Depression and what it's really like

Here's the thing: I have long valued this thread for its honest insights as to what it is like to suffer from depression; from its sincere support for those who are suffering; and for providing a thoughtful place to consider all of the issues surrounding depression.

Your heavy-handed, bull-in-china-shop presence here is not one I, for one, find valuable.

Thanks for your opinion. I will not comment on whether I find it valuable.

If you don't find it valuable, than stfu. If you do, try to be respectful of others.

*then*

"STFU"

"respectful."

Wow. Just... wow. Good day to you, Quincie.

I'm not sure if I'm just drunk, or if you're being kind of an ass, quincie. Either way, everyone else on this thread without this horrible arguing.

say what?

"everyone else on this thread *feels terrible enough* without this horrible arguing"

ah, true

surely depression is one of the foulest demons ever to crawl into a human !!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU1MAokrrUk

everyone else on this thread *feels terrible enough* without this horrible arguing

This is entirely true, of course, and I am sorry I brought it up. I'll stfu now.

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

haven't read last this so maybe this has already been taken care of, but give your pharmacy a call, explain the situation, and ask them to call the prescriber's office and take a prescription over the phone. even if the prescriber is not there, a nurse or medical assistant should be able to read his/her notes, understand the situation, and authorize a refill for a month's supply in the meantime

also, is this a psychologist or psychiatrist we're talking about?

do psychologists prescribe medicine in the UK?

No, in the UK your GP prescribes the medicine, but after a few months may send you for a review by a specialised psychiatrist, who will generally tell you to keep taking whatever the GP's already given you and send you away again within 30 seconds

you usually get referred to a clinical psychologist by your GP, and the psychologist can suggest that medication might be helpful or write to your GP (with your permission?) to suggest a review of your medication, but can't prescribe any or tell you outright to take it or not take it. at least, that is my understanding

sunny isn't in the UK though. hope you got it sorted out

prescribing in the UK is sort of odd right now - the government's been shaking up the NHS and one of their moves to "reduce red tape" and "give GPs more power" was to make GPs more responsible for prescribing medicines, largely because they're now responsible for the budget for prescription costs/community services/hospital treatments/etc.

so e.g. last time i went to the hospital and was prescribed a course of medication, the specialist there could give me a prescription for one item, but for the other (which i needed to take alongside it!) I was given a letter of advice to take to my GP to ask them to do the actual prescribing.

(and so i had to make an appointment with my GP in order to get them to issue the prescription and i felt like a huge waste of their time and money but at least got to dine out on my personal 'the tories are increasing waste in the nhs and here's how' store)

(*story)

wow that's outrageous

That is a pretty terrible idea! Is that true for inpatients too? Because on your first day out after major surgery there's nothing you want to do more than make appointments, go into town, see doctors, go to the chemists, etc.

(the two things I loved most about coming out of my last hospital stay were the big bag of codeine I was sent home with and the possibility of sleeping all day in my own bed to make up for the impossibility of sleeping through the night in a hospital)

depression + having a job is a bad mix for me right now. i'm in a weird, low place right now, plus i'm quitting smoking, so i feel like anti-social and shitty right now. my job environment is really social and i just feel like doing my own thing right now ... but that's like a crime or something. GOTTA BE SOCIAL. MUST HAVE SMILE ON FACE AT ALL TIMES. like it's a crime if I don't feel chit-chatty all the time. guess it's good that people want to talk to me, i just feel overwhelmed by the whole idea. the pressure just makes it a thousand times worse.

at the team meeting we were introduced to a new guy, and new guy said to everyone that it looked like I "wanted to hide". everyone looked at me with this mixture of pity, sadness, and discomfort. i wanted to deck the guy right in the face.

you should have, imo

i don't know if it's me or this job. other team members here have called me pretentious, weird, "maiden" since I work on fashion stuff and I'm a dude, etc. definitely didn't need this today i can tell ya that much.

eh, it's probably me

that sounds like a somewhat toxic workplace

maybe it is. two people on the other team we work with completely torment this one poor dude who has low self esteem ... they tried that shit on me when i first got here, too (which i was able to avoid). now that I think about it there are actually a lot of assholes at this job. i know i've gotta take care of my social presentation and all, but this environment seems filled with nutcases. wonder if that's not helping my depression any.

tormenting a dude with low self esteem? hilarious!

yeah. i can tell they have low self-esteem, too, and they bug me to hang out with them but it's like ... i don't want to hang out with people who treat others like that.

even random people I meet here are bizarre. this attractive woman i bumped into started talking me, and she's from a country another friend I had was from, and I mentioned I might see her on vacation, and this woman said, "use her up. use her for everything she's worth." and i was like WTF!? she's nice to me, too, and I think she's attracted to me, but I don't know if I want anything to do with people who say shit like that. i'm flaying myself for being anti-social at my job, but so many people i've met here are absolutely bonkers.

o_O

do you work with cocaine junkies?

lol. i wish i could say i didn't know what you were talking about Spectrum, but there are offices that are just filled with people like this. i don't believe it's just a coincidence; the people hiring at these companies know what kind of people they're gunning for.

ugh Spectrum, calling attention to a colleague for looking nervous should be acknowledged as a major first day faux pas in any job, sorry you seem to work in an environment where "it's all cool, bro, take a joke"

long emo post time, sorry - me 6 days ago:

"maybe this isn't the right time for therapy for you" ... mostly doing the homework ... but ... halfassing it, not committing, producing the bare minimum ... with a lame "I found this difficult"

Well, nearly time for the weekly session. We'll see how tomorrow goes. I've tried to do the homework (still found it difficult: evidence for/against thinking and one-word summaries of Emotion Felt always feel so lame, repetitive, ugh); it may not be up to her standards but I'll try to present it without disclaimer.

