Depression and what it's really like

Yeah nothing stupid about it, lady! Pls look after yrself xx

Started to take some medication. Just this step is making me feel a bit better.

Sometimes over the years I had to go to the ER. Sometimes I felt stupid and weak and tried to sneak out. Sometimes I was almost dead. I never thought I had proved I was sick enough or worthy enough to get help.

Feeling like you might need to go the emergency room can be a good reason to go to the emergency room. Put my fate in someone else hand once in a while.

Yeah turning it over to others while so your brain can rest and heal is a good thing. Thinking of you, sunny!

I don't even know why I'm going to bother posting this, because a) it won't get noticed, and b) even if it does get noticed, so fucking what? It doesn't do an ounce of good, it doesn't achieve anything constructive and I still suffer constantly, day in and day out.

Suffering from chronic pain and weird un-associated symptoms of various other diseases which don't even seem to have names, people don't have much sympathy for you. I don't really want to go into them here, the chronic pain is enough and even then, you just tend to get blanked. in my experience any way.

My mother suffers from chronic depression and as such, she tends to monopolize most of the attention in my family. I don't want attention, but I just want to have a shoulder to cry on every now and then, but everyone is burned out by my mother enough.

life has descended into some kind of Kafka-esque nightmare where every conceivable exit is sealed off by walls covered in blank stares or seemingly nonsensical turning-asides of the thrust to find an answer. I go to the doc and he says, "nope, sorry, no pain medication for you, you have addiction issues, remember?" Stress seems to widen the area afflicted by pain and other issues, but once i relax again, the pain region does not contract, it remains static, as though it has burned its mark there and will remain forever and ever and ever and ever.

I don't know if that makes it psychological or not. I've gone long, long periods of time where I'm perfectly relaxed and happy, yet still it remains. No-one can find an answer.

it just makes me so fucking sick of life.

most of my friends have moved away. i have a dead-end job. i'm starting to realize various other fucked up things about my upbringing. i just feel full of hate and pain and anguish and wish i could just drop dead from a fucking heart attack or something, so it'd all be over. i don't want people's sympathy or concern, i just want a resolution, some answers. anything. anything. otoh, it frightens me that whenever i post or discuss this kind of thing with anyone, it seems to get ignored. like they supernaturally glaze over as though some puppet master bent on my destruction and suffering is pulling their strings.

oh god, someone, something help.

sorry for the rant/moan. i just needed to get it out.

I think your last sentence answers your first. Vent away, that's what this thread is there for. You didn't go into lots of detail here, but I'm sorry you're going through such stuff. Definitely feel you on the friends front, and some of the rest of that paragraph. I'd say try to make new friends, but since I've struggled with that myself I don't have much good advice! In any case, consider yourself noticed.

friends are useless for depression. depressive friends are even worse, because then you're BOTH lost to each other.

things that are not useless: hot sauce, wicked metal records, lightbulbs, big windows, cooking.

thank you Vinnie.

j, you're absolutely right and a ton of my friends are depressed. my parents are depressed. i just live ravaged by pain from day to day. will i have to face this for another 60 years. the last two have been hellish and sad enough. i just feel totally unable to deal with life. nothing is fun. everything makes me want to scream.

scream then!

i suffer from horrible cowardice in the face of other people's intractable problems - it's very easy to fall into the trap of just "politely ignoring" someone else's pain because you have no idea how it can be resolved but you feel like an expression of sympathy is insufficient.

chronic pain sounds like an absolute fucker - especially because so much of the advice around it can easily tip into woo and patronising statements of the obvious, which is the last thing you want when you're also dealing with depression. And not having a shoulder to cry on, feeling guilty and selfish for needing to take up someone's emotional time, is horrible. In the absence of a close person you can talk to, this thread's not too awful, I think, as a place to get some of it out.

AM that sounds thoroughly shitty and how would somebody in your situation not feel depressed, isolated, miserable? i don't have anything really helpful to say except whenever somebody vents on this thread it's proof that there are kindred souls in the world and that others can empathize your pain even if it feels like people in close proximity to you don't.

find something in you to keep fighting for and keep fighting, imo.

AM, have you tried seeing someone who specialises in managing/living with chronic pain on a mental level? I'm sure such people exist, it just doesnt sound like your GP is being much help.

