Depression and what it's really like

Sorry to hear this, both of you.

In mine own life, I've come to think of depression as kinda like cancer. One is never completely cured; one is only ever in remission. If it comes back, that is the nature of the beast, not a failing in you.

Depression is something like a susceptibility on a biological level. STRESS + biological susceptibility = BOOM.

Hope all of you can find something that works for you, whatever that thing turns out to be.

oh Abbs. i went on anti-depressants for the first time in my life this year because of teaching. this job is so hard. you're not a failure. i've been trying LL's advice of investing a little less in work and a little more in other things. i feel like a criminal about it sometimes. but living the way i did my first year is not sustainable, and i don't want to be miserable forever.

that wasn't really a helpful comment. i just know how you feel, is all. i am glad you've taken some time.

i feel like a criminal about it sometimes. but living the way i did my first year is not sustainable, and i don't want to be miserable forever.

that is exactly my point -- it's not sustainable. you know how when you're like 22 and going bananas and never sleeping and smoking and drinking (and ?) everything that crosses your path? (general "you" there) you knew that couldn't last forever too. some people postpone that realization, but living like that is not sustainable if you want to continue living. so...somehow i have used that logic of unsustainability to convince myself that throwing my entire spiritual self into my work, when the outcome is really out of my control, is actually kinda self-destructive. it was very clearly self destructive a few years ago. or so i have told myself since i started to pull back. better to give my profession and professional self the 40 hours it deserves and then go home and enjoy my activities of choice. Never ever let the work slip in quality or reliability, but don't spend every waking moment trying to improve it.

sustainable living, as far as lifestyle goes, is a long-term goal that is difficult for me. it's amazing how well everyday things go when i keep up positive routines and follow my personal rules, but it's letting really stupid small things slip that throws the whole system out of alignment. not life tragedies or accidents, but dumb things like not cleaning out the refrigerator.

I was eventually convinced after years of bullying at church and at school anyone who liked me was pretending

I was never bullied and sure as hell didn't go to church, but the belief in people pretending hits home pretty hard. It wasn't until I read it just now that I realized this is the basis of all human interaction for me.
So, uh, thanks?

Speaking of which, I last saw my therapist the week before Christmas. He decided to take me off my antidepressants and asked me to call in a week or to email/call him at any time if things got bad.
Well, they've gotten bad. Very, very bad. Besides frequent irrational emotional outbursts (which I think have made my children slightly terrified of me) my cognition seems to be going haywire. I keep falling down. Not Michael Douglas style (yet) but literally falling. I have bruises everywhere. Yesterday it took me a good 60 seconds to remember how to go from the lock screen to the home screen on my iPad. I just stared at it until finally 'oh slide it' worked its way to my consciousness. I work on mobile devices for a living and I couldn't remember to slide it. Not to mention it's written on the fucking screen.
I've tried to contact my therapist 5 times over the past two weeks. I've gotten his answering service, his receptionist twice, his voicemail and I've emailed him but no reply. I understand he is busy being one of the better psychologists in this part of the country but shit is starting to get fucking real. I don't want to go back on Zoloft but I need some kind of confirmation that this will pass. Soon. Or not at all? Was I like this before I started anti-deps? I can't remember. What do I do here? I mean what the fuck do I do? Help, ilxors, pls.

Did I mention I'm scared too? Like terrified 24/7 and I don't know what of.

Hi, sunny! I can't answer any of those questions but I love you and hope you get help/find ways to mitigate these experiences ASAP. I was feverish and sick the other week and had to get on and off planes and navigate airports and public transit and stuff, and the affect on my responsiveness was something like you describe: really long times to think about simple things; barely able to think of how to, for instance, ask for a glass of water; clumsiness; brain fogged by fever. It was terrible and I'm sorry this is happening to you.

I can't help thinking it does not seem incredibly responsible of your therapist to a) discontinue yr meds right before a major holiday and b) not be extremely available to you throughout this time.

It will pass. It's a thing.

