Depression and what it's really like

:(

i'm a crazypants. seriously.
i'm new, but i've already had a couple minor problems on ilx. i lurked for ten years actually, and began to feel creepy about it and decided i should just start posting. i haven't figured out my posting style yet, but i'd like to be sincere if possible.
i'm gonna blow off some steam for a while in this post, but i know i'm helpless -- so, no one should worry about me, and i will normally keep my madness to myself.

i know this is the depression thread, and i'm depressed now, but only for the last few months. . .
i don't like talking about this when i have to talk about this, and i wish there were another thread for it and other mental health issues:

i was diagnosed with ptsd, last july.
i've had two stays in mental hospitals this year. and also, another time a couple months ago, my academic advisor drove me to the psychiatric ward again too, but i talked them into letting me out that night.
the psychiatrists told my family i had schizophrenia at first, but after a month of observing me and interviewing me, they figured out what was going on -- i agree with the diagnosis, now.

you ever stay there, in the mental hospital. i kind of liked it. i just layed in bed and read all day, every day. i made sure i had a few new yorkers and my favorite books for my second stay, a couple months ago.
sometimes you wander around there, you know. the lingo: "so, what are you in for?" i'd just look away; "they told me i have ptsd".
"thank you for you service, sir!" ::handshake:: and, i'm confused about why we're shaking hands.
"i wasn't in service."
"oh"

whatever your politics, i think it's easy to admire the courageousness of people that actually put their lives on the line for a cause that they believe in, however misguided. pause. grant me that.
i have to say that, because i'm about to take something away from them:
i just wish ptsd wasn't completely synonymous with military service.

it isn't really like depression.
sadness and depression are not the same thing. sadness is a deep feeling. depression is a lack of a feeling.
1 day out of 10 is good for me.
it's a lot of sadness, and anger, and confusion -- but, it isn't confusion. or, it was confusion for about 20 months, but i began to understand what happened, after about 20 months.
i don't know. i used to pace around my kitchen in my single apartment, for many hours every day, and i've probably thought about it for over a thousand hours or many more hours at this point.
i understand it now, so i don't have to do that anymore.
about the confusion: it isn't confusion. it's more like 13 disparate facts i have to keep reassembling every day, because they don't add up, and i need to keep arranging them until they almost do.

i can't really talk about what happened.

i'm depressed now, but, whatever a ptsd episode is, they're becoming slightly less frequent.
cbt and effexor, paxil, neurontin, risperidone, all of which i take every day, don't do a damn thing.

i had to tell some of my professors and advisors what happened after i began to display "odd" behavior at school.
i'm harmless. i'm living with my mom, now.
i had to drop out of an elite university. . . one of the best in the world. i had it made. i had straight As until fall 2013

(by the way: i don't normally have the energy to post thoughtfully/intelligently, so i might leave ilx soon. i normally don't have the energy to brush my teeth anymore, which i haven't done in three or four days now.)

i'll live.
i have 0 interest in living, but i can probably never actually commit suicide, for i refuse to traumatize my widowed mother that way.

it's just an unfixable problem. it always comes back, and i wish i could do something.

it probably sounds like i should go to the hospital, but, honestly... i've had a couple psychiatric stays this year... they were really stupid. i mean, they were like vacations, and all i did was read in bed all day, which was kind of therapeutic, especially since i knew that within those walls, i was safe from what had happened since there was truly nothing i could do about it in there, but. . .
please forgive me. . . all of the other patients are just kind of "dumb", and the nurses treat me like i'm one of the others. i'm not special. my stays were nice. i just couldn't really achieve anything with nurses talking to me that way, though.

after what happened in fall 2013. . .
i don't know. my old neighbor called the police on me once because i was yelling late at night. . . but, when they showed up a few hours later, they just looked at me and said okay and walked away.

