Depression and what it's really like

yeah, i do have friends willing to help out, but i seem to be vanishing into a pit of indifference. i don't feel particularly bad; i just don't care about anything. it's sort of interesting to see what happens as i disengage. i realize that this is self-destructive behavior of a passive sort, but as my own motives seen opaque to me, it's hard to know how to change them.

apathy is pretty much depression 101

yeah, i know. i started taking an SSRI abt a year ago, when the evidence of collapse became impossible to ignore, but it made me feel comatose and didn't seem to help anyway, so i quit after a few months. i'm not sure why i'm posting here, tbh, as i know what's happening and what i ought to do about it. see somebody, different meds, change my routine, get some air. i guess i'm just scared.

scared is a good feeling? it's not total apathy.

yeah, true. fine line though.

all I know is to stick with the docs that know what they're doing and don't overload on the benzos. that shit can melt your brain, from what i've seen.

you may not recall but there is a story circa 2008 on ILX about me falling asleep at the wheel at six am after taking a klonopin at midnight, i missed a cyclist by about 5 yards before i drove off the road

xpost

I really don't think it is that fine a line. I spent most of last year feeling utterly apathetic about the idea of my continued existence and basically convinced that nothing (up to and including taking care of myself) had any point. The point when I started feeling fear again (i.e. the point when I started seeing some tiny pinprick of meaning in life) was the point when I started healing. Hope, in whatever form it manifests, is a big deal.

yes, hope is key

yeah, that's probably true. as well as feeling panicky, i'm exercising more and actually looking for work again, so it has to be a good thing. and thanks, all.

"Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded, and you must bear half." --Francois Fenelon

My mother said this (not as eloquent though).

Funny how depression/instability/*nerves* has at one point made me skinny and now fat. lololol

My comorbidity is flaring up again. I need to stop following politics but I can cuz im addicted.

Yoga seems to help, tho

http://www.avclub.com/articles/new-study-proves-music-is-more-depressing-now-than,84296/?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=feeds&utm_source=avclub_rss_daily

let's not be depressed about depressing other people, let's not feel awful about feeling awful, i think all human relations have the potential to be positive, you just got to know where to cut and run

do not make best friends with a chicken soup soul either

there's a difference between making friends with depressive people and making friends with negative people. i know depressives who are optimists and "happy" people who are always complaining.

in any case the depressed don't need to be shunned and have their lives made even worse by that sort of social ostracizing for their suffering

oh i think they can take care of that end on their own

Seriously. People don't even need that douchebag quote. Most people tend that way anyway, treating heavy-heartedness like a communicable disease. I'm right there with whoever said the heavy-hearted often (although certainly not always) go out of their way to not burden others with their shit.

negative people are a trip but i don't read that and think negative people

i have friends who are definitely depressed *and* negative but i have plenty of friends who manage not to be negative, depressed or no.

maybe that quote just comes from the era where people who needed help didn't get help ... UH like my negative friends!!!

corollary: don't be yr depressed friend's therapist

my soul feels dead and I kind of want to stab it a few times more just to make sure

sry sunny, but you should probably not do that

What if you stab it and it's still alive and just in a coma? That could end badly. You should try asking it to blink twice for yes, once for no, before you do anything drastic.

oh sunny :( souls are lazy feckers sometimes it may need a bump start and some hot wires or something

http://i297.photobucket.com/albums/mm209/cdkutz/STAB.gif

l/r : sunny, the id

perfect

or superego depending on ur problems

i have post job application depression. i submitted for a 6 month contract at a place i worked before that i know has a terrible commute for me, but it's steady work with the opportunity to move up the ladder. now i feel shitty because i told the recruiter i was interested, when i was gonna tell him i wasn't interested, because of the commute. i have trouble with being (a) assertive (b) realistic.

found a b3ck depression inventory test online and scored a 43 - Extreme Depression, the highest category. makes sense. i've been living with this since i was a kid, so i guess i never noticed ... not much to compare it to. also never had thoughts of killing myself and always thought that's what depression was.

whelp, at least there's a reason instead of "i was born cursed and deserve to live in inescapable hell."

nevermind, scored a 9 on a redo. mostly remembered composites of how i used to feel. i'll let myself out...

at least there's a reason instead of "i was born cursed and deserve to live in inescapable hell.

it was kinda like the dudes who got in an argument about whether this was the best possible world or the worst possible world, both convinced the other and both committed suicide

life's aight, intellectually got the idea that as a human being, my life could be as good as anyone elses... took about 29 years. feeling it is a different story. it's weird, i understand more about life and shit more now than ever, but i also feel the lowest in a long time. i'm going to read feeling good! by david burns and see if it helps. anyone crack open that one?

I found an old addition of Feeling Good on the street. Some of it is dip-shitty and doesn't really resonate for me with true depression, like I get the feeling dude's never been there. But the exercises really do help me a little bit, and are good for general problem-solving and working through feelings. The chapter on recognizing cognitive distortions was helpful.

feeling good handbook?

if it's the david burns one don't forget he has mad clinical cred and many years of group cbt practice at v prestigious institutions went into making that book. at first it will seem dipshitty but that's a cognitive distortion too!

Not the handbook. An older version of http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-The-Mood-Therapy/dp/0380810336/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346905138&sr=8-1&keywords=feeling+good+david+burns. Also, OTM

^probably contains pretty much the same material, just not as worksheety

i feel dipshitty just looking at the cover tbh. but i guess it looks like the same kind of information i've heard in therapy

tbh i think they market this stuff to look dipshitty, for the self-help crowd.

I'd say it's worth a gander.

don't judge a book by its cover

when you talk about someone and how much they know and their contributions to a field and to get the point across you say "they wrote the book on ..."

it would be fair to say dr david wrote the book on cognitive behavioral therapy

thanks for this info btw, there's a copy in the city library i'm going to check out

Dr David Burns is great! cognitive therapy is great

my issue is that at some point i couldn't locate my distortions anymore. i had worked with one therapist for ten years and she taught me all about david burns and cbt (and christine padesky and dennis greenberger) but suddenly we weren't making any progress ... so we parted amicably and i found somebody with more of a freudian orientation but who also did CBT, but crucially she is also a teacher (of clinical practice of therapy) and iranian-american and from i think a similar family. so she had these insights into the distorted thoughts i had (re: family, work and cultural expectations) that i couldn't identify on my own or w/ my other (very wonderful) therapists

any of you guys not have a family in the emotional, loving, relationship sense? starting to realize this stuff could be related to that. always hard to hear co-workers, friends, people, talk about spending time with their parents, or how they couldn't live without their family. feels like there's something missing here and i get quite jealous and resentful. don't even know how to deal with this, tbh.

I definitely wish I had a more loving & close family. I try to be that family for my siblings to make it a bit easier for them..

i come from a really small family and i don't have any close relatives out here. i'm tight with my parents but i'm lacking the huge warm "family" experience that a lot of people have.

saw a doctor today and got a prescription for paxil. though nothing's really changed and i still wish not to exist, i feel good, as though i've taken a positive step. otoh, it's gonna be two months before they can schedule me w/ a therapist. the suckiness of poverty cannot be overstated.

the suckiness of poverty cannot be overstated.

absolutely, but it's not like having money makes the depression go away -- it just makes the resources easier to tap into.