Depression and what it's really like

that paints a different picture from being creative and accomplishing things. i got the sense of lars from some kind of monster still not being satisfied with being in one of the biggest band in the world,but i guess what you want is to be more like kirk hammett?

I'm drunk as fuck and I have to be up in five hours for work.

Something about the discussion of creativity and mania. I'm not bipolar, just depressed, but the absence of the depression and the normal amazing flow of ideas and jokes and plans can seem like mania in contrast.

I don't realize it is gone until someone mentions it and I realize what a sad hard slog life has been lately.

It's made diagnosis difficult in the past when they ask "Have you had times of extreme emotions or activities and made plans and been active." "Of course that is what fucking life is like what the fuck I've not suffered mania, those were just the moments that I was still alive"

I'm trying to interact with the previous posts, but maybe failing.

then the crushing realization of whatever the hell and that's how I'll feel in a few hours.

put a smile on my face, clean up, drink some water. Take some vitamins, grab the sleep available. Don't take it out on my co-workers.

yeah, yeah, I wasn't being melodramatic upthread. I mean, I really don't do SHIT. xpost

Zachary, so so otm. I totally feel this. I have worried/had it suggested by a friend that I might be bipolar (this was when I was drinking a lot and barely eating and was in love with this asshole and would enjoy music with an intensity that frightened me, but would break down sobbing a lot), but it really is hard to tell when your axis is shifting so far below normal people's. My psychiatrist dismisses the notion that I am bipolar, but that fear is the main reason I have been afraid to take the SSRI he gave me.

(serious malnutrition and limerence do confound any kind of diagnosis..fortunately I have figured out how to take better care of myself re: basic survival stuff and avoiding people who are gonna make me feel like that. I was, like, 21-22 at that point.)

Not doing shit seems to be what most people do. Just sort of maintaining.
what are you afraid the ssris will do?

ugh re zach's point, i was misdiagnosed as bipolar by the first THREE psychiatrists i saw, and i've now been taking ssris for over a year. i have fantasized about revisiting them just to shove an rx bottle in their faces and yell "DO U SEE?"

xpost

I had to google "limerence". smile.

I had a thought while I was washing my face and having an imaginary conversation with a supervisor/friend. "The only trick I have left is being better than everybody else, and I'm not very good at being better than everybody else."

Maybe the only tricks I have left are taking better care of myself and being easier on myself.

xpost again? I don't know the proper usage.

not speaking for emily, but a reasonable fear could be that an ssri could tip the balance into a full-blown mania, if you are actually bipolar. Again, I'm not, but I had a phase where a medically irresponsible combo of welbutrin, paxil, klonopin, and some atypical anti-psychotics pushed my into extremely dangerous attitudes and behaviors.

Yes, Philip, just what Zachary said. Also, I'm not really even maintaining. Not working, barely getting out or seeing anyone. Ugh.

Yeah, I'm like the last thing I need is to take something and spiral up into frank psychosis. This town is way too small for a manic episode.

can the dosage be slowly ramped to a good level or do they not work that way?

yeah, yeah that's how I'm supposed to do it. I also have ocd in the form of health anxiety, so I'm probably abnormally afeared. But yeah, my psych has said on two separate occasions that I don't need to worry about BPD.

Also, fun fact, fellow ilx depressives: you don't have to have BPD for psychosis. My dad had psychotic major depression. I think some pdocs diagnosed him with major depression + schizophrenia, but in my entirely unprofessional opinion that is bullshit because he didn't exhibit any other schiz signs besides delusions of persecution/intense guilt, which also occur with psychotic major depression.

do you feel depression is a kind of OCD as well? Or at least some aspect of it?

Can't speak for anyone, but for me, certainly. Not so much the avolition and anhedonia, but certainly the thinking you're shit and it will never change and everything has a dark cast to it. I guess the "thought" component of it is very ocd for me.

This is fun, I like being interviewed about my crazy.

Is there separate OCD treatment you could try?

Ha glad you are having fun because that's all the compensation you'll get when I use this data to invent a cure for depression. Muajjjajaa ( not manic btw)

there's definitely a connection between ocd and depression -- ocd has to do with thought cycles that don't complete, because the part of the brain that deals out "satisfaction" or "resolution" isn't working. doctors regularly prescribe prozac for ocd, and therapists use the same cbt exercises.