it's just lonely. i don't really have any support or any friends i can talk to. and, it scares people when you talk about mental illness and loneliness. people think of school shootings or 'taxi driver' or something. it isn't like that at all. i just space out and pace around a lot.

i made a girlfriend at my last hospital stay! we were like benny and joon! it was very romantic, like a movie. but, even though she was straight on her meds at the hospital, she has schizophrenia and religious delusions. i've hung out with her a couple of times since we were together at the hospital (we used to just hug all the time in the hospital), but she's worse now. she just makes me read the christian bible with her all night and she's too far gone. i'd go back to the hospital if i could just live there forever.

i just wish they'd give me benzos or lithium or something more. it makes me sick how they trust me -- i dress well and do well in public - no one takes this seriously, not even my family, even with my documentation. and i have nowhere to go now that i'm out of school, and i'm living in a small town now, and i'm very lonely.

fall 2013 was just bad. it was like the past kept changing, and there was nothing i could do.

I don't know you but I'm very sorry for your troubles and hope they ease. Have you ever reached out online on one of those psych forums? Maybe it would help to hear how other people deal.
Once again, truly sorry you are in so much pain. As someone has it big time in their family and has dealt with depression all my life, I empathize.

Same here. The loneliness is the worst. It's hard enough when you have a couple of people you CAN talk to. But please vent here as much as you need!!!

Same here as in i empathise, not that i claim to have your same experiences, i mean

One of my best friends has PTSD from stuff that happened when she was very young and it's horrible. I'm really sorry to hear that you're going through this.

i had to drop out of an elite university. . . one of the best in the world. i had it made. i had straight As until fall 2013

this happened to me too. after 10 years i went back, to an even better school. hang in there!

Posted by me elsewhere a couple days ago:

Maybe I shouldn't be relaying such personal info on a public forum while using my real name, but here goes. . .

I'm currently withdrawing from an anti-depressant. Mostly because of insurance hassles and things falling through, but now that it's been a couple days, I think I've decided that I'd like to stay off of it. It's a little like smoking pot, except music isn't as fun, because it mostly just makes me want to cry. Definitely has all the wooziness and munchiness of a strong couple of tokes (but without the more fun aspects). It was a long train of events that led me to get on the pills in the first place, which I'll spare you here, but I have been in institution three times over the last 18 or so months. It's been an interesting couple of years and I've found myself here, recently dumped by the (former) love of my life and now living in a new city, under my mother's roof again without a job. I'm 34. To say that I've recently been suicidal is like saying the day is bright and the night is dark.

I guess what I'm saying, Smashy and others, is that we all go through it. Sometimes it's our fault, sometimes we're just caught in the path of the storm.

I'm still here. Broken down and bruised. But here.

Nice to meet you, monster mash. I am currently withdrawing from Effexor. Cold turkey. I've felt more real feelings —actual happiness and sadness, if you can believe it; I'd honestly forgot what it felt like to want to cry or smile— in the last few days than I can remember feeling for at least a year. I am not too thrilled about my prospects, but at the same time, I feel better than I have in years.

The other day,I finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for like the ninth or tenth time. I cried at this: "You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance." It never stuck out to me previously, but that hit me right in the feels this time and I am glad it did, because it's true. So fucking true.

You should stay posting (and venting) here. It's a fun forum, even if you don't have your wits about you to realize it yet. And you have at least one kindred spirit here.

And sorry to ramble on here, but I was also on risperdal (risperidone). Withdrawing from that was really easy compared to the Effexor withdrawal. Like I said, it's very woozy and you just kind of feel like, "Am I gonna throw up? Maybe. . ." all the friggin' time. I can honestly say I feel better without it. I had become so numb to everything. It was getting to a point where I was sleeping all day and wasn't even able to enjoy music or literature anymore. It was like, "Yeah, this is good but I feel nothing about it" and that just sucks.

