How to Fight Depression with Creativity

Creativity can act like a compass, leading you out of a dark time.

The world moves through people thinking, acting and expressing themselves. You can fight depression by being more creative, by writing something on the page, or just putting all the right colors together for the sketch. This essay explains in detail, bringing up many other writers and artists, how you can fight depression with these forms of creativity.

Instructions

1. Creating things while you're depressed. Something can be said for the depressed mind and what it creates. Some creative artists fall to alcoholism. These are highlighted by depression. Depression eats at them, forcing the bottle down their throats. It was for Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, Jackson Pollack and John O’Hara—the fine artists who are so important today. Stephen King, noted in “On Writing,” fought his way out of it. Some people said his writing never was the same. It isn’t—it’s much better.

2. Reevaluate what's important in your life. Depression often hits the creative spirits of the world. You can take any normal depression, something as common as the flu, and break it down a million ways. In some ways, for me at least, it provides water for the well, it allows you to reevaluate what is truly important in your life.

3. Shine a light on your depression. Sometimes the most joyous thing in the world is to create something, building it piece by piece. And the most painful is letting it go. Sometimes shining a light on depression is healthy, and that’s what the creative process does.

4. Explore your pain by exploring others. Consider it a rule that on most days you are creative in some way. A certain book may have an effect on you. A Van Gogh painting could highlight something you always wanted to say. Exploring the pain of others is what arts about. If you write or paint, you join them. That is the step you take into molding the novel or beginning the sketch: you see and take action. Creativity is, in the end, about finding solutions. It makes you problem solve and have fun.

5. Talk to yourself. Creativity works as a means of engaging in a conversation with yourself. Stephen King called it “Constant Reader”—the ideal reader he had in mind. When you engage in this sort of talk, listen for all that is being said, for it will shine that light upon you and let you see the world in a different way.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider every step you take toward creativity a step towards defeating depression.

• When you create something it stays with you—let it.

• Creativity isn’t the cure, obviously, if you have suffered a depression for months. In that case, it may help to sit down and read a book, or write one, but do it under the guidance of a doctor and/or therapist.