For those of you who have suffered through a deoression, you have my sympathy-depression is a bear. It is probably one of the worst afflictions known to man.
Anyway, I was reading something about depression by a psychiatrist, who says that you should:
-accept depression as a normal part of life
-embrace it and take it as amn opportunity for personal growth
Now, can this work? I suppose you might be able to conquer a mild case of the blues by believeing that the funk will eventually pass, but is this possible for a massive depression? Winston Churchill suffered several major depressions…according to his own account, he got through by writing and forcing himslf to be active.
So, is a depression a “blessing in disguise”-or should it be treated RIGHT AWAY, with chemicals? :eek:
Anyone who thinks clinical dpression should be treated as just part of normal life has never suffered from it. There’s nothing positive about it other than the relief that you might feel when it passes - as after any potentially life threatening illness. Which is what it is. because many people kill themsleves as a result of it… Imagine being tortured and feeling that it will never end. Not very life affirming. However, Drug treatment is not always the answer.
Frankly, this sounds more promising:
So, if an MRI affects serious depression, then it would seem there is a pretty solid case for a physiological basis for depression (not to mention that many depressed persons respond well to meds). So it seems kind of silly to say, in essence, “suck it up!”
Mental health disorders are no easy matter. While such “positive thinking” may help people who do not truly suffer from a long term physiological depression, that is like telling a schizophrenic that the voices are normal and can give good advice.
Cognitive therapy, a practical system for dealing with depression, can work very, very well for some depressives. (It’s been clinically tested and shown to be just as effective as medication for most, but not all, sufferers of depression.)
But telling someone to “embrace” their depression is malpractice.
I have suffered with bouts of major depression throughout my life and while I agree with the sentiment that depression simply can’t be ignored, I also believe that the current favored treatments (drugs), are not very helpful to most people in the long term.
I think the biggest problem with most of these drugs is that they require you to always take them even when you might not otherwise need them. I have tried several different types of these drugs and while many do give some relief from symptoms they almost always seem to involve steadily increasing dosages.
Often these leave a person feeling odd, or “out of sorts”. Many will tell you they just don’t FEEL like themselves. Most of these also can take weeks or even months before they begin to help with the depression though the “out of sorts”, “not myself” feelings can begin almost immediatly and can definitly make a major depression much much worse than it was initially.
There are some that can be used for “episodes” rather than extended use (celexa is what I have found useful for this)but a major problem with sufferers of depression is that they do not always KNOW they are depressed. It is a very odd, hard to explain state that varies greatly in intensity and can come upon a person very suddenly as well as appearing as a slow slide throughout the course of a week or two. It can be especially hard to tell the difference between a “legitimate” reason for your feelings, such as a major event in your life, and a more generalized disatisfaction with life in general.
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. Embrace depression so you can kill it! :smack:
What’s this psychiatrist’s name? Sounds like bullshit to me. Are you sure you’re accurately portraying what he wrote? As lissener said, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the preferred treatment for depression. Acute depression is not a “normal part of life”; that sounds more like you’re talking about “the blues”, which is not the same thing. I’m not the first, and I’m sure I won’t be the last to say that there is a lot of misunderstanding of depression out there. A lot of people still have this idea that it just means “being sad” or “having the blues”. But listen to anyone who has suffered major depression, and they will tell you it goes way, way beyond that.
I don’t understand this fear of “chemicals”. Chemicals are what makes your brain work. Why is it that people don’t give a second thought to treating blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, headaches, even sexual disfunction, etc. with “chemicals”, but instantly balk at the idea of treating any problem involving the brain in the same way? People are willing to take a pill if it will help any organ in their body, except the brain. SSRIs do NOT make you “high”, and they are not addictive. They do have side-effect, however, and any doctor who doesn’t inform his patients about the alternative of CBT is not doing his job. BUT, CBT doesn’t always work. If a person is profoundly depressed, they become resistant to talk therapy. Sometimes, they need the medication just to lift their spirits enough so that the talk therapy can work.
So no, depression should not be treated “right away” with chemicals, and in fact that’s not what’s being done. It should be done in cases where it’s warranted.
I don’t think that’s true. Millions have been helped by medication. Lots of people have said they would not be alive today without it, because they would have committed suicide. Granted, drugs do not cure depression, but I don’t believe it is a curable disease.