So yeah: medications. . . blech.

i somehow managed to post this in the zing thread instead of here:

i've turned into basically a big blank nothing since i started ADs. but tbh i'll take feeling not much of anything rather than go back to the absolute misery of before.

I am currently withdrawing from Effexor. Cold turkey.

o shit

good luck dude

Thank you. I was taking 225mg/day. Not a super high dose, but hey.

xpost just1n3:
I get that. I really do. But it was almost like the medication was working too well. It was like, "You feel TOO MUCH. Let's shut that switch off." And it went so far in the other direction, it's like I ended up back where I began. I was bummed out and felt suicidal, so I took medication, got so numb to feeling suicidal that I was bummed out that I couldn't be truly bummed out and suicidal. Who knows. I have a feeling my doc is gonna royally pissed at me for going off like I have. And it's not all rosy and nice. I once again feel really bad, like a burden to those around me and a waste of everyone's time. Those feelings are there and as strong as they were a couple years ago before I started on the meds, but I don't know, maybe I'm able to handle it now. I'm having a hard time adjusting, if you couldn't tell.

i guess i meant that i've taken the 'easy' way - i admire people who work to balance things, to take the good and bad, but i just don't have that in me. hence the preference for absence of feeling.

No no no. No "easy way." That's negative self-talk, and I will have none of it. Maybe you need to experience that to be able to live. I'm in a total haze right now, but I can see that I needed those pills when I needed them. I was not taking the easy way. I'm not stupid enough to be that cocky. I needed —and still need— help. There was no easy way to get where I am. I see no other path, honestly.

I'm still taking a mood stabilizer, but one thing at a time, y'know. It can literally be something you can't do anything about, except take pills to numb yourself.

xp--def not the easy way. you need what you need. take care of yourself. <3

effexor seems especially effective at numbing, in my experience? i wasn't depressed when i started it (was taking it off-label), but it just made my emotions totally flat. something extra-dramatic happened in my life while i was on it, that normally would have had me freaking out, sobbing, doubled over, devastated. and i just...blinked. and shed a tear. and felt really really weird about how i was not...feeling. which was probably for the best? because i can't imagine how i would have coped without that numbing. but still. i felt not quite human, because i'm used to being an emotional person!

but now i'm depressed and yeah, i can understand wanting to be numb.

brains are so ridiculously complicated, and tough to cope with.

and it's not about work. i went thru a phase where i was super-suicidal one day a month. i couldn't think straight, researched suicide methods on the internet, just obsessed over suicide. and then the next day, i'd get my period and realize the obvious--it was hormonal. it never occured to me when i was in the throes of it that it was a physical, temporary thing, even though it happened every. single. month. for about two years.

it was so dramatic, and really changed my view of depression--i knew logically that it was complicated, but feeling it that way, that was powerful. though unpleasant, obv. feeling suicidal sucks.

there's so much stuff influencing your brain--there's stuff influencing other stuff influencing who-knows-what and effecting your moods.

finding the stuff that helps you get through--that's work. give yourself credit for the doc visits and the meds and everything you do to try to feel better.

give yourself credit for the doc visits and the meds and everything you do to try to feel better.

This.

it's just lonely. i don't really have any support or any friends i can talk to. and, it scares people when you talk about mental illness and loneliness. people think of school shootings or 'taxi driver' or something. it isn't like that at all. i just space out and pace around a lot.

fucking mental illness, man. it's super frustrating that if you seem 'functional' at all you basically have to kick people in the ribs to get a support network, or therapy, or pills, or what you really need. and it's still all tenuous.

my advice would be:
- make whatever connections you can irl and online; basically anyone who doesn't make you feel like shit (or makes you feel less like shit than usual) and isn't harmful. who cares otherwise. letting down my judgement about other humans really helped for me -- someone's pop culture savvy or whatever i was judging people on doesn't matter if they'll bring you a casserole when you're low
- get any help you can, ask however and whenever you can, and anyone who makes you feel ashamed about it can fuck right off
- don't be afraid to try whatever seems legit to get better; there's a big amount of trial and error involved in finding what works
- anything that makes you feel better, even a little bit, try to put your energy toward doing it
- there are a lot of non-traditional paths to doing ok in life that no one talks about but are still a-ok...like it took me 10 years to get through college and i felt like shit about it, but no one cared after it was all over. literally no one.

it's just an unfixable problem. it always comes back, and i wish i could do something.

