Depression and what it's really like

lol love that, crabbits

feeling somewhat less stuck today. it's been achieved mainly by simply not brooding so much on myself. trying to really focus on other people, genuinely so. truth is, i could spend several lifetimes bemoaning my problems and shortcomings. no lack of grist for the mill. but that way madness lies.

distraction is the way

I dont know if I am depressed or not. I have always felt powerless but accepted it and internalized it. Now im doing something different, a career change, a new start. But what should be empowering I'm finding very challenging and I feel quite despondent a lot of the time which I never did before because I lived in a bubble of pretending the real world didnt exist.

I'm engaged, im not procrastinating, I'm throwing everything at it because I feel if i stop, it will be over. All of it, not just this but everything and yet I welcome that feeling. Ive had enough! Ive been living away for a short time and can go days without speaking to people and...Ive realized how much I love it! Silence! But im in a bubble, I'm living off savings and eventually I will have to return to the real world and I'm not sure that I want to, especially with an uncertain future that I'm not sure I'm going to be able to manage. Can i really be bothered? Wouldnt it be easier just to disappear?

disappearing is a warm fantasy

seems very strange to me that some people don't get depressed

makes me wonder a lot about what makes someone susceptible really

Genetics, for one thing. Possibly for a lot of things.

~genetics~ is a kind of a hand wave

even when those mechanisms are better understood I still suspect that the sort of explanations offered will be incommensurable with any sort of first person experiential or psychological account

depression feels like such a thoroughly integrated part of people's personality that you need to account for it on the same terms you do with other facets

I'm sure completed neuroscience will make it all perfectly clear

i agree with you somewhat, ogmor, but that completely denies the existence of depression for those who have it for a limited amount of time
even if most of us in this thread are the other kind, that is, afflicted with the curse until death

In the broad context of my adult life as a whole, I'm currently doing great. Feeling steady and fine and generally happy, in a good relationship, things are relatively stable in my life, can't complain about much except the stupid job that I really need to move on from already. And yet I still think with a good deal of regularity, "I am fundamentally and irreparably damaged, and it really would be better for everyone if I weren't alive". I guess the only major difference from when I've been actively mired in depression is that those thoughts don't currently have the dreadful gravity that they've had at times in the past. But they never seem to go away completely. I guess I'm at least thankful that, from my present vantage, I can be all, "huh, what's that about?" But still.

In the same boat as you, Old Lunch. This has probably been the longest I've gone without backsliding deep into depression (it's been about six months now) but the thoughts never go away, they just become easier to ignore. In these good times, I am able to counter with opposing good thoughts. I also try to tell myself that when I inevitably fall back into the hole, that it will just be temporary (as it always has been), and that I can pull myself back out, but no amount of self-praise, plans, or good thoughts seems to get paid forward to the depressed times. In fact, I am still not sure how I've gotten out of the hole in the past.

Does anybody here with moderate to severe depression have to travel a lot for work? I'm getting so I can't stand it anymore...have to leave in two days and I'm totally immobilized by the prospect

When shit is bad I have a hard time convincing myself everyone doesn't secretly hate me, and hang out just out of pity.
I get sensitive; I get paranoid that people are shitting on me behind my back – even though my mom always told me 'you're too boring for other people to talk about.'
A little boy waves at me on my scooter and I start crying; I get mad that I read so many stupid Glass family novels. Is that what fucked me up? I feel like I am a bullshit.

I experience a lot of happiness but part of me is always ready to second-guess it unless I am drunk.

in the future when they complete neuroscience mb someone will be able to understand all the different hues we bracket under depression in some that vocabulary but I'm too much of an atheist to be comforted by the invocation of future omniscience & I don't think it wld be in terms that were meaningful. everyone's experience of depression is so individual, whether fleeting or long-lasting, reading about them they feel unfamiliar more often than familiar

in some that vocabulary

Today is a day of creeping existential dread. I spend so much time worrying about what I'm doing with my life that I end up hardly doing anything. I know I'd ought not compare myself to others, but I can't help but feel like such a loser sometimes--I'm in my late twenties and still have nothing that even approaches a "career." My old friends all seem to have found decent niches for themselves--teaching, web design stuff, music, etc. Some days I have this aspiration to be some kind of writer, and other days I feel like I want nothing more than to contribute just *some* thing of value to this planet but somehow it feels impossible for me to do so. I can't figure out what it would even mean. I don't want to live a life of mere existence and taking things from the world; I want to contribute, but it feels so often like I have nothing of value to contribute at all. I'll probably feel fine later, but I needed to vent somewhere.

