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Hi,

I’m happy to hear that you’re doing well. That’s great.

As to some help for your friend’s sister, I’m still doing some footwork and memory-jogging, and I can give you the following information which has been helpful to me.

My experience with getting help for depression has been a long, exhausting and often very painful struggle. There are no “quick fixes”, that’s for sure. I’ve taken advantage of individual and group counseling, both in the private sector (on a sliding scale based on income) and, early on, through County Mental Health. When I became unable to work, I applied for Social Security Disability. My first application was denied, but I immediately appealed and it was granted. So, if your friend’s sister needs to go this route or obtain some other financial support, tell him that she needn’t get an attorney. I didn’t, but I couldn’t have done anything without my friends helping me with paperwork, etc., because I was just too far down to be functional. The ironic thing about needing this kind of help is that if you could get the help for yourself, you wouldn’t need the help. AND THEN, for a lot of it, there’s no one who can get it for you but you! To add to the irony, this in itself is helpful because “it gets you out of you”.

The footwork I’m going to do is attempt to reach a couple of my former counselors; two women who have had 12-step-based practices and one of whom treated me a couple of times with something called EMDR. This stands for: eye movement something something. It’s very simple, even seems silly, but it was a positive experience for me. Basically, the person who has been trained to do it makes very rapid finger movements in front of and very close to your eyes while guiding you through the therapy. Supposedly, this is likened to the REM (rapid eye movement) of deep, dream-inducing sleep, and makes it possible for the patient/client to move beyond her conscious state and deeper into the subconscious base of the problem. For example, my counselor focused me on further healing concerning my mother’s death when I was nine years old. This treatment, because it cuts through the ever-busy conscious mind, is believed to be a “shortcut” to deep problem-solving. It sure seemed to have worked for me. I have a very close friend who has also been treated periodically with EMDR, a few more times than me. It’s obviously valuable to her and is something I want to do again myself someday. As to whether or not either of the counselors I mentioned above, or others, work with United Fund, I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never heard of it and attempts to “Google it” online just confused me. It seems that it’s something many states have and that it’s perhaps connected to the United Way. I admit I didn’t spend a lot of time pursuing it, so please explain. By the way, if your friend’s sister is on disability, has a low income or little or no insurance, she may qualify for therapy and programs she might otherwise be unable to afford.

If this woman’s depression stems from grief, I want to encourage her to seek help for that too. Unresolved grief is devastating. I’ve done a lot of grief work around my mother’s death and didn’t get it until I was an adult. Fortunately, Beth Waddel is a therapist who has a grief-support blog online, which she created following the tragic death of her husband. That site is: DoNotGrieveAlone.com. Additionally, most counties have grief support groups and services.

Getting involved in a variety of 12-step-based programs helped me in so many ways, I just can’t count them. Much of my depression was “fed” and made more severe by my and my family’s history of alcoholism, as well as my compulsive overeating. So, AA, ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) and OA (Overeaters Anon.) were places in which I learned how to cope on a multitude of levels and because of their insistence on “no cross-talk”, taught me how to “shut up and listen” instead of interrupting with by sharing, out of turn, my own problems or giving my unsolicited advice. After all, if I was so good at problem-solving, what the heck was I doing there? Another plus is that this is anonymous, costs you nothing but your time (or money, unless you want to make a donation), and offers you a wealth of literature.

Even more, the 12-step program emphasis on finding “a power greater than yourself” ultimately brought me back to the God of my childhood. My early “higher power” was nature because I couldn’t think of anyone, including me, who could make a tree. One morning while talking to my sponsor I exclaimed, “I wish you could see the sunrise. It’s just beautiful.” She told me, “God’s trying to get your attention.” I was stunned, and what a loving thought! Later, “Footprints in the Sand” brought me to my knees and to tears because that explained to me how I ever got through all my trauma and pain, and my belief that God had deserted me. As you can see, I also highly recommend praying (an excellent form of positive thinking by the way), talking, reading and listening. Many people are afraid to pray because they think they’ll do it wrong. Nonsense. It’s simply a case of talking to God. Two of my favorite prayers are: “Thank you, God” and “Help Me Lord”. So, it’s easy for me to pray many times a day; sometimes silently, sometimes aloud. As far as His answers to my prayers, I find that He’s very creative, of course. I can still see Him in nature; hear Him in the lyrics to a song; bump into a friend or get a phone call from a loved one when I least expect to do so; intuitively get a solution to a problem I’ve been “stewing about”; an so on. Sometimes I’m very specific about what I want or need for myself or others, but I find that what He wants for me is usually something far better than I could imagine. And, it seems that He’s amazingly wise when it comes to “unanswered prayer”.

If any or all of this information is helpful, since you’ll be reading this response on a computer other than your own, you might copy the text and email it to a friend, requesting that they print it for you. My dinosaur printer is dead and this works for me.

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YOU WROTE:

Hi,
It was good to hear from you, and I really appreciate
your encouragement and I am getting better each day.
What I need your help with is - one of the guys in my
GA group has a sister whoneeds some help with depression and some of the trimmings that go with it. I was wondering if you
would know of any groups that might work with the
United Fund in her area or know who she might call to
get info. I thought of asking my brother, but that
is one of the places I can’t go just yet.
I have to spend most of tomorrow with my attorney, but
I’ll try to run by the health club to use their computer
around one or so.
Hope things are going good for you.