I was eventually convinced after years of bullying at church and at school anyone who liked me was pretending

^^^ FEELIN THIS ^^^

xp yeah, that is what i thought as well -- it sounds like med withdrawal symptoms. I forgot to call in a refill at one point last year, so I was unmedicated for half a week, and I definitely had the physical balance problems and brain fog and emotional turbulence.

IO, I love you. Thank you Thank you Thank you. <3

YFAITCB - This pretty much nails it:

Physical symptoms include problems with balance, gastrointestinal and flu-like symptoms, and sensory and sleep disturbances. Psychological symptoms include anxiety and/or agitation, crying spells, irritability and aggressiveness."

— Journal of Clinical Psychiatry(1997) 5u (7):pp5–10[14]

This all makes me feel better but I don't like that wiki page's ambiguity with regard to this lasting days, weeks , months or YEARS.

Oh and "we" decided it would be just a peachy idea to take a break from Xanax at the same time which obvs isn't so peachy afterall.

sending u love sunny xoxo

veg xoxoxoxo

So you just quit taking them, he didn't have you taper off or anything? That's messed up.

I went off Lexapro last year and I tapered by halves every two weeks and I still had slight withdrawals. Hang in there, it will get better.

hey ss

is your therapist trying to kill you and your family?!?

I understand he is busy being one of the better psychologists in this part of the country

apparently not

you don't want to meet the other ones in a dark alley, is what we're saying

xp exactly what i was gonna post

sunny, this sounds terrifying, and it's totally shit that your therapist isn't returning your messages. can you get an emergency prescription for xanax in the meantime, like from your GP?

i wish i would go on drugs but i'm too much of a procrastinator to ever go to a dr. it doesn't help that they can all give you appointments in two months. i get that pretending to like you thing. part of the problem is i feel like i spend the majority of my non-alone time pretending not to hate people. these things are related.

imo you should make an appt, and if you still need it in two months then go; if not then say you have an appt and take time off work

that's good advice! also, based on this thread, all the best people think others are only pretending to like them.

I've tried to contact my therapist 5 times over the past two weeks. I've gotten his answering service, his receptionist twice, his voicemail and I've emailed him but no reply. I understand he is busy being one of the better psychologists in this part of the country

whoa whoa whoa this a total violation of the professional standards of his/her licensing body, I am certain. You don't need anything else on your plate right now, but this is the sort of thing that really should be reported to the board (by all means outsource the reporting part to someone else on your behalf--you just focus on you. And then dump the fucking asshole for an actual mental health professional). Totally unacceptable. Take care and please hit me up on e-mail if I can be of any assistance!

Echoing everyone else that this guy sounds unprofessional as hell. And SSRIs are meant to be tapered off to avoid precisely those crazy withdrawal symptoms.

Completely as an aside:

I was going to say something snarky like: "you're lucky that people pretend to like you; no one's ever bothered pretending with me (but clearly I'm not one of the "best people" blah blah etc)" but that's the kind of thought I have to interrogate these days. Because often when I'm experiencing that sharp, irrational "everybody haaaaates me" what I am actually feeling is "I hate this world, I hate this life, and everything in it, especially me" and project that hatred onto the people who are around me. (This is an exceptionally easy thing to do when there are places freely available on the internet where many people will openly express hate; that's a form of self harm.)

But I do have to wonder if that "everyone is pretending to like me" feeling is also a kind of projection. If it's an externalisation of a sense of alienation, of going through the motions, of pretending to like whatever situation it is one is living in? I don't know. That observation might be helpful, it might not be.

Sunny, your therapist seems to be a jerk, ditto BB on the tapered withdrawal - even with tapering, it can be a rollercoaster coming off them, cold turkey is *not* recommended.

To BB's aside - I know people have pretended to like me in the past, because other people have reported (X would rather you didn't hang out with the group, Y always slags you off when you're not there, type stuff), which says a *lot* about the reporter but is a horrible experience anyway.