Well, unfortunately, they don’t work for everyone. Many people seem to have a certain amount of “resistance” to the drugs, as you have described, where it just stops working well after awhile, and the dosage needs to be increased. But for others, they work fine maintaining the same dosage.
But often the side effects subside after a couple of weeks. It’s not ideal, but “not feeling like yourself” is often preferable to being so profoundly sad that one can’t even get out of bed.
Yes, I’ve heard stories about that happening. Still, though - the number of people who have been helped by medication far outweighs those hurt by it.
It’s my understanding that short-term depression drugs that mask the symptoms are addictive, and should only be used under dire circumstances. Is “celexa” on of these? I haven’t heard of it.
I disagree strongly. Depression doesn’t lead to anything good from what i’ve seen. It leads to learned helplessness, apathy, and numbness. I have had stress induced depression and after i came out of the depression with drugs i was more able to address the problems that had led to the depression. Had i accepted my depression, i would’ve just moped and suffered and become uncomfortably numb to my bad situation. I’ve read that that is one of the purposes of depression, to numb you so you can’t feel anything anymore and your emotions aren’t overloaded. However being numb isn’t necessarily the best thing in many situations.
Since there’s no link available to read firsthand what the psychiatrist in the OP is saying, it’s impossible to interpret his suggestions without just guessing what he might be talking about. I’ve had three courses of talk therapy for serious depression in the past fifteen years, and I’ve recently started sessions with a fourth therapist, possibly the most constructive and effective one yet.
One caution that he’s repeated a few times is that I should probably not expect to reach a point at which I’m entirely unaffected by depression. The first time he suggested this, I felt a strong surge of dismay, even anger (“Well then why am I coming to you?”), but when I objected he explained that he felt it might make more sense to work toward “managing” what’s been a chronic condition for a number of years, than to expect that condition to disappear entirely. Once I understood what he was suggesting, I found that I could agree.
Even during the best periods of my life, there’s been an undercurrent, however mild, of depression that’s affected my actions and outlook significantly, e.g., I tend to be quite shy and somewhat reluctant to become attached to friends, since I’ve tended to lose friends when I’ve gone through periods of severe depression, and that only makes the depression worse. I’ve approached therapy in the past with a hope – even determination – to rid myself of depression thoroughly and for good. That I’ve been unable to do so has perhaps undermined to some extent the positive effects of therapy, in that what starts off with a clearly defined hope ends up seeming hopeless. At this point, I’d rather accept the probable truth that I’ll continue to be troubled by depression on some level, however low, even after coming out of this latest episode.
*Embrace * depression? No, no way. But accept it as what it’s been, a chronic condition, one that I can learn to manage better than I have, by knowing exactly what steps to take and when, when I feel myself sinking into it? Yes, that makes a certain amount of sense to me. I wonder if this is something like what the shrink in the OP meant – learning to live with it?
Having suffered from depression for years, I can tell you that there’s no “embracing” it for me–except when I am taking my anti-depressant medication.
When I’m off medication, I won’t go anywhere that I don’t have to (this often includes skipping class). I won’t answer the phone. I won’t call my friends. I don’t enjoy much of anything. I can’t sleep at night. I’m frequently suicidal.
When I’m on medication, I’m actually a pretty fun person to be around. So my version of embracing my depression is to realize that in my case, it takes the chemicals to keep me sane and alive. I’m on Welbutrin and Celexa, and it makes all the difference in the world.
I have to echo the experience of the other people who have suffered from this. I’ve been suffering from clinical depression since my teens and was diagnosed four years ago after the condition simply because too much for me to handle. I lost my apartment, job, everything due to this and finally the anxiety-level became so high I couldn’t even breathe.
After being put on meds this changed dramatically. My temperament who would go from depressed (90% of the time) to rage, was stabilised somewhere along the “content” mark.
However, I do agree somewhat with teh OP. I chose to go off the medication a year ago mainly because I felt that this wasn’t my identity. I guess in one way I “missed” the depression, but after the rather long time of medication I was also feeling too “evened out”, not entirely human. My friends have commented on lack of “sharpness” and a somewhat clumsy apperance as well during the medication time and I see what they are saying. Even though I wasn’t miserable, I also weren’t very quick, energetic or distinct in my behaviour.
