Our widespread fear of and disregard for darkness—both literal and figurative—may be the most overlooked factor in the contemporary epidemic of sleep disorders.

A therapist helps his anxious clients discover that be not resisting what the present moment offers, they can find a way out of their suffering.

To the ordinary observer, people who are rude in a restaurant, obnoxious at their child's soccer game or overly exacting of their employees might seem simply self-centered. But often, these individuals are dealing with a wide variety of inner phantoms.

Teens and preteens today pulsate with anxiety in a pressure-cooker youth culture and an explosive world, ever at the edge. Not that you'd know it when you first meet them. For the most part, they don't act particularly scared. But for all their apparent bravado, kids need the felt presence of adults—the undeniable evidence that we can be emotionally there for them, keeping them safe and providing them with the structure and guidance they crave in a frighteningly chaotic world. Nothing less seems to hold their anxiety, or capture their digital-speed, supersaturated attention.

If a vast conspiracy were afoot to create an entire civilization of insomniacs, it would operate pretty much the way our society does now. In a nonstop, globalized economy, sleep is a useless occupation, taking up precious time that might better be spent on producing, buying, and selling.

There's increasing evidence that mindfulness helps depressed people fight relapse.

Getting a depressed client mobilized to take the initial steps toward change can be the key to treatment.

Emotional suffering, according to a new view, is a genetic glitch, successfully treatable by drugs. Depression is no longer thought to be shaped by such diverse forces as a sedentary, lonely or impoverished life;

the loss of love, health or community; "learned helplessness" or feelings of powerlessness arising from unsatisfying work or an abusive relationship. Its resolution no longer requires anyone to get meaningful support from others, to establish a collaborative relationship with a good psychotherapist, to draw on community resources, or for communities to address conditions that breed depression.

Perhaps depression is simply hard to convey--even, as Styron says, "indescribable." But I'd like to suggest another possibility: That what we call "depression," like the mythical black bile, is a chimera. That it is cobbled together of so many different parts, causes, experiences, and affects as to render the word ineffectual and perhaps even noxious to a full, true narrative.