Mostly I don't feel like everybody hates me. Just that nobody loves me, except my dad (hurray for dad). And maybe I do not love myself, and maybe that's actually pretty reasonable - I'm no more important or special than anyone else on the planet, nor your average rock or pigeon come to that. Which is all *fine* on a good day, but on a bad day I think nobody would mind if I stopped existing, some people would prefer it, & it would be an awful lot easier on me - and I can see why people find comfort in Jesus. (I've just had three weeks of mostly bad days.)

Aside to BB - not much I can say here but sorry again for being a crappy friend.

it seems likely to me that other people's feelings about us are partly contingent on a bunch of things - how well they know us, the context(s) in which they know us, their own frame of mind from day to day, and that any third party reporting back on what other people have said is filtering the reality of that person's attitude thru a whole nother set of contingencies - group dynamics, the relationship between reporter and reportee, probly a near-infinite list of possibles

which is to say that in lots of ways we can never really know what other people think about us, but also to say we're all in that same boat and maybe our reciprocal feelings are affected by that. and it's good to try and remind yourself that perceptions of perceptions of perceptions can turn into a hall of mirrors without getting at anything very solid, and if you genuinely like a bunch of other people then surely most of us are like that too?

i know that logic is a piss-poor approach to when we feel down about ourselves so sorry but i find it helps to remind myself that the way i see others is filtered a ton thru the way i see myself

Zora, the only thing I can say is, I'm really sorry that you feel like a crappy friend. I don't think of you as a crappy friend at all - if anything, you're one of the handful of UK ILX0rs who have made a consistent effort to keep in touch, even when I fall off the edge of the world - which makes you the opposite of crappy. It makes you the best kind of friend. The one who doesn't wait to be asked. Knowing you as well as I do, I think this probably has more to do with your feeling unloveable, rather than you *being* unloveable. You're a good person in a shitty situation; in my eyes, it doesn't reflect on you. (Though I know in your eyes, it probably does.) I am also in a couple of shitty situations right now which are making me kinda "bleurgh."

I don't disagree that there are people out there who will pretend to like a person, and badmouth person behind person's back - or *report* badmouthing for political reasons. That is unfortunately common - as common as how I said there are people who are prepared to hate *anyone* on the internet, and I will do as a target when they want someone to hate. But it's those moments when you deeply feel that *everyone* secretly feels a certain certain way about you, that might actually be an urgent message from your own secret feelings.

The one - and only - good takeaway I got from CBT (which otherwise was a wretched and damaging waste of time) was that that old truism - "when someone just doesn't like you, it usually says more about them than it does about you" - is capable of being completely reversed, as all great truths are. It is very easy to project hostility - or indifference, or "pretending to care" - that one feels oneself and cannot admit - onto other people. This can be the dark backing behind a hall of mirrors.

It's very easy for me, personally, to slip into self-loathing and self-pity and go "I am the most awful, useless person. Everybody hates me. See, X and Y and Z are acting in a completely hostile way towards me, that means *everyone* hates me!" Then I find out some missing piece of the puzzle about X, and discover, actually their angry behaviour towards me has nothing at all to do with me, and everything to do with some experience they are at that moment going through. (Or else the other thing can happen, and I can find out that Y and Z are being hostile towards me because they hate women/feminists/queers/immigrants/whatever else I can't help being, but that's not about me, either.) But when I externalise "X and Y and Z hate me, ergo, A and B and C hate me, too" that's not about A or B or C, that's about how I have come to recognise: that place is a harmful place for me! A, B and C don't hate me, I don't even hate A or B or C, but jesus fucking christ, I hate being in that space where all of them are, so I just see hatred everywhere." <- yes, I am thinking about a specific place when thinking about this example; I am thinking about my last workplace. It is certainly generalisable out to other experiences in my life! (including, LOL, yes, ILX) - so it might be a helpful insight to others - or it might not be and I'm a complete creep just projecting mine own experiences into places they don't belong! Either could be possible. I'm going to stop typing now because I don't think this is helpful.

p.s. Zora you are not a crappy friend. Again! ;)

CBT I've found hasn't been too great at getting at the root causes of depression. Like, it's techniques are helpful, but it's a pretty shallow approach IME.