Now that I have been off meds for a while, however, I realise that this just won’t work. I’m gradually slipping back into the same negative mental spiral. Even though I feel more alive due to my somewhat manic-depressive personality, it’s also a huge and constant burden, that is growing slowly but steadily. As suicidal thoughts become more and more frequent and it’s getting more and more attractive to just do nothing or cease existing, I realise that I will have to take care of this one way or another.
I was hoping that the “gulp of air at the surface” that the time on meds ment would give me enough energy to somehow manage this myself, this however turned out to be undoable. I’m just going to be grateful that there is medication for this and try for a more permanent fix through therapy, which was extremely unfulfilling the last time.
Actually, fuck it. Have to stop putting this off, I’m going to the nut-house tomorrow. This was exactly the wake up call I needed, have to stop putting it off.
I have never been diagnosed with the mental illness diagnosis “Depression”, although I have managed to collect the other two (bipolar/manic-dep and schizophrenia) in my run-ins with psychiatry.
Here’s my take on it:
• The miseries of depression are grossly unpleasant. On the one hand, yes, all emotional states convey cognitions and therefore I have a predisposition to think that if you can process them and experience them you will benefit more than you would from simply turning your feelings off and tuning their message out. But you could make the same argument for somatic pain and you’ll still catch me reaching for the codeine if I’m in nasty pain. Pain hurts, and sometimes you just need something to dampen it down so you can get past it. For some people, that “something” is a psychiatric antidepressant drug. But…
• There’s a huge body of testimony from personal experience indicating that the psychiatric profession and its tag-team partner the pharmaceutical industry come up short of the efficacy they like to claim for themselves. It is my understanding that institution-ward-quality major league antidepressants are very much like antipsychotics that are doled out to us schizzies: strong neuron-function-attenuators. In large part they reduce unpleasant emotions and cognitions the way turning down the volume on your stereo will reduce buzz and static when your speakers are damaged. Outpatient-quality antidepressants such as the popular SSRIs are less likely to dampen your entire wiring system but their reliability is a lot more iffy than the ad copy would have you believe. The recent trend of questioning SSRI dosing of children due to “paradoxical” effects like making the patient suicidal has now been extended to adults.
• If you’re depressed, you may want to give them a try. Continue to trust your judgment, though, and if they aren’t working for you – in particular, if they seem to make you feel worse – get the hell off them. And make sure the person with the prescription pad fully respects your authority to make that decision. If you find yourself moving from practitioner to practitioner in search of someone you can work with, don’t feel alone or ‘wrong’ about that. And you may indeed decide that for you, medication is not only not “the answer” but that it’s not even a very good crutch. It doesn’t work for everyone.
• Forced drugging is wrong. Period. Be aware that it exists and that it can happen to you, not just next week if you get worse but 11 years from now when you’re basically doing fine but you get crossways with someone and you have a psychiatric history listed in your available records. It would be my advice to forego insurance coverage, and therefore open for yourself and the doctor the option of trying some medications without a clinical psychiatric diagnosis being typed next to your name somewhere.
If this is an accurate reflection of what he/she said about major depression, it is safe to say that this shrink has a) never personally suffered through a bout of major depression, and b) is an unmitigated ass who should find another profession before he helps kill someone.
If what was stated is a paraphrase of said individual’s perceptions concerning mild/situational depression in certain circumstances, there’s an element of truth there.
But it is dangerous to generalize about depression without knowing the sufferer’s specific situation.
Yes, that’s very good advice. Doctors know that depression affects your judgment, and that a severely depressed person is likely to blame the medication and go through periods of wanting to switch or discontinue meds. So to that end, they will try to discourage the patient from making changes. You have to know that your own well-being is ultimately up to you. The paradox is that a person in the throes of depression also just happens to be in the absolute worst condition to be standing up for himself.
But you also have to realize that when one has a serious condition like schizophrenia or bi-polar, they can at any time be in a completely irrational state of mind where they are incapable of making logical decisions. There is nothing you can say to a person who is in full-on mania that’s going to convince him that he needs to take medication. It’s my understanding that people who are bi-polar almost always seek treatment when they are at a low point, almost never at the highs. But yeah, if it were me, I would want to have control of my own life.
Damn, somebody beat me to it.
BTW, there is NO DISGRACE in seeking chemical relief from depression.
Diabetes is a chemical imbalance in your pancreas…treated with regular doses of insulin.
Depression and Bi-polarism is a chemical imbalance in your BRAIN…why NOT use a chemical like lithium or some other “ask your doctor” drug advertised during the sitcoms.