That all sounds very familiar (except, y'know, late thirties with nothing resembling a career). I'm realizing that at some point in the not-so-distant past, I came to accept existential dread as a fact of, if not human existence, at least my own existence, and I used it as a starting point for rebuilding myself from a point in my life when I'd truly turfed out. Like, if I accept that everything is essentially devoid of meaning and human beings basically only exist to squirt out other human beings and to ultimately fertilize the earth...what then? It's been hard work, but I've found it incredibly helpful to reframe things such that the imprintation of meaning/value is and continues to be my own personal choice, realizing that I spend a lot of time beating myself up because I'm failing to live up to some imagined schematic that doesn't necessarily make sense to me and that I don't necessarily agree with. Yes, I'd love to find a path that feels meaningful to me personally, but it isn't helpful to allow some nebulous (and very likely imagined) aura of outside pressure to muddy the waters of what I personally value.

feeling this

http://gawker.com/winter-is-a-black-hole-how-i-deal-with-seasonal-depres-1652408745

http://thebaffler.com/salvos/endlessly-examined-life

reading that now, feelings of existential terror rising

Once I start crying there is a certain inertia to it, and it's very difficult to get it to stop. Fall asleep crying one day; wake up crying the next.

Not that it's necessarily what you're feeling, but that reminds me of this insightful part of Hyperbole and a half's post on depression (all of which is excellent and would make a good pamphlet for friends who can't wrap their minds around depression)

.... I rediscovered crying just before I got sick of hating things. I call this emotion "crying" and not "sadness" because that's all it really was. Just crying for the sake of crying. My brain had partially learned how to be sad again, but it took the feeling out for a joy ride before it had learned how to use the brakes or steer.

pretty much just want to be asleep all the time

tbh i am really good at it

#viking

good to see your sense of humor has not totally disappeared under a blanket of despair

sometimes it's an unidentifiable fear so intense you think it's going to kill you

but it never does!

true. but still feel horrible

i know that fear very well, it is dreadful.

Sometimes wonder if sleep apnoea is my brain attempting to commit suicide while I'm asleep.

Sorry but lol

I wonder how much quality of sleep tends to affect mental health, w/r/t stuff like apnea and light sleeping b/c of aches. How does it affect people and I wonder how it affects me in particular, what w/ my snoring/almost-apnea.

I think this week I will finally schedule throat support implants. Quick and easy. That just leaves my deviated septum, which sounds as horrible as my tonsillectomy (truly awful). Maybe sleep will be the cure of oversleeping.

I wonder how much quality of sleep tends to affect mental health

very very much

hard to say which is the chicken and the egg

in terms of causation maybe but i think it's reasonably well-documented now that inadequate sleep fucks with your mood, even if your mood was already low

the first 6 or so weeks after i was officially diagnosed with depression/anxiety and started celexa, i was also taking klonopin to sleep and holy shit i was getting such a great sleep every night - 6-7 hours of extremely restful sleep - that i thought i was actually cured. i had more energy and motivation than i've had in my entire life. i wanted to DO things, and go places and clean my house. it was the best i've ever felt in my life, but it's gone now and i'm just back to regular old me, which really sucks now that i've had an actual taste of the good life.

"Psychiatrists have long thought that depression causes insomnia, but new research suggests that insomnia can actually precede and contribute to causing depression. The causal link works in both directions."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/curing-insomnia-to-treat-depression.html

get yr sleeps if/when you can, frenz

This article went into more detail:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/health/treating-insomnia-to-heal-depression.html?pagewanted=all

Have made docs appt about apnoea. I've only had it about 10 years but maybe I should actually do something about it rather than moaning.

I don't know if it's the primary cause of my woes but I was really messed up Monday and especially Tuesday when I wrote that and I was extremely foggy and tired then. Went to bed very early all week and I think I'm out of the worst of it now. My depression does seem quite sporadic, but fairly frequent still - I get massively suicidally depressed one day then the next I'm OK if a bit shaken (I likened it to a depression hangover yesterday) - maybe my medication isn't the right one I don't know, I've been on it for 12 years.

Ugh I had weird sleep issues during my most uh "major" depression, things I'd never had before or since, which I have probably already detailed at tedious length in this thread. I'd be in bed for 16 hours but not feel at all rested, have dreams that I was waking up and needed to get up and couldn't and then I'd finally get up and make it across my bedroom only to realise it was only a dream and I was still asleep and still needed to get up, etc. That two-way link definitely sets up a vicious cycle.

