Depression and what it's really like

I think the drugs are working.

*Hugs Nathalie* I knew this would happen eventually.

I'm better than I was last night, thank goodness. My husband and mother-in-law have colds, and I think I might be catching it too--I've mistaken coming down with something with being depressed before.

xpost thanks. <3

Does this burst of energy dwindle? I have been quite energitic. Really been working a lot (certainly compared to the previous months).

Also called a psychologist (daughter of my GP). I am happy. But that's the thing: I feel as though I don't need therapy cause I have the pills. Then again I do feel the anxiety under the surface somehow.

it does, but in my experience it just kinda evens out. The next step is developing healthy ways of dealing with the anxiety and other problems when they inevitably get triggered. Good luck! :)

^^^cosign. And therapy can help sort out and dissipate the anxiety. I had a few sessions before the meds and I found it quite useful. Going to my first session since being on meds and am looking forward to it. I'd suggest aligning your needs with a psych's specialties. Each is more attuned to specific causes and effects of depression.

http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/

OK, was going to post a link to my doc throughout high school (lots and lots and lots of drugs) and "fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-" or something else pithy and clever before realizing a) that's really kind of a bad idea and b) BBcode takes a shit and dies when it encounters urls that contain square brackets. Just suffice to say that the numbers were very high, and that's just for Q1 2010 (Eli Lilly), Q3-4 2009 (Pfizer- oh man, Pfizer) and Q1-Q2 (AstraZeneca). Admittedly, AstraZeneca wasn't too bad- a $200 speaking fee- but this is just for three drug companies.

I decided today that this winter, as a therapeutic measure ("make a movie to solve a problem," my favorite college teacher used to say), I'm going to make a short documentary about the nature of depression and the differing models that exist. Any suggestions for books/movies/articles I should read? I've already got "Manufacturing Depression" on my list. Also if you happen to know of any particularly eloquent experts on the subject who live in Utah, plz to refer.

I'm sure you have "The Noonday Demon" on your list if you've not already read it? Andrew Solomon.

I just started thinking about this 8 hours ago, so I've got no list yet. So thank you.

'an unquiet mind' by kay redfield jamison, perhaps

she's bipolar, though, so just ignore the other half

So I left work tonight, fully intending to meet my wife at home and go out somewhere for dinner. Instead, I got so agitated and upset and depressed on the drive home that, by the time she got home, I didn't want to go anywhere at all. I made myself a peanut butter sandwich and got a little dish of pineapple. I sat at the table, ate two bites of the sandwich, and stared at the pineapple for about 15 minutes. I ended up eating neither. I'm spending my Friday night folding laundry and trying to find reasons to stay awake. Maybe I need to go back on SSRIs.

what happened on the drive? or was it just random?

there's nothing wrong with going to bed early sometimes tbh

En I See Kay - I know that this book talks about all kinds of mental illness, not just depression but it has a really good point about the changing view of mental illness as a psychological model to a chemical model and how treatment has changed (not always for the better) - I am starting to feel like a bit of a shill for it, but Robert Whitaker - Anatomy of an Epidemic.

Phil D - I know you don't like me, and generally think of me as a lunatic, so take this advice with whatever tons of salt you feel necessary - BUT - the thing to remember is that all human beings, regardless of whether they are depressed or "normal" or on medication or not, have bad days and better days. It takes a certain kind of mind to take a bad day and ruminate on it and turn it into conclusive proof that life isn't worth living and one is just a bad/unlucky/terrible person. (i.e. the kind of mind that depressed people often have.) One thing I find helpful is to remember that being on SSRIs was no insurance against having bad moods or bad days. It's very easy for me, with hindsight, to look at certain periods of my life and say "but I was so much happier then!" but I can go back in my diary and look - especially at periods when I was on SSRIs, and it wasn't a total rosegarden.

I think it's really important to learn how to accept that you are human, and give yourself permission to have all kinds of moods, including bad ones. Sometimes it's something that happened (a bad commute home) sometimes it's nothing but the pressure to *have* to be happy that can send you over the edge. That you can get into one of those terrible moods where you don't want to do anything, and it's important to be able to say "you know what? I'm in a bad mood. I give myself permission to spend tonight wallowing over peanut butter and folding laundry. Tomorrow is another day." And start again.

