Depression and what it's really like

i never heard of it until today

<3 markers. the national sibling day posts fucked me up too, for different reasons.

I'm actually quite glad "national siblings day" (no help for the international, I guess) is a thing, because good sibling relationships can be a very underrated and excellent support.

Still, <3 to those with absent, or departed, or estranged siblings. It's difficult.

<3 markers and <3 all of u

<3 my dear markets

I need good sleep to function well, to handle stress well, and to not get depressio symptoms bobbing up that I have to combat - shitty lies from my own goddamn brain that take so much energy to tamp out

Less sleep means increased likelihood of my "I am just to stressed out right now" rxn which is, embarrassingly, crying

Once I've cried there is a backup army of years waiting to be sent out at the drop of a hat

I do "all the right things" - needs, therapy, exercise, social links with loved ones, obsessively distracting my bad thoughts away with hobbies, three healthy hots and plenty of time in the chot

I take an ambit and sometimes a lorazepam before bed and my brain still wakes me up at 3 or 4 am

"You thought you could get me to sip ruminating, could you?"

I feel like I don't have depression but a personal demon that wants to tell me I'm terrible, unwanted, and to give up, a demon that wants to talk to me at night when I can do nothing to distract myself

Our all the "right stuff" I'm doing would work!

i don't know why brains work differently in the middle of the night but christ when the Fear comes that's when it does its worst

a personal demon that wants to tell me I'm terrible, unwanted, and to give up, a demon that wants to talk to me at night when I can do nothing to distract myself

Yeah I have one of these. One of the problems I'm having with the CBT I'm doing at the moment is there's all this stuff about distracting yourself when you start ruminating but this is much worse at night when I'm in bed and have no way to distract myself

thanks veg, daniel, crut, bb, nv, and abbott. fwiw i wasn't even aware "national siblings day" was a thing until i saw it on instagram late in the day, and i wasn't on facebook much either, so i'm just seeing a lot of it now. i'm not sure how much it affected me, actually. not too much? idk. anyway, please return to talking about depression, because ppl need this thread and my problems are mostly really not this one right now. shoutout to those dealing with this, though, and good vibes.

("this" being depression)

Yeah I have one of these. One of the problems I'm having with the CBT I'm doing at the moment is there's all this stuff about distracting yourself when you start ruminating but this is much worse at night when I'm in bed and have no way to distract myself

― Just noise and screaming and no musical value at all. (Colonel Poo), Friday, April 11, 2014 7:52 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I struggle w/ that because I find with distraction, my mind's too sharp to know what I'm doing and the O.G. thought lingers in the back of my head, taunting me. sometimes I find unpacking it and facing it head-on prior to the distraction helps me more, but there's always the risk of that making you think about it more.

it is a bitch how you often feel susceptible at night - this happened to me last night, in fact :(. lately I've kinda fought my fears by fighting instead of fleeing - ie, I'd been fleeing debates/arguments lately cos of self-esteem issues and a few weeks ago said "screw it, hang in there and ride it out" and actually wound up feeling better afterwards as I made good points and realized maybe I was dumb to be so hard on myself.

<3 to all the depressed on this board and may everyone collectively enjoy a wave of peace this weekend.

I need good sleep to function well, to handle stress well, and to not get depressio symptoms bobbing up that I have to combat - shitty lies from my own goddamn brain that take so much energy to tamp out

yes. It's so so bad when I undersleep, and I undersleep almost every day bc of the exigencies of caring for a loved one who is struggling with their own severe mental health issues. Sometimes my brain is attacking me so hard on the train in the morning that I can barely keep it together.

o man yeah the whole quality sleep cycle being integral to consistent mental health = truth

During depressive episodes, the normal logical mind is "hijacked" by thoughts and emotions of negativity and hopelessness. The depressed person lives ina cloud of self delusion. Life is not without its beauty and triumph, and if you can't see that you are being blinded from it. Suicide is futile.
― Mike Hanle y, Wednesday, October 10, 2001 8:00 PM (12 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As true as it ever was.

Intellectually I know I'm primarily suffering from culture shock concerning my new job. But the periodic flares of anger, and the enormous psychological and physical effort it takes to not lash out at my supervisors, are exhausting. Because I don't want to say "Screw you guys, I'm going home" to my workplace, I find myself wanting to say it to the world.

update on my bizarro therapist situation, as i'm sure you're all thrilled, and i don't want to take up too much more space on this thread.

i totally forgot i worked for the attorney general's office in my state, know the right parties to contact, and i'm the nephew of the #2 senior attorney general there. i think i'm going to call some contacts to file a formal complaint about his license. i'm also the grandson of the of the former mayor of the city he works in, who recently had a small monument and park built for him for his good works, and his supporters are still on the council and they've been bugging me to get involved with them in local politics. i might finally call them to see if we can do anything about this guy.

i seriously want to put some heat on his ass. not even just for vengeance, but for the fact that i can't stand people out there who are so willing to hurt people like that. fuck that shit. i have no idea what can happen, maybe nothing, but it's worth a shot.

my mom volunteers in the state attorney general's office's consumer protection division

nj?

lol, no

Please please do this, Spectrum. This guy belongs on the OTHER side of therapy, clearly.