Thing is, every week I'm meant to fill in "key point to take away from this session" and then "what I found most useful over the week" and I've almost never filled it in, so that's probably a big reason why she thinks I'm half-assing it. But it's partly because I leave the session and have to rush back to work and put everything out of my mind and partly because, well, we just don't seem to have major key points. Which creates a vicious circle where she thinks I'm halfassing so she softballs even more and we just talk and there's even less to write on the sheet for next time so she thinks I'm quarterassing, etc. I think?

Hokay, back to trying to extract something from my memories of last week to fill in. I hope that I get more than one more session if she does cut me off so I can try to learn from this experience as to what I need to do differently, how can I know when I'm finally ready to make the change, etc.

Hi, aps! I have a really high opinion of your faculties and processing and expressiveness, because p much all we do around here is wave those things around, so you can try to divert this with some self-deprecation but I won't believe you. And what you say makes me wonder if this is the right therapy or whatever for you? Or approach or time or therapist--not to dissuade you from working on your things, JUST THE OPPOSITE, but you sound like you're either inhibited and holding back by not trying, or not very interested in this direction of change for yourself.

That's pretty presumptuous, I would love to be wrong, just what it looks like to me, which is that you're intelligent and thoughtful and would like to feel better and yet you don't seem interested in this as a project at all.

being required to learn a lesson on schedule would make me resist the 'hard work'.

maybe the idea is just to routinize self-awareness, render self-judgments in lowest-possible-stakes terms, so that you can acclimatize yourself to doing them without their being freighted with everything that keeps a person frozen, stuck by the way they are.

io your summary seems otm! but I don't know WHY I am not interested enough to work at it, or whether it is just inhibition/uncertainty, or how to change it either way

maybe the idea is just to routinize self-awareness, render self-judgments in lowest-possible-stakes terms

this seems like a good goal and maybe I am overestimating the import the weekly lessons need to have - maybe it is ok just to have found a small lesson or something obvious but worth remembering, write that down and bear it in mind and be able to say "this week I started to feel bad but I thought about this one tiny point from last week and felt 5% less sad"?

(this is going to be my approach for this week, so I'll see if it seems sufficient)

having to fill things out would be hard for me, and that's kind of the point as I surface a lot of my anxieties as procrastination in work/social life. basically I'm scared to complete things. I'm not sure if it's because I'm afraid of being evaluated or because I feel nothing is ever really _done_ so why try to complete any part of it.

think of completing the worksheet as a tangible goal at the end of the therapy session, maybe? or something that you allocate time to add to throughout the week.

I guess what I am saying is that perhaps it's not the summary of the therapy that is the goal of this exercise, but instead the actual completion of the worksheet?

yeah. i'm obviously the most important thing in my life, so i would find it very hard to dial that down and perform a little activity that appeared to be an insignificant, inconsequential version of what i'm caught up in constantly ('if i'm going to THINK ABOUT MY FEELINGS then i had better really get somewhere by doing it, not this worksheet shit!').

maybe your person should be giving the 12-step advice: 'work the program'.

In the past, I've written a trivial comment on ilx or elsewhere, gone on with my day, and suddenly had an epiphany about life -- the reason I think some stupid thing that I based my comment in turns out to be some belief I inherited from my family and never questioned. Sometimes just putting your thoughts into words on paper stirs up those neurons.

I surface a lot of my anxieties as procrastination in work/social life. basically I'm scared to complete things.

hey me too! except I might be scared to start things.

I shall try to, uh, gamify the completion of the worksheet in my mind I guess. Worksheet completed = every last chest on level opened, progress to next level, etc; writing on worksheet = signifier of engagement and progress aside from actual meaning of writing

Just write across the top: "I am not good at starting things, such as this worksheet" and roll from there

If I'm avoiding starting something and it's detrimental to me and against what I claim to want, which is to progress in some way, it's usually because I'm uncertain of next steps, unstudied in that skill area, haven't solidified my ideas, or am just avoiding the study/work of digging in EVEN WHEN THE TOPIC INTERESTS ME. It's SO self-sabotaging. Lately I've been taking myself to task with questions like "Is this who you are, someone who lets herself be beaten by the unknown? Are you going to make any difference for people's lives by being afraid of learning??" It's kind of self-shaming, I guess, but not as punishment, just to get my goals back in sight. Won't work for everyone obv, and my procrastination/avoidance is not clinically significant, just a personal tendency that I'm not proud of.

It's kind of a personality glitch that's common to kids who were told they were smart or put in accelerated programs in school, according to some studies. Being intelligent, you feel like you're supposed to instantly figure things out or do well at them, and when you're not you feel like a failure. So you avoid new things, or avoid starting things.

Oh huh that's interesting.

I keep meaning to read that Carol Dweck book on this subject, but (drum roll) not starting it

lol

<3 aps throw any ol fuckin answer down and slam it on the desk like a boss imo

that's the spirit!

from what i've discovered re: being smart, having a hard time doing shit like this is that when you're smart it's pretty easy to get far just half-assing it. at least that's my case. overcoming depression, particularly with CBT type methods, requires a committed, daily, long-term discipline that doesn't bear any rewards without 1) significant sacrifice of time and emotion and 2) doesn't deliver rewards easily or quickly. this makes it a pain in the ass for me to get through this stuff, too.