Depression and what it's really like

ILX thinks yr great, Abbs. Take that for whatever it's worth to you, you can totally pwn the next three hours.

I'd give him a call but like he needs to spend 15 minutes of work hearing me in choking sobs over the phone.

Why don't you give him a call and ask him to tell you a story, instead? That way you get to hear his voice and feel closer to him but won't feel like you're dumping on him...?

Also it will prob be a better story than the one about your dad and the birds. Because THAT'S not depressing or anything.

HAHAHAHA

I've been thinking about that one for the past few days. Why?

Hope the time passes quickly for you; depression is awful - I've so been there (not too badly lately, thankfully).

Hang in there. (And yeah, I'm sure that doesn't help much from a perfect stranger, but unless you're in southern Minnesota, it will be hard for me to invite you over for brownies or something!)

what kind of brownies

megabus is only a dollar and i'd pay a dollar for brownies.

http://forum.armedassault.info/style_emoticons/default/hug.gif

See? An hour has already passed! How you doin?

Damn this accursed MACHIIIIINE!

Just plain brownies! They are kind of fudgy - no nuts - very simple, with chocolate icing (really just chocolate chips melted with some butter). I made them because I was feeling low today.

Megabus sounds like something from My Neighbor Totoro. I must find out about it!

no weed, no visitation.

just kidding, id kill for any kind of homemade brownie right now.

and how is abbott doing now?? apparently no longer at her computer surfing ilx, which means: way better off than any of us.

I went and got a baked potato at Wendy's. Some good songs came on the radio that made me nostalgic. The nostalgia took me places I shouldn't have gone, but the potato was good. And, uh, pulling through, You guys 'r' swell.

megbus.

the bacon cheddar baked potato is the only baked potato worth having

you're crazy deeznuts. the bacon cheddar may be at the top of the baked potato hierarchy but by no means is it "the only baked potato worth having".

I am actually a fan of the potato skins with cheddar and bacon, with a side of sour cream and chives. Hit all the bases that way.

ok, fine. excuse me for being hyperbolic. the sour cream & chive is a delicious steal, & i would recommend it to anyone short of $2.49.

xp i didnt know this was possible?? i dont have a wendy's within 45 mins of me anymore tho

i know admitting it is like admitting that i enjoy the slaughter of kittens, but i have to say that i find baked potatos fairly nasty

Oh, not at Wendy's. They're awesome in diners or at home, though.

theyre mainly a starchy delivery device for cheese/sour cream/butter/etc

remy, do you eat them with like, stuff on them? cuz baked potatoes are disgusting, which is why you coat them w/ butter & sour cream & cheese & bacon, all of which are wonderful things that i fail to understand how anyone could not love.

xp tru!

fighting w/ my fiancee because i do what the psychiatrist + therapist tell me to do and she stubbornly fights them every inch of the way (we have different psychiatrists + therapists).

sucks.

Remy has v cultivated tastes, he probably likes more imaginative potato forms. I'm a simple person, though, and I like mine with lots and lots of salt and dairy product.

i havent had one of those in so long i should bake one up. sour cream is one of my favorite things.

actual potatoes made at my old apartment as part of an amorous evening. nothing hotter than cooking on a cold wet night.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2028/1582573169_debd965da4.jpg

rawr

Holy mother, give me those potatoes.

see, the ratio of baked potato:topping really has to be about 1:2 for me to eat without complaint, and by that point i could just as well be gnawing drywall. for what it's worth, i don't like french fries either, unless the fry:ketchup balance is tilted to a near-farcical point

Holy mother, give me those potatoes.

you can have the potatoes, give me that girl again...

Want a hug so bad and the man won't be home for three hours. Fucking THESE DAYS. These fucking days.

Trade 'man' for 'woman' and 'three hours' for '2 months'.

What's that sound effect in the Simpsons in the episode when Darlene from Roseanne tears out Bart's heart and throws it against the wall: "You won't be needing THIS anymore...ahahahahahaha"?

uuuuuuuuuunnnnngggggghhhhhhhh

gif or it didnt happen

I'm working on it. Softcore porn+Glowing Edges effect+Music

So when does one decide to call a therapist? I can't even begin to determine if I even have some form of depression (again). I... it seems easier just to shut up about it instead of talking about it.

Awww, Nathalie. I would say, if your depression starting to interfere with your ability to function, then that's time to step in and get the medical help.

Then again, I don't know. A lot of people manage to function on autopilot and go on autopilot and look after kids and go on, even though they're feeling totally dead inside.

Only you can make that call, but if it's affecting your ability to work, to sleep, eating, your interactions with the people that you love - your standard basics - then you need to call someone in to help you out.

