Depression-Proofing Your Home

This is a chopped version of an article I just uploaded on mcmanweb. It's amazing I've never written on this before. Better late than never ...

Let’s start with the proposition that people with mood disorders are extremely sensitive to their environments. You may be stuck where you are, but your entire well-being is riding on making the best of what you’ve got.

Atmosphere

Essential adjectives are vital: Cheery, bright, relaxing, calm. Your home is a key player in setting the right mood. If what comes to mind, instead, is, say, depressing, you are on the wrong adjective.

There is a direct connection between light and mood. If vast quantities of natural sunlight aren’t streaming into your place, then you need to buy stock in a lamp company and make yourself rich by purchasing their entire inventory. You may also want to consider a light box, normally used to treat seasonal affective disorder.

Meanwhile, fresh air (charged with negative ions) is linked to good health, both physical and mental. Cracking open a window is the obvious solution, but if you are you living in a sealed enclosure and inhaling central heating or air conditioning (charged with positive ions), you may need to consider investing in an ionizer.

You also need to be extremely mindful of breathing in anything toxic, from mold proliferating behind the wallboard to chemicals in the carpet to germs the central air-conditioning spits out.

The Bedroom

The basics: A comfortable bed that supports your back, good lighting (for bedtime winding down and for waking up), and as close as possible to absolute quiet.

The quiet aspect deserves special consideration. Many of us have hair-trigger stress responses that can be set off by loud noises. A lot of us also have great difficulty tuning out background noise (such as air-conditioning). These should not be regarded as inconveniences we have to get used to.

Family members: You will be doing both yourself and your entire family a favor by bending over backwards to accommodate the needs of your affected son or daughter (or other family member). If he or she sleeps peacefully, you all sleep peacefully. And daytime will be much easier on all of you, as well. Whatever it takes.

Your Own Special Room

Having your own hideaway is essential, whether in catching your breath or catching up. This is your special piece of the world. It needs to reflect you in all your quirky glory, from the First Folio Shakespeare in the bookcase to the neon Budweiser sign in the window.

However you choose to set up the room, it is giving You permission to be You, whether smoking cigars or meditating, building model airplanes or running a business.

The Kitchen

You are what you eat, but living with a mood disorder means you are often going to be too depressed to want to cook. Therefore, it’s vital to be well-stocked on healthy pre-prepared slap-together stuff. Bags of mixed greens, stir-fry, you get the picture.

The Bathroom

Think of all the stuff that goes on in this room besides the usual - uh - stuff. From looking in the mirror to all the rest of it, you are on display. The other you is evaluating, assessing, taking stock. Don’t like what you see? It’s going to be a rough day.

Likewise, there you are, in your inner sanctum, alone with your thoughts. Is the atmosphere conducive to a meditative experience, a breather, a pleasant time-out? Or is your decompression chamber a depression chamber?

Of all the rooms in the house, the bathroom is the one room where you need to walk out of it feeling much better than you went in. If this isn’t happening, you need to closely evaluate the situation - and treat it as a high priority.

Home Maintenance

Things can easily run away from us, even when we are not depressed. I know for a fact that if I go to bed with two dirty plates in the sink, I will wake up to a family of dirty little saucers. As for clothes on the floor, it’s like tumbleweed piling up against a fence. My theory on rubber bands is they morph into power cables for electronic devices that don’t exist. All my cables, incidentally, defy the law of entropy by self-organizing into gordian knots.

By now, you recognize that the front line in the battle against depression is played out literally on the home front, in our own homes. Make yourself at home and live well ...      

Coming Home

Recovery is a journey. Healing is coming home. A lot of what I write here has been about my sense of coming home after leaving New Jersey more than three years ago and settling here in rural southern CA. Today, my good friend George from New Jersey called and offered me a different perspective.

You know, he said, this is the best you’ve sounded since you first moved - to New Jersey.

I thought I had heard wrong. He caught the silence from my end and clued me in.

You and “Sophy” had just got married, he reminded me. The two of you were optimistic, were looking ahead. Our DBSA support group that would meet in Princeton Hospital every Tuesday night had just started up ...

Yes, I remembered. In the weeks and months ahead, a very unusual collection of people walked through the door, sniffed out the vibes, and settled in. There was John “One”, a New York City wiseguy type, dealing with some business setbacks, with a thing for setting land speed records in his silver Porsche on the Jersey Turnpike, particularly in winter with the top down.

There was his polar opposite, John “Two,” a quiet guy with a Princeton doctorate in something that had to do with the science of water, out of work, trying to hold his family together.

There was “Flora,” a lawyer with an Ivy League pedigree and competitive marathoner (and nicotine addict, of all things), suspended from seminary, unemployed and eating through her savings with the clock slowly winding down.

There was Kevin, an earnest and very personable young Jehovah’s Witness with the wisdom of one many years older, picking up the pieces from a disastrous manic episode.

There was Chris, another polar opposite, a young and socially clueless math and computer geek, living with his mom, a prime candidate for being the first voted off the island, who nonetheless grew on you.

There was Christine, with a science degree, jumping from temp gig to temp gig, many times a bridesmaid, never a bride.

Plus a whole supporting cast of characters. Plus me and Sophy. Plus George.

We all had our issues to deal with, demons to wrestle, beasts to confront. All our lives were either on hold or at best in a tentative state of forward movement. The past was something we’d just escaped from, the present probationary, the future uncertain. Somehow, we found each other. Out from the cold of winter New Jersey evenings into the warmth of each other’s company.

We shared our stories. We laughed. We cried. We left feeling way better than when we arrived. Then we’d reconvene ten minutes later at one of the local coffee shops or diners. We’d keep in contact through the week. Fast friendships developed. A romance.

It was a special group of people, George reminded me.

Yes, it was. Yes, it was. I recalled that line from the musical, Camelot. “One brief shining moment,” I related to George, impossible to replicate. In some crazy unpredictable way, we gelled and we pulled in others.  

But things never stay the same. John One and Christine got married and moved to the Washington DC area to pursue a new business opportunity. John Two had a third child and found employment commensurate with his education and experience. Flora went back to seminary, got her degree, found a husband on eHarmony, moved to the Virginia countryside, and is working as a government lawyer. Chris moved out from his mom’s, and found his own place down the road.

As for me, in the space of six weeks, I had a book published followed by a precipitous marriage break-up. Ten days later, I boarded a train out of Princeton Junction. The next day, I strapped myself into the seat of a Southwest flight headed one way to San Diego.

George is still wrestling with his demons, but his struggle has resulted in a series of profound healings. George recently reached out to me, and we’ve reestablished our friendship, with regular phone conversations.

Sophy has started up her own successful blog.

Kevin - alas, Kevin. On a miserable muggy September morning in 2008, just outside Princeton Junction Station, he threw himself in front of a train. George and I, of course, can’t have a conversation without bringing up Kevin. Our breathing falters. Our voices shake. We feel his presence, as if he is part of the conversation.

As for the Princeton group, it’s still there. New people are running it. It is thriving, a source of comfort to many. Sophy is still involved, the one link to what seems a distant past, that brief shining moment.

I thought I had come home by moving out of New Jersey. But my conversation with George served to remind me that coming home is also about reaching a state of acceptance with my past. I lived in New Jersey for just three years, and perhaps I felt like your average traveler who just drives through it.

But I did reach a very significant destination there. A brief shining moment that will stay with me forever. Today, I experienced a new sense of coming home.