As it so happens OCD is usually treated with SSRIs, too. Also really wish I could do a CBT/exposure intensive to knock out the fucking panic disorder (which is also very much fueled by obsessive thinking), as it's what's keeping me in and avoidant and has got me depressed in the first place. (Though tbf I've had depression/obsessive tendencies for 17 years. The panic attacks only blossomed about three years ago.)

Yeah, what GB said. xpost

There's some weird brain tricks you can do with powerful magnets that I suspect can be used in concert or even in lieu of cbt.
Has anyone offered this sort of thing or is it still on the fringe?

DOnt mean to make light, but you mentioned magnets so I read that as "or is it stil on the fridge".

otm

fucking depressions how do they work?

A friend's father (since deceased) was bipolar.

His manic phases tended to be things like hauling all the furniture out of his living room and dumping it into the yard, bcz he needed more space to work on some bizarre and impossible project. Or driving across the country, on his way to see someone he'd only read about in a newspaper, but the article triggered a bunch of super-exciting ideas he wanted to discuss with him, but running out of money in the Midwest, bcz he never planned how he would pay for the trip.

Not exactly creativity in any productive or satisfactory sense.

hey emily, totally hear you about all this stuff, you too zachary. my parents/family life screwed me around big time, and only now i'm starting to sort shit out and clean up the wreckage. your crazy sounds pretty close to mine! i worry too that I have BPD or something like that since I'm finally starting to drag my ass out of nearly 10 years of straight depression, and rediscovering that I was once an energetic, creative, highly social, slightly bizarre person. i'm thinkin like, "am I manic now or something???" but then realize life during depression isn't anything like a real self you can check yourself against.

life during depression isn't anything like a real self you can check yourself against.

― Spectrum, Saturday, October 27, 2012 11:00 PM (2 minutes ago)

^^^^ important facts

"hauling all the furniture out of his living room and dumping it into the yard, bcz he needed more space to work on some bizarre and impossible project. Or driving across the country, on his way to see someone he'd only read about in a newspaper"

it seems like the major difference between this and the sort of thing artists get paid for is the artists figured out how to get paid for it. maybe there's some sort of sweet spot of mania to shoot for?

otm otm otm

this might be the hurricane booze talking, but any of you feel like you're "different" from other people? i don't mean with the depression and shit, just your personality, qualities, aptitude, etc. it's hard to imagine its uncommon on ILX. part of my depression is like this struggle that i'm not quite like uhhh ... the regular joe, i guess.

i was labeled 'gifted' in kindergarten and my whole life i could sense that i operated on a slightly different wavelength than other people, but it's something i still struggle with. friends, teachers, professors, strangers, were all like, "dude you're different from other people!" "you have gifts!!!" and it lands fucking nowhere, makes me feel like an aberration. i look at everyone else and i feel ashamed i'm not like them and completely cut myself down til i barely exist. i've spent my whole life hating everyone and myself cuz of it and not doing my groovy own thing. make sense to anyone?

I have been labelled as depressed most of my life because I was unhappy at certain things. That unhapiness stemmed from being ADD and not being able to accomplish as much as I wanted to, and being socially awkward. Once I understood I was ADD and that I was given the tools to work on that, I have been mostly happy, bar a few nervous breakdown that everyone seems to have. However, yes, a lot of unhappy persons are being labelled as depressed way too easily.

'friends, teachers, professors, strangers, were all like, "dude you're different from other people!" "you have gifts!!!" and it lands fucking nowhere, makes me feel like an aberration.'

would you have welcomed a cabal of extraordinary individuals to harvest you for your talents, or would you rather be integrated into gen. pop?

i reckon everyone is pretty weird in their own ways? most people who pass for "normal" turn out to have some peculiar beliefs or interests or tendencies going on, it's just that it's stuff that isn't immediately apparent.

When i was a kid i felt like i knew absolutely what the normative understanding of the world was - it was really important to me that i knew what "we" thought about e.g. politics or what people who were at other schools were like, and then i'd explain it to my parents, "well you see this is how it is, this is what it is like, this is what we all think". Like i was suspecting in myself some deviation (and hearing about it from adults) that could only be corrected by channeling the norm, but then i was too clumsy to correct it right.