Good luck with it. x

Thing is you can always see a therapist - see if it helps. I saw one for 2 years - found it very helpful.

Of course, they are therapists and there are therapists, one method might not work for you.

To be honest I think everyone should see one!

I... it seems easier just to shut up about it instead of talking about it.

For me this was crucial - I didn't want to talk about - it was too painful - to friends or family. Therapy "allows" you to do this without feeling "I'm just wasting everyone's time."

Does that make sense?

To be honest I think everyone should see one!

Yeah, woo. Also, everyone should spend a leisurely year in Paris, just drinking wine and eating cheese and malingering. So good for the soul.

To be honest I think you're being callous. Mental health care is really, really, really, REALLY expensive.

Er... at least around here. My medication alone costs $300 a month, not counting sessions with the doctor, and I am quickly entering a situation where I will be working to pay for my mental health so I can keep working so I can etc etc. It's like delivering pizza to pay for car repair.

Hi, welcome to The Sad Place, you must be This Depressed to enter.

I got mine on the NHS. Sorry, wasn't meaning to be callous.

Sorry, you touched a nerve. Nothing personal.

Natalie, have you been to see your doctor about it yet? I'd say definitely do that first if you're open to the idea (helped *a lot* when my wife had post-natal depression btw)

i think the nice thing about a therapist is that you're paying them to listen to you talk about what's wrong (& of course hopefully help you out). It's not like a friend, where you have to consider whether or not you're making them uncomfortable or expecting too much of them or you'd actually rather hear about what's going on in their life. Going to a therapist is useful even if you're just trying to work something very temporary out of your system: there is nothing to do there but talk. I know you're not supposed to think of it this way but sometimes i sort of see the ~therapeutic space~ as the place where you talk about it so you can stay shut up about it everywhere else.

xps, No I wasn't thinking. I have no idea what the situation is like in Belgium for instance. I'm just a bit...er...enthusiastic about it because it did me so much good. Continues to do so, too. I get a bit carried away.

If cost is an issue then look into CBT, it's remarkably quick - ten sessions max on the NHS - and has really done wonders for me, just in terms of getting out of the mental rut I was in, transforming my attitude, restoring confidence etc.

Cost is not that big of an issue but, well, finding a good therapist is. Belgium has good healthcare. I think I could check with my doctor first and then it would be even cheaper? I had one but he ignored my cries for help in regard to my panic attacks. Really strange. I wanted to ask: "Why don't you HEAR me when I talk about my panic attacks?" Instead I just gave up and stopped going. I'm not sure if I need to. I have the (wrong) idea that this is me, this is how I feel at times so why bother with addressing this "problem". I also feel I'm a bit silly for being this way because I simply don't have anything to complain about. Yes, I know, that's not really the issue. I also don't like talking about it cause I just start crying. IF I don't, then I can just pretend it's not here/there/anywhere.

I don't think it's postnatal depression unless hahaha it extends to 16 months after giving birth. haha

I dunno, it can last for quite a while. But whatever it is, I'd say it's still worth giving your doctor a go first.

If your doctor refuses to listen to you when you bring up panic attacks, then that's cause to find a new doctor. A good doctor pays attention to their patient's mental state of health, as well as physical. If you told your doctor that you were having sharp pains in your head, and he just ignored you, instead of sending to check you for migraines, would you keep going to him? Why should mental health be any different? Panic attacks are a symptom - they're a sign that the mind is in distress and needs some kind of attention. You can't just ignore them like that, if you're a doctor.

Incredible insights regarding DBT and mindfulness, Kate, thank you, and also I love the trans serenity prayer omg

My big annoyance in doing CBT for over a year was running into the inevitable "final problem" with the approach: there comes a point where CBT, which has spent all its time attempting to convince you that all your anxieties are illusory, and distortions of actual-reality, falls short in addressing "the brutal truths of one's existence". That's where DBT and mindfulness come in... training your brain and body to accept the brutal truths.