Enola Straight:
Oh please. (nothing personal, mind you…)
Diabetes is effectively an insulin deficiency disease. Insulin is made naturally by the healthy human body.
But depression is not a Paxil-deficiency disease, just as schizophrenia is not a Thorazine-deficiency disease. NONE of what psychiatrists can prescribe for you is in any shape way fashion or form a replacement or substitute for some known endocrine or other biological component that healthy people have but which we don’t.
It’s a really overused, and really bad, analogy and I’m sick to death of seeing it.
Psych drugs are at best comparable via analogy to antihistamines. They are, in fact, similar chemically (at least some of them) to antihistamines, and, as with antihistamines, they exist for symptom relief. Unlike insulin, they don’t dismiss or diminish whatever mechanism is causing the problem to begin with (which in the case of depression is something we understand far less well than we understand allergies); and, like antihistamines, each individual reacts a bit differently and what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another.
Psych drugs can also be realistically compared to opiates, and I said above. What makes a cognitive or emotional state a “disease” is its unpleasantness (subjective, personal) or its tendency to obscure the individual’s ability to maintain a grasp on reality (also subjective – surprise! – but social not personal). From the patient’s perspective, the unpleasantness part is key, and as a group we have tended to seek out the emotional and cognitive equivalent of painkillers, and why not? Pain hurts, and depression is intensely painful.
But pain, even severe pain, is also not a deficiency disease, and that which gets one through one’s personal Valleys of Darkness is not a cure but a coping mechanism.
AHunter3, with SSRIs at least, your argument doesn’t hold.
As is serotonin.
But depression IS a serotonin deficiency disease, and SSRIs increase the level of serotonin. While it’s true that it’s not injected directly into the bloodstream, as diabetics do with insulin, it is nevertheless analagous.
Wrong. It absolutely is. Healthy people have normal serotonin levels; Depressed people have sub-normal serotonin levels. Why this is is sort of a chicken/egg problem. Are people depressed because they have low serotonin levels, or do they have low serotonin levels because they are depressed? You can ask the same thing of diabetics.
There are many kinds of “psych drugs”. You can’t lump them all together and blithely declare that none of them “diminish whatever mechanism is causing the problem”. Insulin doesn’t “cure” diabetes any more than SSRIs “cure” depression. They both increase the level of a naturally-occurring substance that the body is lacking. SSRIs are most definitely not “happy pills”.
Total bullshit. You really don’t know what you’re talking about.
OK, I’ll acknowledge that I wasn’t thinking in terms of SSRIs when I wrote that.
Nevertheless it is still no more than a theory that depression consists of, or is caused by, lowered levels of serotonin or any other specific neurotransmitter condition.
It’s like vasodilation and headaches. It has been posited that common analgesics such as aspirin help headache sufferers by promoting vasoconstriction, and the basic common headache may be nothing more than vasodilation, but we don’t really know that, nor do we know if it is cause or symptom or what.
If depression were a serotonin-deficiency disease, SSRIs would probably have a better track record than they do.
Nevertheless, it looks like they’re playing in the right ballpark with SSRIs and depression, something I would not say for the antipsychotic meds.
About 3 years ago, my doctor leveled with me and told me that I would probably be on anti-depressants for the rest of my life. I wasn’t too shocked but it was strange to hear what I had been suspecting for so long.
Several mental illnesses run in my family and it looks like I am on the low end of the scale. Which is still far from ‘normal’. I have personally decided to treat my own depression with medication, therapy and lifestyle changes. I learned in my college anthropology class that human beings did not evolve to live in the current society we find ourselves in. Some of us (most of us?) have varying degrees of difficulty mentally and emotionally dealing with what this life throws at us.
I know that chemicals are not the final answer for me. I have gone through so many medications that worked for awhile or failed to work entirely. But when they do work, they are a godsend. They allow me to deal with daily life. They allow me to interact enough with my environment that I can notice what works for me mentally or not. I pay very close attention to my state of mind and I try not to put myself through things that I can’t handle with my state of mind.
I have learned so much about myself and my limits through this process. I don’t know if I will ever be off medication. I don’t think so, especially with anti-depressants improving all the time. But my goal is to keep from getting worse. To not end up like the majority of my relatives.
Regarding the OP, I have embraced depression as a part of myself and I am learning from it. I have not, however, accepted it. There is no way that I could have gotten this far without chemicals.