I have a friend who wisely told me 'there's no use in hoping for a better yesterday'. You can't fix your past and it probably feels as if you'll never 'fix' your ptsd, but with the proper external support and painstakingly acquired insight you should be able to slowly learn to recognize its nasty tricks and improve your ability to curb your reactions to it. We accept all kinds of never-ending tasks in life, without tossing them aside as hopeless just because they'll never quit requiring our frequent effort and attention.

Good luck. Accept help whenever and wherever you find it. Don't give up. Things can improve. Imagine if 4 or 5 or even 6 out of 10 days felt good. Woo-hoo!

a friend who wisely told me 'there's no use in hoping for a better yesterday'

It's so important to learn to let stuff go. Even good things have to pass. I found that I was holding myself up to unreachable standard by holding onto romanticized memories.

hey i need help

test

Well, your submit button works.

What's up?

Hey, ENBB. Not sure I can help, but unless you say more it's pretty sure none of us can figure out how to help you.

Yeah, not going to bed until this gets sorted.

what's up? i'm here & awake too.

Hrm.

ok hey i'm sorry am working it all out for myself in therapy. i didnt mean to scare anyone i'm sorry.

No apologies necessary, Benson. You reach out however you can. Important thing is that you are reaching out.

so i went to this thread to vent about how terribly my life is going lately, but everytime i see somebody else's posts my life seems better and better.

so i'm falling apart. it's my last semester of what is maybe my fourth or fifth go-round at college, and i'm a wreck. having nightmares left and right, sleeping 12 hours a day on top of it. every monday i get a new series of deliverables for my classes, and every sunday i complete them two hours before the deadline. they're easy deliverables, thankfully, but the sheer number of them leaves me overwhelmed. i keep stress eating and getting less and less healthy. a restaurant by my house opened which offers fabulous poutine and beer. the only thing that keeps me from going more often is that it being fabulous, they're usually packed, at which point my social anxiety sends me cocooning for a few hours.

work is also really stressful. i've worked at this job for seven years and went to school because of the healthcare situation, which means i need to find a new job as soon as i graduate. problem is that i really do love my job on top of being heavily averse to change, and right now they really, honestly need me, to the point where they keep asking if i can go full time. they're in the middle of a huge project which is going how projects typically go (which is to say, failing upwards), and it needs experienced help. it feels good to be valued and needed, and it's fabulous experience, but it feels terrible to be unable to meet those needs, it feels terrifying to know that i'm going to have to start seriously looking for work soon and not feeling like i have the time.

i'm completely neglecting my spouse. sex is difficult for me at the best of times, but completely out of the question now. so is any form of creativity. i have a book (not a good book, but a book) with 75,000 words in it and no confidence to go back to it for the past year, and the fear that i've changed too much for it to be finishable. i have trouble finishing things. in the meantime we have mandatory class participation forums in which i'm posting lengthy ruminations about the nature of human mortality.

but counterbalancing all this is, well, I'M GOING TO FUCKING GRADUATE, despite my apparently bottomless capacity for self-sabotage i'm going to actually complete something. my life is a goddamn nightmare, but there's an end point in sight, and while i'm greatly overreacting to what are for normal people everyday stresses and strains this stuff is happening for a reason, and having spent decades suffering and feeling miserable for no god-damn reason at all, this is heaven in comparison.

No apologies necessary, Benson. You reach out however you can. Important thing is that you are reaching out.