I've struggled with the same damn stuff you guys are going through now... getting through it slowly. The only ideas I've found particularly helpful for this stuff come from Albert Ellis, one of the other founders of cognitive therapy. His approach is a little deeper and more philosophical than CBT, and he has some pretty brilliant workarounds for depressive shit. I know I've harped about him before, but his ideas are seriously the only things that have actually helped me in this wonderful journey.

A year ago I was obsessing about people hating me, not liking me, etc., and I stumbled on this article that kinda blew my mind. Tackling Your Dire Need For Approval

I just realised I think this probably has more to do with your feeling unloveable, rather than you *being* unloveable unloving.

^^^really easy mistake to have made but I think a pretty important one to rectify.

Sorry!

Thanks, I'll read your link, Spectrum.

oh hai everyone-is-only-pretending-to-like-me crew, you are good people on ILX and I am sorry that I have basically never contacted anyone outside ILX in 13 years of ILXing to be able to vouch for the same off-ILX; I am p. bad at waiting for others to make the first move, I suppose as a filter against pretenders, but really just as a bad and hypocritical habit, something I can point to to say "this guarantees that everyone is only pretending" while batting away any thoughts of "but YOU didn't phone either" with "ah but it's not my place"

and now, a deep breath, and a warning that the next post is going to be too long and too me-me-me and I'm sorry

Saw my therapist today. She's been totally nice and not criticised me outright (though maybe I need/deserve it) but was making the same "maybe this isn't the right time for therapy for you" noises I've heard from every therapist I've had.

It's true I guess, I've been mostly doing the homework so I am not 100% sure what exactly she's found disappointing, but I agree I've been halfassing it, not committing, producing the bare minimum for each CBT homework with a lame "I found this difficult" and no attempt to keep up with previous weeks' tasks on top of this week's half-assed one

or maybe it's just because my scores have barely shifted since I started, maybe I just need to fill in the first questionnaire with any new therapist at 40/40 bleak fuckin' misery and taper it down week by week so they can be all "but we've come so far!"

but I just, it's been 13 years since I first saw someone about depression and 23 years since I first thought that being dead sounded p. good but not worth putting any effort into, I've heard "maybe you're too low to fix right now, come back in a year" and "your scores are only moderate, you seem too comfortable to fix yourself, you're wasting our time" and, what is this "right time" I still need to wait for?

I agree I've been halfassing it, not committing, producing the bare minimum for each CBT homework with a lame "I found this difficult" and no attempt to keep up with previous weeks' tasks on top of this week's half-assed one...

...what is this "right time" I still need to wait for?

It seems to me like you are wanting them to take you in hand, bend you to their will, and fix you in spite of yourself. The right time, I suppose, is whenever you're prepared not to halfass it.

tough love

xp Well... I know. And it sounds so simple onscreen. I just can't find my way to lower all the barriers, a way to look at what is asked of me and go "I know exactly what that means and I can and will give it 100%", rather than convincing myself I don't understand, or I'm not getting it quite right, or it's not getting me quite right, or I was kind of busy and stressed this week but maybe next week, or...

I know, I've got to want to fix myself, I sound stupid and childish and I've brought it on myself, but it's frustrating and I felt like venting. (Although, I admit, it was the kind of venting that also is hoping someone here will take me in hand and write a reply which makes everything I need to do become perfectly clear and perfectly appealing, with a lightning bolt across the sky, a fanfare of trumpets and the presentation of the vorpal sword of self-determination, +6 to WIS, CHA and CON. That can happen, yes?)

That is all.

Yo veg embrace the unknown.

If the way forward were always clear, then being human would be soooooo much easier. Good luck, spacecadet. There doesn't seem to be any obvious blame here, just an unmet need and understandable frustration.

Sorry, I meant aps! Sending from laundromat.

Spacecadet, there's a time when therapists just say "maybe this isn't the right time for therapy for you" and there's a time for you to say "maybe CBT isn't the fucking right THERAPY for me" if all they care about is whether you conform to having improved on some NHS check-list.