Personally, I think mindful meditation should be taught in schools, as part of phys. ed., that even the most entry-level understanding of what-it-entails can change the way one walks a block, or swims, or runs, or rides the bus, or engages in any moments of solitude (where the mind may have a tendency to ruminate). A friend who was highly-invested in her own mindful meditative practice told me that in certain languages, the terms for "meditation" are virtually interchangeable with "exercise", that its as important a component of one's daily upkeep as eating, sleeping, exercise, relaxation, etc.

yeah i like that last post Kate and i agree with what i *think* you're saying about the need to be thoughtful about he we react to things that have been corrupted by capitalism because, yes, capitalism corrupts everything. it made me think about how Deleuze & Guattari talk about concepts as tools, which seems to me like a way of trying to remove ideas from the ownership of ideology - ties in to how they reject the concept of ideology i guess

a mindful approach to mindfulness gods help me but yes, i don't want to reject any of those ideas out of hand no matter how much the language of corporate self-idealization makes my gut grumble

This is just my experience and what I’ve seen happen with a couple of people close to me but: anxiety is exhausting, and often doing the work to try and manage it is also exhausting and then you become so exhausted that you can’t hold the fort against the anxiety and it just gets worse and worse, and the mental work to manage it gets harder and then the exhaustion increases and the cycle continues, round and round until you feel like you’re gonna die - especially if your anxiety manifests as loss of appetite and insomnia. If you can find the right medication that works for you (which tbh can also be an exhausting process) it can interrupt that cycle and give you the space to do the mental work.

I have done that occasionally but never on purpose and I haven't found a repeatable formula for it

which isn't to say there aren't interventions that could make that more or less likely to happen but they're probably different for everyone (or even for the same person next time round)

too much to respond to immediately, but i did want to pick up on this

what i did read, fizzles, is your last post, which i think is really... i mean, honestly, i think you're in a good headspace. when you say "in an abstract sense it was really interesting", that's actually what's referred to by mindfulness.

thank you, first of all, for your thoughtful post(s). second, yes, i should stress that my mental state right now is not terrible. you do come up against the edge of things sometimes though. and i’m guilty of only paying attention to my mental health when it’s bad or when i’m over that edge. i want to contribute to it when i’m not in a hole and corner situation. hence this process and thinking through things now. hopefully shoring things up against harder times.

"hmmm, fizzles... i haven't read this whole thread, i recommend reading "the body keeps the score" by besser van der kolk. that's the source of a lot of the recent upswing in "holistic" approaches to therapy - a growing recognition of the somatic component of psychological issues. it is in fact, at its root, an evidence-based approach and not a bunch of pseudoreligious "woo"."

I read this feature about it last year and I got the sense that it's a pretty contested notion.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trauma-bessel-van-der-kolk-the-body-keeps-the-score-profile.html

The language of mental health is very badly conceptualised on many levels I think. Social construct innit?

what field of professionals exists where the vast majority of practitioners arent in it performing the role as handed out to them in a safely approved guidance manual reviewed every five years by deloitte tho

im not crying out for the robin williams mouldbreaker therapist lord forbid but 8 times outta ten your gonna get a template applier right? in most fields?

is my feeling yes. i think the framework is very lacking in mental health.

if - peers at screen - i’ve understood you correctly anyway.

I acknowledge no peers

as far as the profession internationally is informed by the successive editions of the DSM, i'd say it's an unusually labile framework compared to the majority of technical professions

psychotherapy as a field is something broader than that tho, and certainly doesn't belong wholly to the world of the medical

as far as the profession internationally is informed by the successive editions of the DSM, i'd say it's an unusually labile framework compared to the majority of technical professions

psychotherapy as a field is something broader than that tho, and certainly doesn't belong wholly to the world of the medical

― wang mang band (Noodle Vague)

the main way it belongs to the world of the medical is when it comes to getting paid... the thing that makes the MH field interesting, from a US-based perspective, is that the majority of the field is solo practitioners. you go to see a doctor, even if they're a solo practitioner they have an office staff who take care of billing insurance and making appointments and all that stuff. MH professionals are doing all that stuff themselves, most of the time.

which means that the ability of something like the DSM or whatever to enforce hegemonic MH standards is kind of limited. first off the DSM isn't a billing standard... like it can set up whatever diagnoses it likes but for someone to get paid they're gonna be billing, in the US it's probably gonna be CPT codes, and these are a standard set of CPT codes for therapy. honestly one code, really, you're just gonna submit 90834 probably, and then the insurance company is gonna want a diagnosis, and that comes from a _different_ set of standards, that's the ICD-10. this is where it gets tricky because american healthcare is fucked, right? this is why it's hard when therapists bill their own codes. so say you're treating someone with gender dysphoria, and you're in, like, tennessee or texas or something. see, where i'm at, here in oregon, it's probably fine to bill F64.0... that's not actually "gender dysphoria", there's no billing diagnosis for "gender dysphoria". gender dysphoria is in the DSM-5, but you have these list of codes from this standard that they came up with in, i don't know, probably the early 2000s, and so the diagnosis code they're gonna bill for me is "transsexualism". and you know what, fine, they're working on a draft standard for the ICD-11 which the AMA will spend another 20 years fighting because it makes it harder for their doctors to get paid, in the meantime you use what you have available. except, i mean, if you're a therapist treating someone in texas maybe you wanna use a generic F32 ("depression") code. because maybe there's some fucking law in place that makes it illegal to pay for it, or maybe some insurance company has some policy in place saying that they don't pay for gender affirming treatment, or whatever the fuck. it's a fucking pain in the ass, billing insurance, which is why most providers don't do it themselves, they hire somebody else to do that bit for them. therapists, though, they don't have the resources that an MD does so they're stuck doing it all themselves. i'm not a therapist, but part of me thinks dealing with the insurance companies might be harder in some ways than dealing with the clients. i mean you're treating somebody for mental health issues and at least they mean well, you can't really say that about insurance companies.