I've had pretty much the worst few days in a long time, mentally. At least I've recently discovered there's a genuine medical reason I'm in pretty much constant pain for two weeks out of every month. But that doesn't stop the short temperedness and the just plain bad moods. I made the mistake of trying to go to the pub with people from work last night, and that was just an exercise in alienation and social anxiety so I thought "I don't have to do this" and came home and thought I'd watch a film to cheer me up. So I watched Pi, which is a great film but fuck, it is not something you should be watching in that kind of state. I cried myself to sleep, had nightmares and woke up feeling borderline suicidal and wondering if I should try self trepanation. It took a huge wrench to not fall into that abyss. Got up, exercised, took a walk around my neighbourhood and my favourite cafes and shops, planned my next creative project. Remembering the lifestyle things that keep depression at bay. I hope it's passing; I go on.

Anyway, that's besides the point. Give yourself permission to fail; pick yourself up afterwards, go on. Rinse, repeat.

phil d., i hope you're feeling better. n/i/c/k, good luck with the film.

http://www.bristol.indymedia.org.uk/article/690010

Didn't know that movie existed before I was googling for a Hillman ref. Wd definitely be worth seeing if you cd, and definitely worth reading any of James Hillman's work on depression.

Phil D - I know you don't like me, and generally think of me as a lunatic

Neither of these things is true btw, I only know you as a name on the intertubez! Not in a position to like, dislike or otherwise. We clearly disagree about many things, we may quite likely agree on any number of other things. And I do appreciate the advice. Last night was just . . . bad. Really bad. It felt like my brain had just entirely broken, like I could have sat and stared at that sandwich and that bowl of pineapple all night without moving, speaking or doing anything else. Had I not decided to fold laundry, I might very well still be sitting there.

Yeah - what Kate says about giving yourself permission to have a bad day is really important. Last night I was gonna go to a monthly dance party that is usually fun and cheers me up, but I was just not feeling it. So I didn't go.

i have a question about an apparent effect of depression a friend of mine has - she has v little in the way of what she called the self-reporting of her body, in both the expected way of getting no pleasure from things that it seems are in an objective way 'good' (cognitive understanding not passing on to experience), but also the less expected way of never feeling hungry or thirsty, little acknowledgement of temperature etc. so i guess the question is just, is this a 'thing'?

is she on medication? like, is this a potential side-effect of medication? I definitely have a minor version of this.

Numbness to stuff both physical and emotional is a depression thing, yes!

totally can be a side effect of medication. i had to make some dosage adjustments a while back cuz i felt emotionally/creatively flatlined on the high dose i was taking. i'm better now.

unrelated: one thing i'd like to learn to deal with better is disappointment toward other people and situations. i can't make anyone else not be a shit, but i wish i could change the way i react to someone i used to like turning out to be a shit. it depresses me that it occupies my thoughts at all.

^^ this!

I think cognitive behavior therapy has been shown effective for that, but I don't have any first hand experience. Seems like the kind of thing medication in and of itself will not fix.

"behavioral", not "behavior", maybe? Goes by CBT for sure.

cbt comes up short when addressing a lot of the real life external-to-self things. it teaches you to turn negative thoughts into positive ones but it doesn't show you what to do when those positives may not exist.

(xp i've taken a cbt course.)

xposts yeah, she's on medication (venalfaxine), although the bad part there is that it's the third thing she's been tried on without much success. it's a pretty tough balance because before medication she felt terrible both emotionally and physically virtually all of the time, and now she feels pretty neutral all of the time, although in the former state she still managed to get things done and in the present state she's now working on a six month dissertation extension because she just hasn't been able to get anything out. hm. well she can at least be satisfied that it is indeed a 'thing', and hopefully bring up more medication modifications in her next doctor's visit.

It's not just a "thing" it's got a name, anhedonia. It is one of the principle symptoms of depression.

It being also one of the common side effects of anti-depressants, is something I find completely weird. It seems to me a poor medication that duplicates symptoms of exactly the same illness it purports to treat.