Older, i think most every person does this - invents a norm in their head and measures themself against it and maybe stretches themself on a rack or lops off a foot to fit, maybe just slouches convincingly. Some of us find that experience really painful, some of us are really good at it, some of us learn all kinds of corollary skills in the process. I was identified 'gifted' and acted out and ended up in child therapy and changed schools and found it horrible to not be normal, and then hideous to be thought normal, and then disgusting that people even thought there was such a thing as normal. It was a bruise I couldn't stop poking at for years, a scab i wouldn't let form, a poorly-set fracture that left me walking funny -- but at the same time if I hadn't chosen "normality" and my failures at "fitting in" to fixate on and hurt myself over, I bet you dollars to donuts I'd have found something else.

Yes, feeling different sucks. Not fitting in. Sometimes I feel like I'm out of it even when I'm with my best friends, that my mere presence is a kind of anomaly or something. But the important thing to remember is that nobody has everything figured out, and everybody probably feels like that sometime or another. Maybe certain people feel that way more often. Nobody can judge you but yourself, so treat yourself right and you'll always be good.

out of curiosity, what were you guyses special abilities?

(if it sounds like i'm trying to recruit a legion of depressed superheroes, it's because i am)

As far as information goes, "dude you're different from other people!" is pretty fucking useless, because there is literally nothing you can draw out of it that you can use. It is worthless as a starting point for figuring anything out that is worth figuring out. So, I say throw it away and begin with what you know about who you are. At least that kind of data has some content.

Spectrum, I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're saying, but for me, yeah, being told many times as a youngster that I was gifted or whatever was ultimately pretty stymying and pointless. Being told you're special, but given no real guidelines or instructions for how to succeed on earth. I think it only serves to heighten this despair over misspent youth, wasted potential, etc.

But I think Aimless is right, trying to work on divesting from the idea of exceptionality or some perceive unattained normalcy is probably a good thing.

yeah, being told many times as a youngster that I was gifted or whatever was ultimately pretty stymying and pointless

i went to "gifted" schools and had cool friends that did interesting things, and even as an adult, i know tons of really creative, iconoclastic people. so i don't quite feel like an outsider among my peer group, i just compare myself to them all the time, and give myself short shrift.

compare and despair! If there is not already a self-help book with that title, let's write it.

oh geez

yeah

how much does "fear of inevitable rejection" affect how you live your lives - i realize how many years and how many times that has been my major motivating factor

what do you mean by "fear of inevitable rejection"?

I think it is her way of saying that her best efforts will always fall short of gaining approval.

keeping friends and dating have been extremely hard for me.

Back after power outage. Aimless, it's pointless to deal with labels on an exclusively personal level because they're misleading. I brought this up because I think a huge part of my depression is that it seems like there's no place where I belong, and the dots connected back to what made me "different", I guess.

I'm just mad it's so hard to meet people who "get it" with me. I tell people the way I think or feel about things, and people say "you're different!" or "you're amazing!"(???) and seem taken aback or confounded, and the result is that they either call me crazy, or they like me a lot, more the latter usually. So I guess I can't complain about that. It's lonely, though, like there's a huge side of me that needs to stay in hibernation and has pretty much died, unfortunately. All the things that I think are truly amazing and wonderful and interesting about the world and people I see utterly no reflection for in most other people, the media, our culture (if you're American), even when I get to know people ... it's like there's nowhere for this stuff to go in a relational sense. Maybe I just need to lower my expectations or something, but that might also be the death blow to my spirit.

Emily, I totally hear you about how obnoxious that label is, even the treatment without the label. People act like you're going to do something great with your life, and even if you succeed fairly well, it's still not good enough ... it sets up a lifetime of expectations that are pretty much impossible to meet. Even in middle school and high school I fell into total despair and went into rages over this idea of my wasted potential... today I'm just numb about it. And for me, none of the things I've accomplished feels like success because it was all really fucking easy, even with having had sadistic and insane parents and bullies growing up to make the journey that much more hazardous.

of course all this could just be through the lens of depression, distorting it even more. this condition sucks.

so you guys were labeled with non-specific "talented" ?
Nothing like "you're really good at watercolors -- here's some art supplies"?

not really. if you're curious about specifics, i taught myself to read age 3-4, scored 99.9th percentile on some national aptitude test in verbal reasoning ... school did some weird tests on me, and skipped me a grade in my strong areas. that's about it. my parents barely paid attention to me as a kid so it made me feel like i was super duper special. frankly i wish that never happened.