Like, literally, one of the first things I said to my therapist, when we started was: I am bipolar. I am never going to *stop* being bipolar. There is shit I know and accept about myself which hasn't been fixable by anyone so far, so I doubt you'll make any progress. But there are some shitty things about my situation and my behaviour that I *need* to look at and try to change, before I get fired from another job. And she accepted that as the starting point, and instead of giving me grief about wanting to kill myself every session, she says "I'm rlly sorry you feel that way, I wish you didn't bcz I like you, but..." and then we go on to talk about the person I am *now*, suicidal urges and all, and handling situations with what I've got.

Therapists often like to turn it around and say all "maybe this isn't the time for therapy for you" when the truth is, therapy is a thing that takes two people. The place where the magic happens is when TWO people trust one another. If you don't trust your therapist to open up and lower the barriers and get at the realness of the shit that is eating you, it might not be ONLY YOU that is at fault. It might just be that this is not the therapist or the therapy for you.

I have had SO MANY shit therapists I can't even count them. But I had a good feeling about mine from like the second email, and when we met in person, she had Berenyi red hair, and tattoos on her hands and pirate boots and wore lots of things with swirlies on, and had a total badass attitude, and I looked at her and thought "You are not a bullshit therapist, you are MY PEOPLE" and the magic happened within like 3 or 4 sessions, and there was trust, and stuff started changing. I always thought therapy was supposed to hard and draining and awful, but even when it's difficult and deep, it's actually still OK and it's *easy* and there's as much laughter as there is weeping because we have *trust* not numbers and tick-boxes. If you don't look at your therapist and think "you are my people, you are on my side" why the fuck should you trust them or open up to them?

I don't even know what your therapist will be like. Probably nothing like mine. There is no one size fits all therapy experience, which is the bullshit LIE of CBT. But you will know when you find your therapist that they are *your* therapist, because you will feel OK with trusting them, first a little bit, and then a lot.

CBT is the signature dish of NHS mental health services at the mo i suspect because of its relative cheapness alongside what i believe is sound evidence of relatively high effectiveness in treating depression compared to other treatments BUT relatively high doesn't mean "this will work for everybody" and i worry that the current diagnostic regime is set up in such a way as to create a "CBT or gtfo" culture within the NHS

i've taken some things of use from it i think but i've never fully committed to it and there's no way that it should be offered as the only effective treatment for depression imo.

CBT is the signature dish of NHS mental health services at the mo

as in it's more popular than just putting people on medication?

my recent-ish experiences and those of friends suggest they assess you for CBT much faster than the wait to see a psychiatrist used to take but nah of course they give you the pills first, quickest and cheapest of all

yeah I got seen surprisingly quickly on this go through too, and whereas in the past they've questioned my not taking pills they were just like "oh, well, that's up to you" this time round. PS now I am questioning my not taking pills but I may take that to the pillz thread

I think I'm disappointed (in my lack of commitment/progress/trumpet-heralded epiphanies rather than her) because I do trust her. Or, I like her. That's not the same thing as trust or as her being right for me, but it's a lot better than I've had before.

On the other hand I worry that I like her because she's older, and... she's not My People, she's more of a mother hen, which I feel more comfortable around but it shouldn't be about comfort. And maybe I'm playing it for sympathy and a pat on the head, rather than finding the truth. And she's happy to fill silences while I nod, and that's more comfortable than the people who lay awkward silence traps to see if you fall into them saying something that they can pick apart, but maybe it's not as helpful. Eh.

feel like branwell bell is dishing out a lot of undeserved negativity toward CBT and therapists

what a relief -- was briefly worried that large health bureaucracies weren't the same after all! (Haha)

My HMO's process:

1. are you trying to kill yourself right now? if y -> emergency services, if n -> psychiatrist
2. psychiatrist makes you fill out a survey and talks to you for about 30 minutes or so, generally advises you to drink less alcohol, stop recreational drug use, eat healthier food, get exercise and get out of any domestic/work situation that is dangerous to your mental health. Then asks you how you feel about taking medication. Generally recommends medication.
3. psychiatrist will also recommend relevant group therapy meetings