Perspective: The Bigger Picture.
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This wiki is intended as a 'sister' wiki to Depression Awareness
Originally it was to based on a set of questions i came up with based on my research. I sent them to an old aqauintance of mine, a counsellor who i felt sure would help me. Her reply came in the mail a few days later than she was unable to answer theese questions for me.
Therefore i have drawn my sources from some inspiring books as well as from my own research.
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The world of the depressive is very small. They seek to cocoon themselves and cut themselves off from painful experiences and people.
It still remains virtually incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.
I spend a lot of time studying and researching what i like to call 'People therapy' rather than 'Textbook therapy'.
Understanding people is all about seeing the bigger picture.

Paradigm
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Its a way of viewing something. Time can be viewed as linear construct that can be measured accurately by digital watches. Or it can be viewed as as a cyclical recurring phenomena (the seasons) Or it can be viewed as one of the four building blocks of the everything we call the universe: matter, energy, space..and time..
It just depends upon what paradigm you use.

People paradigms are necessary because people are just so damn complicated.


Defining what constitutes a personality disorder is clinically very useful but unfortunately quite impossible. No one has an entirely 'normal' personality.
The true test of a person whose personality is disordered are:
Distress This implies that the person carries more than their fair share of pain.
Dysfunction Implies that they are unable to get on in life, to mature, and to accomplish the usual goals of life.

Its all a matter of degree.

Plato did his writing a long, long time ago now, yet he summed up in three words what the mind does: it thinks, it feels, it wants.
(Its also where we get the term 'Platonic' from, so he must have had a lousy sex life...)
Reason (Cognition)
Passion (Emotion)
Appetite (Wanting or Conation)

Around a hundred years ago, doctors made a very brave step. Up until then it had never(probably never) occured to anyone that neurosis and madness were anything to with medicine until Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud.

(''Freud was incidentally quite a 'wackjob' He put forward the plausible, and probably correct theory that children that were sexually abused grew up to have mental problems in later life. There was an outcry that Freud was talking about *gasp* Child sex - total taboo subject. So the bastard turned it around and said that children WANTED to be sexually abused, and thus gave an excuse for paedophiles to use - 'She was asking for it'.The oedipus and electra complex has absolutely no evidential support, he developed it whilst studying an 'abnormal' selection of people (Rich women with mental problems), and it's theoretically unscientific as the explanation 'You repressed it!' leaves it unable to be proved wrong").

Anyway Plato was back in fashion!