AM, I'm not sure how thoroughly you have researched the issues you are dealing with, so I'm going to throw out two possible areas of inquiry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatization_disorder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_management

you should also be aware that there at least three (and probably many other, better) meds that are used for the treatment of both depression and certain aspects of chronic pain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duloxetine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellbutrin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortriptyline

since you are at the moment pragmatically and perhaps economically stuck in your current living situation, I would not be surprised if you were depressed. I list the above medications not necessarily as recommendations, but more as a reminder that there are many other people in your situation and treatment options exist. find yourself a psychiatrist/GP and a therapist if at all possible as soon as you can. they may not fully resolve your issues but they may offer solutions that will allow you to at least feel stable and secure enough to start taking additional actions for your self-care. if yr current GP is not being responsive, find another! chronic pain is legit and should not be dismissed in archaic terms.

Nothing useful to add except that you are totally noticed and I really hope very much that positive things come about for you, even little ones, to help your sitch. Also your GP sounds like a dick.

Mindbath, do you have a hobby or an outlet to express yourself? Perhaps it's cliché but expressing oneself can be very therapeutic. Some people will listen, I know I would.

thanks for letting me vent. I'm sorry I didn't get back to this thread sooner, but I've been trying to keep busy. I have a driving theory test in a couple of days, but don't feel particularly excited for it.

There's been a lot of good advice offered and I'm really, really grateful for that. I've started seeing a therapist for the past couple of weeks and I think it'll do me good. Hellhouse, I'll look into that about somatization disorder; I've always been an extremely anxious person. I do have physical manifestations of a psoriasis-like condition in my mouth, which causes lots of dryness and pain, and expands whenever I'm stressed, but then refuses to retract or disappear even when I have long periods of tranquillity. It has reached down into my throat in the past couple of weeks, so I'm constantly hacking and choking and once again, I'm not sure how I can address it, cause doctors have told me that they simply haven't seen anything like it before.

I'm not really mad at my GP, he is a good man who cares for his patients. He has not prescribed me painkillers because I've dealt with addiction issues in the past, but I should probably ask if he can at least suggest something else for me

Van Horn Street, I've always wanted to be a writer (lol) and have been pursuing that aim for a lot of my life. Perhaps I should get back into it more seriously, it would at least be a bit distracting. Maybe I can make something serious of it, or at least something of which I can be proud.

Thanks for all your advice again, it is *very much* appreciated. <3

http://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/8019B6/data.tumblr.com/007c3cf0385d8a710140c0277ab082f8/tumblr_mzrjpcbP4O1qisuj3o1_500.png

ha, i'm kinda upset this has been bumped again (although that strip is lol), because i am having a very, very dark night of the soul.

what can you do just to stop the overwhelming, white-hot intensity of anxiety and bottomless despair?

sigur ros' latest seems to be a slight balm...

there are a lot of things you can do

http://psychologyconsultants.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Activity-Planning.pdf

the dishes

xp - probably one of the pleasurable or pamper-y things, which it seems like you are doing with listening to music you like

What is the source of the anxiety?

I have been feeling really flat because I've done nothing recently except watch tennis, but I'm trying to read up on the players I'm watching that I'm not familiar with. Then hopefully I can join in usefully with the chat on the tennis thread rather than just waffling uninformed crap. The other night, I got really down, that anxiety and bottomless despair thing you mention, and I cried and screamed and hit my pillow for a while, then made myself a really good coffee and ate some biscuits and zoned out and played bejeweled blitz on facebook for about two solid hours by which time I was a bit more chilled and a bit less despairing. The screaming and crying helped get the feelings out of my head (if you can't cry and scream, I also recommend listening to the Ramones really loudly for distraction purposes. Or looking at video clips of kittens on the internet)

And I know it's not a cure, but it's a useful sticking plaster to get you by until you can find a better solution.

define a really good coffee please my usual techniques are all failing me lately

I have a schmancy coffee machine, so double-shot dark roast espresso topped with steamed full-fat milk and three sugars is my coffee kick of choice right now, but that's maybe not the best if you want a restful night.

i have as much chance of a restful night at this stage as do you i reckon, s-c-h-m-a-n-c-y ok got it thanks

:-)

Seriously, good coffee is one of my favourite things. I expect caffeine is not really the cure for a jittery mind, but at least it stops me zoning out completely from life.

I have one of these, requested in a rare moment of clarity when asked what I wanted for my birthday. Best present ever! Even the act of making the coffee starts to make me feel better.

http://www.staticwhich.co.uk/media/images/product/gaggia_cubika-plus-234902.jpg

i've been doing habitrpg which isn't really doing much for me except now i floss, but i imagine it could be interesting for some others itt

does it have fun bleepy music with whooshy-whirry sounds?