― Austin, Monday, November 9, 2015 12:40 PM (2 hours ago)

this was confusing until i saw ennb's displayname

i don't have anything insightful to say except i wish you all well

(including benson)

Having a rough day today. The shakes have settled in. Before it was just dizziness. But now I'm shakey and it's really fucking bothering me. I tripped while crossing the street in traffic this morning. Grrr.

Sorry to keep upping this, but I don't have anybody else to talk to about this stuff, so I'm using this as my vent space.

Feeling really low the last couple of days. I think I'm on the downside of the withdrawal because the wooziness and dizzy spells aren't nearly as strong as they were a couple days ago. I should be pleased about this, but all I can think about is how going off the Effexor is equal to throwing down my shield on the battlefield and trying to continue fighting without it. I've been continuing to take the 20mg tablets of Abilify (aripiprazole)‎ for two reasons: maybe taking them is having a placebo effect (or that's what I tell myself) and I don't know if I would experience double withdrawal if I stopped. I was on 30mg tablets, but my old doc wanted to try and taper me off of it because she was concerned that it was disrupting my sleep————

In any case, I have an entire bottle of the 30mg tablets and just got my 30 day 20mg tablet supply refilled yesterday. I've been googling what the effects of overdose would be all morning. I certainly have enough to overdose, I'm just not sure it would be lethal (can't find anything definitive). Kind of scared. I mean, why am I looking that up?

In to see the new therapist on Thursday.

sorry i don't have much constructive to offer other than sympathy and recognition.

i think coming off Effexor was a good thing for me - eventually - but that chemical rollercoaster that it sets in motion took much longer to clear than i thought it would. maybe keep reminding yourself that you'd rather have mood swings than no moods at all. i've had lots of psychophysical feelings the last few years that felt like i'd never get thru, and eventually they change into something else ime

venting usually helps? vent away i reckon, this thread/board has helped me crystallize some horrible stuff in the past that felt more manageable just for typing it out

i have a book (not a good book, but a book) with 75,000 words in it and no confidence to go back to it for the past year, and the fear that i've changed too much for it to be finishable. i have trouble finishing things.

having taken five fuckin years to write a book due to long periods of feeling that it was a pointless endeavor and being waylaid by depression from countless other factors at various points (and this is even w/o thinking about the process of editing it/seeking out an agent), just wanted to say i totally feel this & wish you the best w/ it (and everything else). if you got that far into it (75,000 is a fuckin lotta words!), the work had to have been worth something.

feeling a lot better than the last time i posted here but shit still lurks, and i have yet to return to therapy, which i know is essential if i want any improvements to stick

love and best wishes to all y'all

*still

Thanks for allowing for this space. It does help to be able to type it out and just send some of this shit off.

But yeah, goin' down the road feelin' bad right now.

every monday i get a new series of deliverables for my classes, and every sunday i complete them two hours before the deadline. they're easy deliverables, thankfully, but the sheer number of them leaves me overwhelmed.

online huh? i'm teaching online courses rn so if it's any consolation, it's the SAME WAY FROM THE OTHER END.

i instituted simple hey-what's-up check-in assignments where students email me just to help keep everyone on track and feeling connected and bizarrely enough it's working, they even thank me for being so interactive with them, like the poor kids are usually just out there all alone in learning-management-system land. : /

oh yeah, i have the profoundest sympathy for anybody trying to teach an online class; i feel like it's probably a lot easier to take a course like that than it is to teach it. it's the whole thing about trying to manage a billion different trivial questions at once, all of which seem to have the utmost urgency for the people asking them. and if you mess something up nobody bothers to report the issue until five minutes before the assignment is due.

