A Splintered Mind

Does living next to greenery offer benefits to your mental health, or is something else at work? Last month, the headline “Access to nature reduces depression and obesity, finds European study” caught my eye. All I had to do to feel happier and fit in my pants better was surround myself with trees? I felt silly. Here I was using cognitive behavior therapy techniques, exercising, and working on my sleep schedule. Instead, I should have been sitting in a bush all day. After all, that’s what it implied in the news. Look at what they were claiming: Middle-aged Scottish men with homes in deprived but verdant areas were found to have a death rate 16% lower than their more urban counterparts. Pregnant women also received a health boost from a greener environment, recording lower blood pressures and giving birth to larger babies, research in Bradford found. See? The babies know all that verdant abundance matters. Just being near the plants made a difference! Ther...

Healthline Every once in a while, out of the veritable blue, an announcement arrives in my inbox that stands out from the noise. Usually, I receive spam from desperate, out of work infographic makers or eager guest bloggers who pretend to read my site, then think I want their guest post about their experience herding yaks. The other week, a guy asked me if I still posted on my blog these days, offered to guest blog for me to promote his book on depression, then told me that I could really use it. Yeah, not a great pitch. DELETE Then today I discovered that Healthline had featured me in their yearly list of top depression bloggers again. There I was listed with sixteen other fantastic bloggers. I am humbly grateful, and also excited to learn about new bloggers. I hope you will be excited to learn about them, too. There isn’t just one way to write about overcoming depression. We need more voices to fight stigma and reach people who still struggle. Inside this new list of The ...