this is kind of a... i'm kind of into the weeds here on this, and i'm not doing it from a clinical perspective because i'm not a clinician. this just happens to be my professional background, figuring out how the hell providers can get insurance companies to pay them for the work they do. and i think that's important because it comes back to something that is kind of unavoidable when talking about any kind of health care in the US, which is to say that the whole thing is completely and utterly fucked. the idea of anything in american healthcare being done based on a safely approved guidance manual reviewed every 5 years, that's just so far removed from the reality of things here. it's really hard to follow a system when the system you're supposed to follow is completely unworkable, you know? you kinda have to just improvise things sometimes.

which makes it in theory high-risk because you never know when you might run into a dr. eugene landy, but usually? usually those providers aren't therapists. usually they're the ones doing the prescribing. i've had therapists that worked out well and therapists that didn't, but when in terms of going through medical abuse, which i have gone through, that wasn't something i ever got from therapists.

idk i guess that's kind of a ramble, i got a... lot of experience with mental health, and mostly it's as a patient, but shit, you spend a long enough time around these kinds of places you sort of pick up a thing or two. particularly since i do have some professional understanding of how the donuts get made.

now, how that all plays out in Canada or the UK or whatever, i don't have any idea. really my only experience is within the US.

That was a great post Kate! I totally appreciate the “code compliance” issues.

Most days I’m good at just suppressing it and “carrying on”, as it were, but then it sneaks up on me and hits me all at once to be reminded of how much it sucks to not have any good friends.

I’ve written a much longer post about 8 times, but it all feels kind of futile and doesn’t get the point across well. I’d kill to even have one of those text groups I’ve heard about where friends bullshit with each other. Sounds cool.

Hell, I’ve been posting here for the better part of two decades and I don’t have a single one of you I interact with outside ilx (I mean, considering how often my threads sink to the bottom, it’s not like I actually “interact” with many of you on here either lol). Yet I stubbornly persist.

sorry man

I'm glad you're here jon. I don't actively post on many threads and I lurk on maybe a couple dozen, but your posts on the annoying coworker threads get me smiling and shaking my head in recognition and commiseration every time.

Most days I’m good at just suppressing it and “carrying on”, as it were, but then it sneaks up on me and hits me all at once to be reminded … Hell, I’ve been posting here for the better part of two decades and I don’t have a single one of you I interact with outside ilx (I mean, considering how often my threads sink to the bottom, it’s not like I actually “interact” with many of you on here either lol). Yet I stubbornly persist.

Jon, I hear you. I often think to myself who I would call if I were in trouble or needed someone and the answer is always "shit, no-one". Then I get depressed and this is exacerbated by remembering how I don't have anyone to call when I'm howling and crying and then I howl and cry more. Then I fall asleep and I wake up and it doesn't matter until I start remembering it again hours or days or weeks later. It just sneaks up.

Sorry, didn't see this had been bumped. Appreciate the thoughts.

It's just been hard, as my son has gotten older and is spending more time with friends and I've found a little more free time, the lack of friends has become more glaring. I keep thinking, "hey, it would be cool to go see that band with someone" and then remembering there are absolutely zero people I could reach out to for that sort of thing. Not that I'm afraid to go to shows solo, I do it a lot, just would be nice from time to time to go with someone to talk about it with afterwards or w/e.

Part of the challenge, beyond just how hard it is to make friends as an adult, is that most of my interests don't alight with chances to get to know more people, even those who share said interests.

Not going to most of the gigs I'd like to go to is a thing I accept nowadays to the extent I mostly forget that I could even go on my own. I just...don't do stuff.

^^^
i used to buy advance tickets in an effort to make myself go, but soon realized it was just a waste of money

hey jon, i just wanted to say that i really appreciate the breadth of your knowledge and your generosity on ilm, and all the times i make a post about a random harder rock band and see an enthusiastic response from you it raises my spirits. you rule!