Depression and what it's really like

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.

do you think you'd have been happier/more productive in a montessori environment?

If you are in the 99.9th percentile of any category, it is rather futile to expect others to match or reflect your own abilities in that regard. It would be like Lebron James playing pickup games in Ames, Iowa and being disappointed when his teammates are a bunch of no-talent scrubs. He could show them exactly how the game ought to be played, but for obvious physical reasons, they will not be able to follow him.

However, this analogy is possibly misleading because Lebron James was lucky enough to be enmeshed in a system that not only identities those with extraordinary talent, but also helps the ultra-talented to develop some very specific, external, measurable skills. Those of us with broad mental aptitudes such as verbal reasoning are more often left to fend for ourselves. (Although, it occurs to me that in many ways elite universities play the role of scouting out ultra-talented individuals, developing them, and connecting their star players with the big leagues in all kinds of fields.)

In any event, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is not to pine for everyone to understand you and appreciate how you think; they won't, any more than they will play ball like Lebron. Rather, it is to discover how to leverage your internal talents and abilities into skills you can apply throughout your life, to meet every kind of goal you have. The key part is that you get to choose those goals yourself and prioritize them. All those expectations that you have and others have for you need to be sorted according to what you want out of life, nothing else. After that it is mostly down to effort and uncountable mid-course corrections.

Spectrum, kinda similar deal, sounds like. Always did great on verbal aptitude tests, told I was "gifted" all the time, but was always really undisciplined. Parents had minimal involvement in what I did, and I was never intrinsically motivated. I've always been highly distractible, emotional, perfectionist, and tending to depression, and really could have used some whip cracking. I had only one teacher in high school who called me out and told me I wasn't that smart. She ended up nominating me for the governor's honors summer school thing after torturing me for a year. (Didn't get in because I was a pretty solid D student by that time.) Anyway, I've always been really feckless and mad at myself for not being able to go through the motions or figure out what I want to do.

Re: not relating to people, I have to wonder if you don't live somewhere kinda lame. Maybe you should try to move somewhere with more freaks.

to be honest i'm creeped out by people who figured out at an early age what they wanted to be and stuck to it.
like i don't think g. gordon liddy was depressed for a day in his life, even when he was in prison.

there's a lot of "i'm broken" sentiment on this thread but maybe you guys aren't broken -- it's the lebron jameses of the world who are broken?

Framing things in terms of "broken" or "functioning" seems wrong to me. My daughter barely functions in terms most people can see or appreciate, but she's not "broken", either. A talent or aptitude is just an opportunity, not a destiny.

Got approved for foodstamps, saw pdoc today. Found a weird jawbone of some animal next to the parking lot at dr's office. Took a nice, long walk. Don't feel utterly doomed today.

I also taught myself to read around age three and scored the highest scores on all the standardized tests, realized waaaaaay too late that the real world doesn't actually care about those things that much. Which is what parents and counselors are for. I just didn't have any that knew what to do. I've told my pedagogical history to a few professionals and they've all had the same "jesus, they really dropped the ball, huh" reaction.

Which is just to say that I can really sympathize with what a lot of you are saying.

what would they have done ideally?

I'm not entirely sure, but I know that growing up I thought that being smart was the most important thing and that since I had that in the bag I'd be fine and happy and successful no matter what, and that view was implicitly supported by pretty much everyone around me. I knew that other kids had to do their homework and study but all I had to do was stay half-awake in class so I could get an A on tests and quizzes and maybe fill out the worksheets during the lecture. I took that attitude way past grade school because by then it was a fully-developed worldview. Add adolescent stubbornness and I didn't really get that it wasn't working until I'd amassed enough F's and Incompletes to make it a moot point.

Anyway, I really don't just want to barf out my school history, I just get it and wouldn't be surprised if this was a factor in a lot of depresso-ilxor's histories. Much like the over-thinking that's been discussed here before, I think there's a very familiar pattern in a lot of depressed former smart kids.

so if you all were scooped up by some bela karolyi-esque life coach to browbeat some kind of trajectory with your talents, that would have been preferable?

Doesn't have to be anywhere near that extreme. Smart kids just need to get a better grip on what smartness will do and what it won't do. F'rinstance, good test scores won't stand in for genuine accomplishments. As one of my high school teachers memorably told me, "Aptitude just means you're apt to accomplish something one of these days."

I disagree with kay, being smart is valued when you're in the right places. When your brain stuff gives you a seat of the pants closing statement that makes the judge's jaw drop and helps win an otherwise impossible case, that's nothing to sneeze at. or when a Washington DC bigwig buddies up to you because he liked your ideas. Thanks to depression I totally bungled the opportunities that opened up to me, it's impossible for me to accept this good stuff and i just compare myself to everyone and fail in some way or another. no matter what i was like i'd probably find some problem with it. I think kay's right, though, in that it's not everything... friends, family, love, all that shit's more important, but seeing great things possible right in front of your nose and then letting it go to shit is some high level of misery.

emily, you're on the ball with the freak thing, life was much better in nyc. i'm trapped in the burbs now and it's soul crushing. good to hear you're feeling less than doomed today ... i'm convinced there's a light at the end of the tunnel. wish i could offer more in that regard.

Aimless, your advice is great. I never thought about things that way. All my life I dreamed of being Uncle Ned in that very special episode of Family Ties, and unfortunately it became close to true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlLvS1vH9Tk

anyway, i feel like i'm being selfish here, so i'm going to chill and take a bubble bath or something. i appreciate all the smart ilx folk for contributing, it's good to talk about this stuff for once... feel like if i tried to tell this to other people they'd think i was some high falutin' prick.

wait are we positing that depressed ppl are frustrated geniuses?

i mean damn straight i'm a genius obvs, but i think there's a bit more to it