As I was looking for information on anhedonia as a symptom of depression (doctors sometimes use other related terms such as "flat affect": not displaying any emotions) I found some really useful factsheets from MIND. This is about the symptoms of depression:

http://www.mind.org.uk/help/diagnoses_and_conditions/depression#symptoms

And this one is about the synergetic effects of food and mood, something I always, *always* forget, when I get those terrible, out of nowhere "headache depression" type moods. For me, they're sometimes caused by blood sugar spike and troughs - I was at a birthday party on Friday afternoon and stuck a whole bunch of highly processed highly sugared birthday cake down my gob. Combine that with physical pain and a trigger and bang - filthy headache depression seemingly coming out of nowhere.

http://www.mind.org.uk/foodandmood/food_and_mood-the_mind_guide

(Phil, I just thought there might be something in there you'd find helpful, since environmental things can cause those out-of-nowhere depressions.)

And having read that second link a little closer, yeah, yeah, I know the idea of food-based treatment type stuff has got a lot of bad press on account of irresponsible quacks like Gillian McKeith but that doesn't mean that there aren't necessarily some genuine effects you can have from certain foods or the lack of them.

thanks k. i knew about anhedonia but not that it was associated with the kind of strictly physical things i was talking about (she actually gets headaches a lot too, ranging from the tolerable to the crippling 24-hour migraine), although it does make intuitive sense.

Antidepressants cured my anhedonia.

On another note, anyone here tend to mistake the symptoms of coming down with something with a bout of depression? It happens to me all the time, and it just happened to me a few days ago (I'm recovering from the cold or whatever it was now).

just sort of feel like if all i have to look foward to is working my shitty job or being on the dole, being lonely, gormless, boring and unattractive, getting drunk and consuming garbage media... then i'm already dead right? what's the fucking point? when do i actually get to feel like a fucking human being in my pathetic life?

Have you talked to a therapist yet?

lol i just spent ten weeks in therapy and it felt good at the time but any benefit seems to have just evaporated.

it's not like i'm nihilistic or i think life per se is shit... i just wish i was somebody else. somebody who had something to contribute, somebody other people actually liked, somebody with a future.

i think life can be beautiful and amazing, there are times in my past when i was so happy and optimistic. but i can't even think how i would ever feel like that again.

It's a vicious cycle--you feel like shit because of depression, so your life rots away, which makes you feel even more like shit. Are you still following your therapist's suggestions for improving your life?

This will help maybe not at all, but: IT WILL PASS. Everything passes, included the horrible bleak times. Just hang in there as best you can. Be gentle with yourself. You've already contributed and continue too contribute. You are liked, you have a future, a meaningful one. Hang in.

there are various ways of thinking more rationally about things, not being too worked up. but this doesn't really help when my depression is very stoic and british. "oh well. i'm shit, my life's shit... may as well just get on with things." i dunno if it's depression or just realism. i DON'T have anything to look forward to, and i'm a bit of a joke, end of.

this is ok as some sort of mantra, but it doesn't ring true or add up in a society where most people are taking more than they contribute and there really isn't any future for most people.

x-post

i think life can be beautiful and amazing, there are times in my past when i was so happy and optimistic. but i can't even think how i would ever feel like that again.

This is a pretty good alternate way to say the thread title, actually. The thing is, when you feel this fucked up and lousy, it's hard to remember how feeling good works. It's like if you had the flu for three weeks – you just kind of lose touch of a direct connection to how feeling hungry and energetic feels. That doesn't mean you are no longer capable of experiencing it, it's just too far away from your current experience to feel like a real possibility. But it is a real possibility. Someday you will feel less unhappy. I know it's hard to keep track of that or believe in it sometimes. This is the reason why I like when Charles Schulz said he takes his despair one day at a time.

xp

Maybe for most people life is more shitty overall than it is good overall. I believe that. I also think it is the best idea to stick around anyway. How I got there, I don't know. I think the other option (death) leads to more net shittiness, basically.

yeah... i dunno. just feeling low this weekend, thanks for the responses.

you need to come up with more invented demographic groups for ilx to analyse

hahaha ^^^ actually cheered me up

srsly tho

i've been on the look out for SSB signifiers but inner london is thin on the ground with SSBs (the city excepted, maybe)

i've missed this, can i get a pointer?

ps max, i don't want to ignore thread premise etc, but don't know what to say that wouldn't sound trite. all the best.

"Hipster" as pejorative.

and the next few pages of that