Mental Health Topics
How to Talk About Your DepressionA common question my patients ask me is how to disclose to family and friends that they are experiencing depression. My patients report that family and friends typically respond in one of two ways: they are overly helpful and supportive, repeatedly asking the person, “How are you feeling?” “How are you doing?” Or, they are unsupportive and unsympathetic, “What do you have to be depressed about?” “Cant you just snap out of it?”
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Off the ClockHow do we determine the appropriate age to start dating, get married, have kids, and/or retire? Bernice Neugarten (1976) suggested that human beings use a ‘social clock’ to define the cultural norms and expected social behaviors throughout the lifespan. Differing from biological clocks that have a neural origin, social clocks are largely determined by the culture in which we live. Neugarten proposed that we internalize our culture’s social clock and use it to compare with our peers in order to determine our position in the ‘expected life cycle’ (Greene, 2003).
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