The Cold Chill of Seasonal Depression
Resilience doesn’t mean never feeling negative emotions, such as seasonal depression. It means having the ability to tolerate negative emotions without falling apart.
[00:00:00] Stephen Calabria: From the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, this is Road to Resilience, a podcast about facing adversity. I'm Stephen Calabria. On today's show, we welcome Jelena Kasmanovic, PhD, a practicing clinical psychologist. Dr. Kasmanovic is the founder and director of the Arlington and D.C. Behavior Therapy Center.
[00:00:21] Institute and an adjunct professor in the Georgetown University Department of Psychology. In both her clinical practice and her numerous writings, Dr. Kisch discusses at length the roles of resilience and mindfulness in navigating tough times.
[00:00:34] She's particularly vocal about maintaining resilience through this time of year because seasonal depression has a way of testing our resilience more than we realize. And with October being depression awareness month, we're honored to have Dr. Savich on the show.
[00:00:48] Dr. Jelena Kesmanovic, thank you so much for joining our show.
[00:00:52] Jelena Kecmanovic: Thank you so much for having me on.
[00:00:53] Stephen Calabria: Could you give us a bit of a background on your work in behavioral therapy, particularly regarding resilience?
[00:01:00] Jelena Kecmanovic: I started being interested in human condition and psychological functioning very early on. First time I was introduced to those concepts in general, and then in particular, to behaviorism and behavioral therapy was in the eighties.
[00:01:13] Eventually, you know, in my undergraduate work, and then later in my master's and PhD in clinical psychology, I very much got into this general umbrella term, termed cognitive behavioral therapy or cognitive behavioral therapies, which are the type of psychotherapies, which do have the largest evidence base in terms of their effectiveness and working with all kinds of populations.
[00:01:37] So through that work, one of the things that you can do is, when working with patients, is, figure out what are their natural sources of resilience and emphasize those and strengthen those. And really, you know, as I often talk to a depressed patient, a patient who is prone to very serious depressive episodes, the goal is not to never have you feel depression, never have you feel all these different even symptoms of depression.