Ooh, that looks a decent concept at least. My GP and counsellor are trying to encourage me (unsuccessfully thus far) into doing some meaningful activity with my day rather than sitting around the house in my pyjamas talking shite on the internet, so maybe the game idea will spur me into actually doing it for myself? I'm terrible at routine, and love wasting time on stupid games, so turning my life into one sounds ideal.

it is admittedly fun for me trying to figure out how to balance it, i just haven't been able to yet -- i've not structured it so i'm in any real danger of "dying" or not having enough coins for my rewards, which aren't really that enticing anyway

if i were less depressed maybe (loooool) it could be a quality way to find (like literally determine) structure and balance in my life and also make "actually doing things" more tangible and accessible, but i'm worried that if i arranged it to 'force' me to do the new things i want/need to do in the back of my head and stop doing the things i shouldn't be doing until i've earned them, i'd just go fuck it and bail

ailsa, you sorta have to give into it -- which is a good thing (cause it's still YOU in control, it's just there to help) and a bad thing (cause it's still on you to follow through). imo the actual in-game stuff (buying swords and shit) isn't interesting or worthwhile, but maybe you'd be different. i also haven't messed with a lot of that stuff so i don't really know what i'm talking about.

you have some manner of control over the mechanics but it mostly determines reward/punishment based on how often you do a thing, so the more often you do something the less you get for it, and if you keep missing out on your dailies your health goes down exponentially. not sure how useful it'd be for doing just one thing as opposed to a bunch of things. but hey, now i floss. except when i don't want to. not much of a loss rn.

this all must sound v nerdy if you don't know what i'm talking about

i'm a second level cleric with 7 hp

I think I get it, and I might try it. What's the worst that could happen, right?

now dont be like that

"What is the source of the anxiety?"

just this hideous sticky feeling in my mouth that's been lasting for days. i have problems with the inside of my mouth which leaves large sections of it permanently sticky, sore and dried out, but it's not dry mouth. this has spread, thanks to a period of stress around new year, to my throat, tongue and uvula, so I permanently feel like I'm about to throw up, have a harsh cough, raw throat, feels like my uvula is constantly sticking to my tongue. add to that chronic pain elsewhere and you have one very miserable and frantic AM.

aisla and zachlyon, i hope you feel more positive soon. i whinge a lot, but i'm hoping to be there for others as well. best wishes to everyone in this thread.

drink lots of hot tea

thanks late great. I picked up a bottle of medicated mouth & throat relief today, so I'm praying that works for me. The fact that my uvula keeps sticking to my tongue is driving me utterly round the bend.

Today I think I will stay in bed and try to relax, which will be easy considering my cat has decided to flop over my right leg and trap me here.

the late great, thanks for the worksheet!

Honey is my answer for everything tbh. Not to be all woo-woo but I believe honey is really good for wound care--anti-septic and moistening and soothing.

It's either that or aloe, and I definitely don't want to eat aloe gel.

mmm delicious aloe drinks

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/jan/01/surgihoney-treatment-infected-wounds

IANAD or a med student even but here u go. Start gumming some nice honey and feel better soon!

It's been hard for me to admit it to myself but I'm depressed again. I'm not very skilled at noticing my own moods and emotions until they get really bad, and around Xmas time I started to notice it. Was considering going back to therapy, but it seemed kind of shameful to do so, which is somewhat hypocritical of me because I was unashamed when I was going to therapy, and I've encouraged several friends to try therapy. Logically I knew I should go back if I need the help, but emotionally it felt like regression.

Any thoughts about myself fell away when my father passed away unexpectedly a few days after Xmas. Thankfully we have a lot of friends and family who were able to help us get through things, but because he died abroad, there were a lot more complications and it required my mom, brother, and I to take an emergency trip to India. I didn't get too many moments to think until we got home about two weeks after his death. Even now, we're still dealing with some logistical things, but the whole experience has forced me to look at myself and realize that I'm still depressed, and was so even before he died. I'm gonna be starting therapy again, with the same therapist who helped me two years ago, but it's different than the last time. Previously we were working on my social anxiety, which I thought at that time was the cause of my depression. But the depressed feelings I've been having the past month or so aren't caused by anxiety, I don't think. We're gonna be delving into uncharted waters, which is scary for me. It's harder to find hope that things will be ok, but with my therapist's help I mostly overcame the social anxiety, so maybe we can do this too.

Anyway, I just needed to vent and make my own thoughts clear to myself. This year has been fucking awful. I've talked about a lot of this with close friends, but it's hard to be 100% honest with them.

is it bad that i don't feel as if i can confront my brother about his alcoholism?

depends what you mean by "bad"

@Chris: Well people train for some time to be professional alcohol counsellors so you shouldn't feel as if you have to just know how to do that?

Him being your brother probably makes it harder. So no, you shouldn't feel bad at all (in my opinion).

Chris, it would most likely be a pointless, if not damaging, exercise anyway.