Ok, I'm so out of my depth.

Life is nearly at a go. Our Prince's Trust loan for the business has been accepted and we should get it in a couple weeks and we have a small subsided office space waiting. Everything will be busy and ok from June onwards.

But my girlfriend's (and mine a bit, but its taking a massive backseat) depression has hit a pretty deep new low. She's barely left the house in a week and we are so poor that we can't really afford to do so anyway, even buying some milk is a bit extravagant atm. She signed up to do a screenprinting course with her last bit of money and it starts later today and... she has been in tears about going for like the past 2 hours. I try and talk to her or comfort her and nothing but more tears. We move room to room to have the same non conversation about it. It's horrible. Now I just need...

Ok half way through typing this out we talked again. She said straight out she's not going and I suggested going to the doctors and she ran away and locked herself in our room to loudly cry again. We've got like another 3 weeks of nothing in our lives. idk what the fuck to do. it kills me to see her this unhappy. Life is fucking shit and by the time it has potential to get back on track I'm worried she's going to be so much of a wreck that it won't even matter or make a difference.

I don't really know what you should do but I can empathise with that a lot & hope things improve for you guys. Maybe emphasise that the course doesn't matter, that none of this shit really matters outside of making the two of you happier

do you have access to a therapist? i have no idea what getting one of those in the uk would consist of

Having something of a bad time of it at the moment. Suicide attempt followed by four days in the looney bin. Feeling better now, but they pointed out it's only been fourteen months since my last admission. Can't keep getting lucky, can't keep this cycle going. Don't know any way out though. But as I said, feeling better know, really. Still down, but without forced/intrusive thoughts. Feel terrible about my friends and family having to put up with my shit.

oh guys, keep on fighting, keep asking for help. i know that feeling of being a burden, remember it's a story you're telling yourself. i really hope everybody can find what they need to be well.

so sorry dudes

update- she didnt go but might go next week. we did a bunch of household sorting out shit instead and stopped arguing over nothing. today is another day. neither feel great but you gotta try and find something. dowd that sucks but glad you didnt die, suicide attempts aint a great place to be /understatement :)

best wishes to you both, and to you too, dowd, i'm really sorry you've been having such a hard time. please keep getting help, your life is worth it.

we need you to stick around and chill w/ us

great, my stupid brain's doing that thing again where it keeps analyzing things and i end up seeing reality as a meaningless, chaotic void. which it is. sometimes i wish i could jab a metal rod into my head to stop it. no matter how many distractions i can come up with, how many pleasures i can fill my life with, how many lies i can tell myself, all i'm doing is running from the true nature of things.

i really wish i could believe in religion again, but that's not gonna happen. the true nature of life is the void, and diversions can only help you forget it for so long. all that protects you from this is how long and how fast you can run, and even then you'll be swallowed alive by it no matter what you do. so what's left with that ... how well you can lie to yourself? i'd love to lie to myself that none of this is true, but i already know i'm lying so i can't trick myself like that.

oh to have a life filled with so many distractions i'll never see this again... distractions, pleasure, lies, let my life be nothing but these to protect me from the truth for so long that i won't even know that i'm dead.

it's funny, one therapist i had i shattered that poor woman's sense of reality when i innocently told her what i thought about life. it was sad to see how much i crushed her just by telling her my own beliefs... or it was weird to see how much a person could be crushed and disturbed by the way i think. but i wish i had her resilience in lying to myself. i'd love to get a lobotomy or something, or maybe do so much LSD to go completely nutty. blech.

ah whatever, i'm just going to enjoy the silly, absurd dance of life. i can post this bizarre shit and it'll fade into nothingness at the same moment 5 billion years passes by and this planet is obliterated by the sun. it's only an illusion of our minds that creates the distance. http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/25164iD7348D641E4387E2/image-size/original?v=mpbl-1&px=-1

do you really think you shattered a therapist's beliefs about the world through what you said in one session?

I liked "tune yards" recent tune, "Hey Life" – it had a lot of little bon mots for the depressio mid. "Hey ==life – Why do you keep me around??"

i think a lot of therapists probably hear quite a bit about the chaotic meaningless void tbh

xxp dunno if it was that extreme, but she said "i don't know what to think anymore" and seemed really weird after the session i was referring to. she was cool a little while after that, though, so it didn't really "shatter" it i guess. just made me feel really awful! like, is that how powerfully negative my own thinking is??

Your therapist is a human being.

So are you.

Flaws, cosmic shit, etc.

yeah, maybe this is the sort-of crap that's troubling for everyone! i'm not immune to it, my therapist isn't, no one is. guess we're all together in it!

Yup

It is ridiculously easy to view life and the universe as meaningless collisions of matter in a chaotic void. Doesn't make it true.

