself in 1970 so she would have known what to say a traumatized twelve-year-old boy. I also wanted to write the kind of book that would have been useful to me when I was 21 and just beginning to talk with a therapist about my dad’s suicide.

I had so many questions and didn’t have a lot of answers. And I wanted to write the kind of book I could hand to my grandmother, who struggled for the rest of her life after my dad’s death with guilt and shame over his suicide. I also assumed that many people searching for answers about suicide have a short attention span like I do and preferred concise answers to their questions, which is why I wrote the book in a question and answer format and kept it short.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
            – George Santayana

I believe that we humans spend a lot of time repeating our past — the mistakes, the patterns of behavior, the way we communicate with others. We’re creatures of habit and habits are hard to break. We believe, “Hey, this has worked for me in the past, so why not keep doing it?”

Except that sometimes, we’re deluding ourselves. We think something has worked for us in the past, when in fact, it hasn’t at all. We believe our style of communication is effective with our partner, when all the while our partner sits there and wonders what the hell it is we’re thinking.

History can be a great teacher and source of wisdom. This is true of history in the traditional sense — wars, a nation’s independence, how empires rise and tumble into time. But the kind of history I’m talking about is your own personal history. You know your history better than any other person alive today. You are the world’s foremost expert in the subject of You. So while a psychologist or therapist can help guide you to better understand You, at the end of the day, it’s still going to fall to one person to make a change — You.

Researchers remain fascinated by the relationship between money and happiness. Perhaps it’s because of the observation that money alone doesn’t appear to “buy” happiness, unless you give it away or spend it for experiences more than for material things.

A new study out last week (Quoidbach et al., 2010) suggests that money’s effects on our well being and happiness may be even more subtle than previously realized. Simply seeing a picture of money — which appears to prime our brains, increasing the concept of money at a level below awareness — seems to impede our ability to enjoy life’s little pleasures.

How did the researchers arrive at such a stunning conclusion?

By far my most popular post is the gallery, “12 Depression Busters.” But those suggestions were actually a response to Beyond Blue reader Peg’s query on how to stop smoking. They absolutely do help a person fight depression and the ongoing war against negative thoughts; however they were designed as techniques to use when getting pulled into addictive behaviors.

The last month or so I have used every single one of these. And I’m happy to report that I actually feel a lot freer from insidious, destructive behavior than I did several weeks ago. Here they are: 12 Addiction Zappers. They work!

1. Get Some Buddies

It works for Girl Scouts, depressives, and addicts of all kinds. I remember having to wake up my buddy to go pee in the middle of the night at Girl Scout camp. That was right before she rolled off her cot, out of the tent and down the hill, almost into the creek.

Our job as buddies is to help each other not roll out of the tent and into the stream, and to keep each other safe during midnight bathroom runs. My buddies are the six numbers programmed into my cell phone, the voices that remind me sometimes as many as five times a day: “It will get better.”

I know that the fastest way to despair is by comparing one’s insides with another’s outsides, and that Max Ehrmann, the author of the classic poem “Desiderata,” was absolutely correct when he said that if you compare yourself with others you become either vain or bitter.

Or, as Helen Keller put it: “Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.”

But Helen and Max don’t keep me from going to the land of comparisons and envy. Before long, I’m salivating over someone else’s book contract, or blog traffic numbers, or “Today Show” appearance. Then I have to pull out my set of directions — these 8 techniques — that will lead me out of the continent of jealousy and home, to self-acceptance.

In his book “What Happy People Know,” Dan Baker argues that you can’t be in a state of appreciation and fear, or anxiety, at the same time.

“During active appreciation,” Baker writes, “the threatening messages from your amygdala [fear center of the brain] and the anxious instincts of your brainstem are cut off, suddenly and surely, from access to your brain’s neocortex, where they can fester, replicate themselves, and turn your stream of thoughts into a cold river of dread. It is a fact of neurology that the brain cannot be in a state of appreciation and a state of fear at the same time. The two states may alternate, but are mutually exclusive.”

Other studies have also highlighted how gratitude can buffer you from the blues, promote optimism, and, in general, make you feel peachy.

However, I do hereby swear that it is possible to be grateful and depressed.

Simultaneously.

“Our country is over-medicated.”

I get that a lot, usually right after I tell someone that I write a mental health blog. Not as a hobby. As my job.

Part of me agrees, the part that doesn’t want to get into a long and frustrating conversation, where I explain that it’s really not that simple… That the issue is fairly nuanced and complex.

Are some people overmedicated in this country? Yes. Absolutely. I devote a few chapters of my book, Beyond Blue, to describing the dangerous phase in my recovery led by a doctor whom I call “Pharma King.” I was taking something like 16 pills a day, enough to drop my head into my cereal bowl every morning for about three months. And I wasn’t at all uncomfortable with how the nurses at the outpatient psych program I attended jumped to an increase in medication every time a patient voiced a complaint or raised an issue.

I wanted to scream out, “For crying out loud, let the woman try to sort through this a tad before we up her prescription.”

I was asked by Diana Keough of ShareWIK.com to write about the topic of living with bipolar without letting my mood disorder define me. You can get to her blog post by clicking here.

“A label is a mask life wears,” writes Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., one of the first pioneers in the mind, body, health field. “Labeling sets up an expectation of life that is often so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are. . . . In my experience, a diagnosis is an opinion and not a prediction. What would it be like if more people allowed for the presence of the unknown, and accepted the words of their medical experts in the same way?  The diagnosis is cancer. What that will mean remains to be seen.”

I used to think that meant that I shouldn’t call myself bipolar, that I should stay away from hospital psychiatric programs, therapists, and head doctors; that I shouldn’t take antidepressants, mood stabilizers, or any kind of sedative; and that I should rely on nothing but my inner strength to carry me forward through the hard days.

Having tried that, and failed (really, really failed), I have come to a new understanding of that quote.

In his newest book, “After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters,” Anglican bishop and biblical scholar N. T. Wright advises his readers not to cheat on their tax returns. Because that deceitful act may very well carve a neural pathway inside the brain that makes it easier to cheat on other things or people.

Scary thought.

But the reverse is also true: that the decision to grin and bear a conversation with a boring neighbor on the train–to try ever so painfully to remain patient–also leaves a pathway in the brain that facilitates patience the next time you are confronted with an obnoxious, the-armrest-is-mine train mate.

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Douglas Eby,
M.A./Psychology, who is a writer and researcher on the psychology of creative
expression, high ability and personal growth. He is creator of the Talent
Development Resources series of sites (including HighlySensitive.org)
at http://talentdevelop.com. I know many of you are “highly sensitive” and enjoy articles on that topic, so I am excited to pique his highly-sensitive brain today!