Take care everyone. Hope the doc is helpful to you, Col Poo.

I am basically not depressed atm but for various reasons it might be now or never time for me if I want to go back to university (I don't know if I do), which is where I first had a total depressive breakdown which lasted years and I am very scared of it ending up the same way, because I don't think I've resolved any of the issues that contributed to it. Like no matter how good or bad my mood is or those not-quite-definable things which more or less constitute "depression" to me e.g. does everything feel pointless and grey and exhausting, do I burst into tears to a perfectly quotidian not-even-a-real-question "how're you" - even if not I still feel drifty and brainfoggy and never able to concentrate or get anything done, but psychologists always say "oh that's just depression". Well OK, but then why doesn't it go away when I feel not so bad?

I've always had problems with insomnia, often caused by ruminating over things I feel guilty about from my past, which are usually totally insignificant faux-pas or sometimes actually shitty things I did, often from when I was a teenager, which at 38 is probably a bit silly. But after doing CBT earlier this year that has eased up slightly, I still do it but can sometimes fight it off. This week I've been so tired that even ruminating couldn't keep me awake but I think my quality of sleep must be so bad it doesn't matter. I wake up several times a night routinely. I'm not overweight so I don't think I have the obstructive type of apnoea, more likely the one where your brain just forgets to breathe, which is what made me think of it being my brain trying to die in my sleep, but IANAD.

aps, laborious dreams are terrible. I don't understand "oh that's just depression." If it's depression then it's not something to downplay.

Re sleep, I rarely have insomnia, but when I have, it has definitely thrown my mood for a loop. My problem is poor quality sleep, especially since I've been sleeping on my side for about 15 years and now my shoulders are hurting. Hoping a new mattress + throat support implants (to help me breathe better and allow me to sleep on my back) will make things better.

I've had two sleep studies done and they found my problem didn't quite meet the standard for apnea, so insurance wouldn't pay for implants or other procedures. Current insurance is HMO which basically pays for whatever my a PCP-referred special suggests, so hoping for the best.

Nono, depression is definitely not something to downplay and I'm sorry if my post read like that! By "just depression" I meant that they tell me it's a side-effect of depression and that I just need to do my anti-depression CBT and then I'll be fixed. Except that even when the depression goes away, as much as it ever will, my problems getting anything done (without my head feeling like a load of marbles spinning round and round and oh wait it's midnight and time to go to bed with this work still undone) don't go away.

I also sort of mean "wahh no healthcare official will even entertain the thought that I might have ADHD which could've made me depressed in the first place" (my GP doesn't even believe it exists) but I acknowledge that they know best, I probably don't have anything, I am not a special snowflake just a lazy bum, etc.

My ex used to stop breathing in the night. It would unnerve me and I tried to get him to go and see someone about it a few times but I guess it wasn't actually disturbing his sleep because he always seemed totally unconcerned.

...and since I'm only making things worse, "just need to do my anti-depression CBT and then I'll be fixed" I'm exaggerating here too as I never was much good at CBT. I know that it's hard work and not a miracle cure and that it does help lot of people

I should stop saying things

I am just kind of frazzled because I'd always had a little daydream at the back of my mind that maybe I'd get a degree one day when I was ~fixed~ and ~suddenly woke up one morning what I actually wanted to study~ (and also suddenly had a lot of spare money) and now it's like, oh yeah, I might need to do this thing now, or not ever do it at all*, and I don't really like reality that much

for a person who "doesn't have depression" I sure have babbled a lot on the depression thread, shitting it up for everyone. sorry folks, thanks for your patience, sorry for being a big rambling crazy jerk, I'm out

No not at all! I just thought that your therapist was saying "whatever, it's just depression," which seemed like a weird position to take. And anyway you're not babbling and certainly not a jerk. <3

and ADHD exists - pace huge philosophical arguments about the nature of neurodiversity - and GPs are not qualified to be dogmatic about this imo

I would really love to see a therapist but can't afford it. Depressed about a lot and feeling guilty because it doesn't seem right for moms to be depressed. During the day I can put it all away but if I miss that point in the evening where I am just so sleepy and don't fall asleep...I end up unable to fall asleep. My grandmother is dying and that only adds to all the other inner sadness I feel guilty about having. Today a friend saw aphorism of me from 2007 and said,"wow, you look so healthy and stress free. What happened to you, you are so skinny and look tired a lot." Yes, I know. Happiness is the best isn't it?

* a photo not aphorism
Using my phone because my computer is dying as well. Triste.