With panic there is a low key, constant feeling of anxiety known as GAD and there are short lived bursts known as panic attacks.
Has anyone studied this same kind of emotional response in depression? For example, during summer of 2005 I had alot of things go wrong in my life. This gave me a low key depression that lasted until around February but there were also a couple of extremely bad but short lived ‘depression attacks’. What would happen is for a few minutes I would feel intense, almost unbearable depression that would then leave me the same way some people get intense, short lived attacks of panic but it was depression instead of panic. Has anyone studied this phenomena or am I just a genetic mutant/superhero?
Dunno that anyone has studied it, but I have chronic severe depression that I treat with medication.
Note: Tom Cruise, the Church of Scientology, and anyone else that doesn’t like this, tough. Go flame someone else.
Besides my constant depression, I would have attacks of severe anxiety and depression. Fortunately, the last really severe one pushed me into hospital treatment, where I started on medication and other work that has helped me.
So I don’t think you’re at all alone. My own theory is that depression and bipolar (aka manic-depression) have been with us forever, but we haven’t noticed it as such. I look at the lives and behaviors of people documented in history, and I see multiple instances of depressive and bipolar behavior.
I also think that people that had depression or bipolar medicated themselves with drugs or alcohol. Fairly powerful drugs were legal and commonly available until the early 1900s. Alcohol, of course, was accepted and universally used; restrictions on it only date back to Prohibition in the 1920s.
I have never heard it described that way but I know what you are talking about first-hand and it would be interesting to explore. I think a lot of depressed people would report something similar.
I get it about once a month. I call it “my period.”
This never happened to me my whole life long… until I came out as trans. Then the periodic bad times began as a direct result of the difficulty of existing as trans in this benighted, uptight Judæo-Christian society. The metaphor for my existence is: I’m a little buoy of positive energy floating on an endless ocean of pain. I’m fine until waves surge and submerge me… the bad time lasts until I resurface.
It’s better now that I’m on estro, much better, oo baby. But until then, I self medicated and prayed, which always helped, so I’m OK. To her from whom much is demanded, much is given.
Not so much an attack as a wave. I suffer from depression, and am treating it with meds, but about twice a year, I am overcome by what in past times would probably be called ennui, and for a couple of days I can hardly function.
The closest analogy I have come up with is it’s like that Bugs and Daffy cartoon.
Bugs is the cartoonist and is tormenting Daffy by redrawing him as several different characters. At some point he causes the black around the frame to droop down and after trying to brace it up, the blackness completely engulfs Daffy.
My depression used to hit in waves, too, usually soon after I woke up in the morning. I knew that the medication I was taking for depression was working when, one day, I realized I hadn’t had any of those waves of depression hit since about a week after I started on it.
I tend to think of them as episodes instead of attacks. I’m under horrid stress right now, and I do OK on a daily basis. But sometimes, it just gets overwhelming, and I can’t not cry, if you know what I mean. So, I have a “bad moment” for anywhere from 10-60 minutes, and then get back to my daily low-level blues.
I get depression “fevers”, too. Odd, I never thought this would be a common thing. There are times that, without any causation that I can see, I just want to be in bed in the dark. With maybe some danish. I find the best thing to do is to be as depressed as I can be while at home and it will eventually pass.
Out of all the different titles people seem to give their “moments” I think I’ll go with “episodes”. Ya know before I go into my whole personal account addition here- I was just thinking about what Johanna wrote and in my ignorance of the female menstruation tacked together the strange presumption that possibly most women know what it feels like to be have depression due to this monthly process…just thinking outloud-
anyway, like niblet head I never really thought this kind of thing was “beyond me”. I find heat (sun, a shower, warm cup’o joe) seems to help a little bit, light especially daylight and a few of those artificial sunlight thingys help a bit also, but the immediate tendency when it comes on pretty good is to go to bed, I can many times “sleep it off”. I used to be amazed by this, but I guess it really does just pass after a while and that’s why the sleeping worked- “I outlasted another one” I’d say to myself.
I think currently I’m better because of a number of accidental good fortunes (job+ low stress+ no current debts+ a wonderful wife to talk to) … but even so I still have my days when I get “temporary Parkinson’s” -I’m real weak, and though it’s not extremely visible I feel my legs shaking lightly/harder to stand as if I"m falling into myself and the typical outside/external stimuli is too much for me; especially moments of human interaction when you need to have a grasp of yourself to emanate a certain good or friendly vibe (I’m a sub-contracted pc hardware tech) …it’s important to make a positive impression on each customer. Still if a customer were to complain to the company I work for and I got a call about it (even if I didn’t do anything wrong) I’ll feel extremely drained and weak in direct response.
Luckily I don’t get many of those.
Regardless, if there isn’t research being done currently in this area, I second or third or what-have-you that this is worth some researching shrinks time to look into. Thanks to Wesley Clark for starting this thread.
My, my, you guys really thought you were original?
Sorry, not much new under the sun.
I was somewhat depressed for a very long time. There were times I seriously considered jumping off the nearest window (I felt like I was wasting the air I breathed, hey I was like 10 or so and hadn’t learned about breathable air “naturally recicling” yet), there were long times I was fine, there were the times in between.
Haven’t been depressed in quite a while, thanks God - even though it lasted years, it was exogenous depression, so once the external cause went away, the depression did too.
But yeah, it came and went. I’d always figured it would do so for everybody, otherwise people would commit suicide on the first day of being depressed instead of waiting for years. Sorry to be so morbid.
Actually, wouldn’t you be a gull? Soaring over it?
Normal depression, AKA “the blues”, does indeed seem episodic to me, lasting anywhere from 30 minutes to several days. Fortunately, they don’t happen often, and when they do, I remind myself that they are temporary. That alone seems to lift the clouds a bit.
Wow. Not that I’m really naive enough to think that I’m all alone in my feelings and the only person ever to feel that way, but it is very reassuring to hear all of you describing exactly what I’ve experienced pretty much forever. The dark feelings come at random moments, for no apparent reason. They stay around a little while, usually a few days, and eventually I’m able to shake them off.
I wonder if there is a real honest-to-goodness physiological trigger to the “attacks”, like with migraines.
Tomorrow, if I can get access to the online journals in the hospital library, I’ll see what I can come up with. Someone must have looked into this sort of thing before.
But until then, I self medicated and prayed, which always helped, so I’m OK. To her from whom much is demanded, much is given.