When I was at uni I was consistently 2-4 weeks late with papers so I think two hours before deadline is impressive.

it does feel to me like a job / mode of work drowning in a sea of trivialities

just getting in a room for three hours a week to teach a real class puts that in remarkable focus

i just want to go back to the hospital. i just want to be left alone with my books in there. i can't do anything.
i'm crying and watching lockup raw. these are my people. they have no idea how much easier it is in there than it is out here.
i'm not fit to talk about this or be around people. i am waiting until my mom dies before i can kill myself. i keep making people mad at me on ilx.
they told my mom i have schizophrenia and ptsd. like, i'm crazy, but i don't think i'm crazy crazy, so i try to joke about it.
i had to drop out of one of the best universities in the world, when i only had 30 credits left to go. and, no, i can't really ever go back after my inappropriate behavior. all i remember was e-mailing my mental health advisor about something, and she took it well, but...

i would rather be in the hospital with my books.
i would rather just be in prison.

i can't take care of myself. i have serious problems with self-care at this point. i haven't brushed my teeth in days. i haven't showered in weeks. i just get drunk every day with the money (someone) gives me and sometimes i read.

there isn't much I can do about this until my mom dies. i'm just going to drink myself back to sleep. i just wish I had a place to go to where they would let me live and help me, like a hospital. but places like that don't last long anymore, and, times I've had short term stays, the psychiatrists won't take me seriously because i'm not constantly banging my head against a wall.
doesn't matter.

sorry fella.
i have no idea how to address any of those problems except to say there's no point where you can't come back from. i hope you can find something that brings you some peace of mind.

i'm not mad at you. anybody who is mad at you can fuck right off. i'm just sad because you're hurting and you need help and none of us can really help you. like half of these things you're convinced are totally true right now is just your brain, or the disease, or whatever, lying to you, but who the hell am i to say that? like i have any more authority than your own brain. you need somebody you can believe who can tell you those things, and instead all you have is somebody who gives you money for booze, which is killing you, and a bunch of words on a screen, which doesn't help, or at least doesn't help in any sort of empirical way.

I cosign what rushomancy said about your brain constructing the world you are finding so painful to live in. Reconstructing a better world to live in will take time and help, but it can be done.

the psychiatrists won't take me seriously

If you tell any psychiatrist what you wrote here on this thread and they failed to take you seriously, then they ought to have their license to practice medicine revoked. And be kicked up & down the street by all the patients they've failed to help.

i tried to see a therapist recently and she was terrible and minimized all of my problems. she also got mad at me for "going over" the allotted time even though she didn't tell me that time was up. i thought it was her job to watch the clock.

i mean, from the outside, things might not seem that bad for me, but i am in an overwhelming job and the stress is causing me to slip back into old depressive habits and symptoms. learning to give 100% at a job while still practicing self care seemed like a legitimate thing to seek advice about. idk.

those are just my own issues, but the point is, mm, that mental health workers are like anyone else, some are terrible. so you should keep seeking help and even if you don't find it right away keep seeking it and if you believe you can get better that's your best shot at actually getting better. unfortunately, in this life you have to be your own advocate. sorry if all of this sounds boilerplate.

piggybacking off treeship-

therapy isn't an empirical science. hell, even psychopharmacology isn't an empirical science, because at least my experience is that the way they prescribe drugs is that they just start throwing drugs at you essentially at random until one gets good results without intolerably bad side effects, and then they just keep you on that until it stops working. the good news is that there are way more therapists out there than there are approved anti-depressant drugs, and if you wind up with a therapist who doesn't work for you, you can just try another one. i've had therapists who were much worse than merely ineffective- although they were very nice, well-intentioned, completely compliant in every respect with therapeutic protocol, they just made my life a living hell.

co-sign on treeship: having a shitty experience in therapy is not a very good reason to rule out therapy as ineffective.

I'm scared.

I've actually thought about what it would feel like to die. And not in a way of like passing thought, like oh wonder what that's like.

Like, very deeply going over what it would actually be like and the ramifications it would have. I'm talking doing nothing but laying in bed for hours thinking about it.

I have the means to do myself in. I'm just not sure I want to hurt the others I live with in that way.