~bad weekend~

reality as a meaningless, chaotic void

guess it's a question of perspective, but it occurs to me that nothing logically follows from this. say it were true - what you do with that truth is more your decision than ever, not less.

We are all in it together. I had a therapist say that to me once...no one is in such perfect mental and emotional shape that they can live lives without their own issues. If people were that strong, we'd have a different world. I swear... if only a handful of people were that strong, we'd have a different world.

Had a bad weekend full of junky thoughts and shitty ponderings all directed towards making me feel bad about myself. I know you are supposed to choose thoughts. I need to learn to do that. Bought vitamins because I have a B12 thing and that could be most of my issues. Never underestimate plain ole nutrition. Thinking midlife? Then again I had something like this at 23, 33 and now I am 43 so maybe it's my own personal cycle?

NV otm. I feel a lot better in life thinking that there's no universal meaning or truth that I'm screwing up or missing out on, but instead meaning comes from what I personally put value in.
I guess that in moments of feeling down it helps some people to think of a specific thing larger than themselves, but that's never really been for me.

Just knowing that the world is out there, doing whatever the heck it is, is always reassuring to me.

mh and Noodle Vague both otm. I realize neither are purely talking about 'religious' influence, as the idea of a universal truth goes beyond that scope. But I'll say this: I was at my most miserable when I was a teenager who was a god-fearing individual who believed there was one incontrovertible 'truth', and if I chose not to follow it, I was clearly damaged. I even used to 'punish' myself for any time I would stray from the path, whether it be telling myself I was a horrible human being, or denying myself pleasure in retaliation for the specific transgression.

I was always miserable and it came to a head when I was about 16 or 17, when I finally was exposed to outside thought and realized my misery wasn't due to feeling like I failed in my universal mission, but because my psyche was telling me "THIS IS NOT FOR YOU!!!!!") (/Vedder).

I like the idea of identifying my own purpose - one which is still fairly strict in some senses, but it's *mine*. Even today some of my more spiritual friends ask me if atheism/agnosticism isn't depressing because it makes our lives 'meaningless', I think it's empowering as all hell to be able to define what I'm here for rather than having it dictated to me. I also like that it can evolve over time - my ideals and life goals in my 30s are nowhere near what they were in my 20s.

It also forces us to deal with life in the here and now. I'm tired of seeing shitty people doing shitty things and hearing platitudes like "karma will pay them back in the end" or "everything happens for a reason - they'll get theirs in the afterlife". No they won't! I don't think things happen for a reason, I think life is purely random, and that we need to hold people accountable for shit here and now. And we should quit shitting on the planet so future generations can prosper rather than saying "well Jehovah's gonna take us all to a big shiny palace anyway, idgaf if the ice caps melt".

i think meaninglessness and boundless freedom of purpose can be terrifying too, but i don't think the connection between that feeling and the internal narrative of depression is a necessary one. i think there's a definite sense of anguish/tension/blue when you feel forced to do things you hate against a background devoid of meaning, but like i said, i think yr perspective can be moved

absolutely NOT trying to diminish your experience of yourself and the world, Spectrum, want to make that clear

but this sidetrack has made me think about the ideational aspect of depression, and how it might connect/disconnect to biochemical aspects of it - how what we tell ourselves why we feel alone and empty might partly be an accounting for ourselves, to ourselves, after the fact

my depression usually manifests as the idea that I'm screwing up someone else's life or experiences, or that there's an expectation in ~the world~, not just my job or life, that I'm not fulfilling.

nice to go on vacation to a large city and just kind of take in all the things that are working, or not working, regardless of my actions

yeah, i feel that

thanks dudes, it's good to know i'm not alone, and that there are better solutions to these issues than just despairing about them. that's the challenge i'm facing now, figuring out what i want to do with my life, how i'm going to do it, and reconciling with the fact that the only meaning in life i'll probably find is self-made, self-directed, and self-fulfilling. that's totally new stuff for me! which is why i probably found it easier being religious when i was younger. just another hurdle to jump over, i guess.

totally relate to the self-punishment thing neanderthal, i forgot how much i used to do that back when i practiced. there was a lot of baggage and harm that went along with religion that isn't there with not believing anymore. but it's funny, i still punish myself a little bit when i stray from my values, which can be OK if it doesn't get too bad.

I kinda feel mh in regards to being afraid of fucking with other people's experiences. like I feel unusual levels of guilt when I wrong someone. I STILL remember this one night I made a girlfriend cry years ago and feel immense guilt over it, even though the girl (now an ex, still a friend) in question forgave me years ago.

for instance, tonight I saw this guy at a local theatre festival. This is a guy who has two kids, who recently got divorced because he'd been cheating on his wife for years and finally got found out. He was at the festival, chilling, looking completely relaxed and at peace. albeit I know that I have no idea what was really going on in his head or context, but I was thinking if it were me, I'd be so racked with guilt I'd be basically unable to function.