What to Do During the Middle Two Weeks You’re Waiting for Your Antidepressants to Kick In or How to do self-care when you have moderate depression

Chances are you’re not having quite so many devastatingly low days now. You’re functioning a little better overall, but you’re still not ready to run any marathons yet or run for public office. Don’t worry about it – this recovery takes time, and it happens so subtly you may not notice it till someone else points it out. You’re probably still not eager to spend too much time outside your home, but the cyber world provides many diversions (you can wander around it in your pajamas, and no one will know). I’ve found that things of beauty are both soothing and refreshing at this point, so that’s where we’ll start first.

Art/History

• The best place to start your art cybertour is, of course, the Louvre. There is also a Louvre section at the Web Museum, Paris. This page also provides three tours of Paris.
• The State Hermitage Museum has an incredible collection, and much of it can be viewed online.
• You can “virtually” visit the Musee D’Orsay with their panoramic viewer.
• The Museum of Fine Arts, one of my favorite places when I lived in Boston, has a website.
• Visit The Chagall Windows, Marc Chagall’s stunning stained-glass windows depicting Jacob’s blessings to his sons, the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Chagall also did a series of windows that reside in the Art Institute of Chicago.
• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
• MuseumSpot is a guide to museums and other cultural information online.
• Galleria degli Uffizi
• Artcyclopedia is a fine art search engine.
• If modern art is your style, go to the Museum of Modern Art‘s web page.
• Art Crimes: The Writing on the Wall showcases graffiti art.
• Entropy8 is an online gallery.
• The Vincent Van Gogh Information Gallery showcases his paintings and letters.

Food

Time to start moving away from the comfort food in the direction of the food that’s good for your body. That doesn’t mean you have to completely abandon the comfort food. For instance, you can use whole-grain pasta in your mac and cheese (if you’re up for cooking).

If not, if you’re close to a Trader Joe’s, you’re in luck. They make eating better easy, with premade salads, yummy frozen meals and really tasty flavors of hummus like tomato basil.

Fitness(Mental and Physical)

• Paradoxically, it’s during this time when most depressed people are beginning to feel better that some attempt suicide. This is due to the fact that while someone is profoundly depressed, they don’t have the energy or clear mental processes necessary to plan and carry out a suicide. Please remember, if you begin to have suicidal thoughts, that there are people available to help you deal with your feelings. SAVE – Suicide AwarenessVoices of Education is a web page which provides suicide education and support.
• The philosophy behind holistic medicine, that we should treat the body as a whole entity instead of just addressing the sick “part”, is appropriate both for treating depression and for this stage in your recovery. De-stressing is important since it will relieve the depression to some extent. To this end, think about exercising. I know it’s hard to even keep up with normal stuff, but even a half hour walking a few times a week should help. I used to hate to exercise, but I’ve made it into a habit in the last ten years, and it makes such a difference in whether I slide back into depression during stressful times.
• If you’re not ready for aerobic exercise yet, get your body ready by doing some stretches. Yoga Class has a lot of good info.
• You might be ready to stretch spiritually or re-discover your faith. About.com’s Religion section is a good place to start. The ORCT (Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance) page covers many aspects and issues of many different religions. Interlude: An Internet Retreat is a site with inspirational meditations, prayers and poetry. My favorite is the Native American prayers.
• Meditation might be a good thing to try now. Even if you think you can’t, or haven’t been able to in the past, give it a try, as apps like Calm and Headspace are effective, even for someone like me, with ADHD. An option that I found recently, and love, is sound meditation. It’s much, much easier than mindfulness meditation. I usually listen to my local sound meditation guru on SoundCloud.

The World Outside

• Here are some of my photos from the Berkeley Rose Garden.
• Castles on the Web is a well-designed site of links to castles all around the world.
• Claude Monet’s Garden, Giverny shows the real-life inspiration for the beautiful series of paintings.
• Discover space thanks to NASA, in their Earth Observatory and Astronomy Picture of the Day.
• The Natural History Museum site has many fascinating interactive exhibits online. I was fortunate enough to visit the real thing when I was in London.
• Graham Hawker’s journal of his Journey to Beijing depicts the trip in pictures and text.
• Take A Tour of My Garden and look at Cheryl Netter’s beautiful roses.
• Travels with Samantha
• You can take a virtual tour of the New York Botanical Garden
• You can read about the voyage of the Endeavor in the Papers of Sir Joseph Banks.

Music

• In keeping with this page’s theme of bringing the outside world in to soothe and stimulate you, I highly recommend listening to sounds of nature, either alone or mixed with new-age music. I myself love listening to either the sounds of the ocean, to rain or a mountain stream (hard to believe I wasn’t born under a water sign!). My favorite series, Echoes of Nature, is a little hard to find as it’s pretty old, but you can also find a lot of similar music on YouTube.

Reading

• The Power of Myth is a life-altering book that sprang from a series of conversations between Bill Moyers and mythologist/storyteller Joseph Campbell, and is said to have inspired George Lucas to create Star Wars.

Socializing

• You’re probably not ready to meet people in real life, so how about getting to know some people online?
  • Join an online community that revolves around a passion or hobby. I spend a lot of time at Ravelry, a knitting and crochet community.
  • Online games are a good way to socialize without going outside. I play a Gnome Warlock, among other characters, on World of Warcraft.

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