What are the stories we tell about mental health? This little list seeks to contemplate the questions. This site in continuous improvement. Get an email for updates.

It is not “all in your mind”.

• Youtube: Stanford’s Sapolsky On Depression
• Niall McGee didn’t believe in depression – until cancer medication put him in a suicidal spiral
• Using economic theory to argue the validity of mental illness
• 7 Ways Childhood Adversity Changes Your Brain (take the ACE quiz)

What is depression?

• What is depression? You asked Google – here’s the answer

Research

• Stanford Medicine: Major Depression and Genetics

Feel less alone

• TEDx Talk: Depression, the secret we share
• Recovering from Chronic Depression
• Depressiongrams
• Very Sick
• Not Everyone Feels This Way
• @bfeld’s blog posts on depression
• Depression
• My thoughts are swirling, and I am tired
• Charles Darwin’s Battle with Anxiety
• This is about the time I chose not to die.
• Screw stigma. I’m coming out.
• Depression and the Highly Logical Mind
• I’m Glad You Didn’t Jump, Shannon
• Depression, Success, And Lies Of The Mind
• List of people with major depressive disorder

Visual explainers

• A comic that accurately sums up depression and anxiety — and the uphill battle of living with them
• Just because you can’t see the pain, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
• Adventures in Depression

Rethinking mental illnesses

• “The results of our study found that depressed people were accurate when estimating time whereas non-depressed peoples’ estimations were too high. This may be because mildly-depressed people focus their attention on time and less on external influences, and therefore have clarity of thought – a phenomenon known as ‘depressive realism’.” – Depressed people have a more accurate perception of time
• “The researchers found that the depressed individuals were much better at identifying those instances when they had little control over the outcomes, while the non-depressed students tended to overestimate their degree of influence over the light.” – The New Yorker: Don’t Worry, Be Happy
• “Laboratory experiments indicate that depressed people are better at solving social dilemmas by better analysis of the costs and benefits of the different options that they might take.” – Scientific American: Depression’s Evolutionary Roots
• “A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.” – The Atlantic: Secrets of the Creative Brain
• “Creative ideas probably occur as part of a potentially dangerous mental process, when associations in the brain are flying freely during unconscious mental states — how thoughts must become momentarily disorganized prior to organizing. Such a process is very similar to that which occurs during psychotic states of mania, depression, or schizophrenia.” – Brainpickings: The Relationship Between Creativity and Mental Illness
• “Because gifted children are able to consider the possibilities of how things might be, they tend to be idealists. However, they are simultaneously able to see that the world is falling short of how it might be. Because they are intense, gifted children feel keenly the disappointment and frustration which occurs when ideals are not reached” – Existential Depression in Gifted Children

Impact on Society

• The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders

Tools

• Take NPR’s Adverse Childhood Experiences quiz
• 11 Things Those Who Love A Person With Mental Illness Should Know
• Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS)
• How a spreadsheet helped me tackle my depression

Books

• Research

  • The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
  • Touched with Fire: Manic-depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament
  • My Age of Anxiety: the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition

• Memoirs

  • Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
  • Furiously Happy
  • Darkness Visible
  • Beyond Blue
  • Shoot the Damned Dog

• Books that may help shift thinking

  • In Praise of Melancholy
  • The Power of Habit
  • The Power of Full Engagement
  • The Art of Happiness
  • The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions
  • Molecules of Emotions

• Improvement strategies

  • The Ultramind Solution
  • Search Inside Yourself
  • The Mood Cure

Communities

• Quora
• Devpressed
• Developers and Depression: a weekly newsletter

Other resources

• prompt: “Let’s start a conversation about mental health in tech”
• Greg Baugues
• Startup depression