Go! The hardest thing is to get yourself there! You will feel so much better after having completed it! And maybe, just maybe, you’ll meet a nice person that you’ll want to follow up with but don’t feel discouraged if you don’t.
Too many people to quote,
I’m reading and care. I feel your pain and if I don’t respond everyday, that’s because I can’t am and going through my own personal stuff - good and bad.
Good stuff - I had a friend visit over the holiday weekend. She’s been through three serious depressive episodes (like where you had to check out of school or work) so she could relate to what I’m going through. It is such a relief to talk with a sane person who can really empathize.
Hi. I’m currently undiagnosed, and for that matter haven’t even seen a doctor, but everything I’ve read in this thread and a bunch of other places leads me to conclude that I have some kind of depression, and have for around 4 or 5 years.
The last 3 weeks or so have just been one long episode. Somewhow I manage to get up and drag myself to work every day but once I get home after 9 or 10 hours or so (the greenhouse is crazy because it’s spring) I just kind of collapse on a couch or in bed. I don’t even flip on the tv or read a book or anything, I just kind of lie there, with my head feeling all cloudy, either thinking of nothing at all or making up excuses to dislike myself. I completely sympathize with the people that feel like they’d like to give up.
The most fucking annoying thing is that I don’t really have any problems. I have a family that I’m close to and that cares about me, I’m relatively well off financially (for a university student anyway), I have a job, I have a girlfriend that I love…I have no reason to feel this way. I shouldn’t feel this way. I shouldn’t be here thinking about getting a knife and cutting myself or jumping off a cliff or just thinking about what an awful, useless person I am. My life is good, damnit. But I still can’t do anything half the time.
I don’t really know where to go from here. I haven’t told many people - just my girlfriend and a few close friends - and while they try it’s tiring to try to explain things to them and they can’t really offer any advice. It just frustrates them. And upsets them. I realize I should probably go to a doctor but it just seems like failure to me. These are my problems and I should be able to deal with them, damnit. But I can’t. And it’s starting to hurt some people around me - which is another thing I feel awful about. Which sounds self-centered - which is another thing to feel awful about.
Typing things out seems to help a little though. I guess I’ll just keep going for the foreseeable future. Keep dragging myself to work.
[quote=“keeganst94, post:584, topic:653187”]
Hi. I’m currently undiagnosed, and for that matter haven’t even seen a doctor, but everything I’ve read in this thread and a bunch of other places leads me to conclude that I have some kind of depression, and have for around 4 or 5 years.
My unprofessional opinion is that you’re depressed, and I’ve been around it enough to recognize the symptoms. Please consider seeing a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist. The first can help with talk therapy and the second can prescribe life saving medication if it’s needed. Hopefully, they talk to each other. Can your primary care physician give you a reference? If not, maybe someone here can put you in touch with someone in your area.
Welcome to the thread keeganst94.
Sometimes depression is “situational” and usually rights itself after a while. This doesn’t seem to fit what you’re dealing with. A lot of us have chronic, clinical depression. It’s with you all the time no matter what’s going on in your outside reality. Listen to Zago; get thee to a doctor who will send you to a psychiatrist (for meds) who will send you to a psychotherapist (to help you work things out.)
Depression is an illness just like diabetes or any other chronic disorder and needs treatment in order to be maintained. You’re functional, which is good, and have a support system, which is great. Go find out how you can feel better than you do now.
Also you seem to have suicidal ideation, as do I. Believe it or not, not everybody examines the contents of the kitchen knife drawer mulling over which one would do the job best. A few times a year I have what I think of as “regular” days; no obsessive rumination much less a “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Once, on one of those good days, a thought “spoke” in my mind—“You know, you really ought to kill yourself.” For no reason. Let your primary care physician know you feel this way sometimes. It’s not a crime, it’s a treatable illness and if anything should quicken your way to getting help.
I hope you keep posting as well as reading. Sometimes we listen more than we talk, but we always care.
Let me add, assure your doctor you’re not planning on committing suicide right now so there’s no over-reaction. Just that you do have these thoughts so it’s clear you do need a specialist.
It’s not failure to seek help for something you can’t deal with yourself. Would you feel the same way about a broken arm or pneumonia? Just because the problems are yours doesn’t mean you should expect to be equipped to deal with them all effectively. That’s what health professionals go to many years of school for.
The source of your depression may be something as simple as an imbalance in your brain chemistry. You couldn’t be expected to deal with that effectively on your own. Please don’t think it’s failure to seek help. You’ll be doing yourself and your loved ones a big favour if you can find someone to address whatever your problem is.
Go monstro! (and let me know if you’re ever hiking in New Jersey!) I absolutely love it. Nature is such a rare thing in the big city, and it’s so refreshing to get out of the house - to get out of your head - and into the natural world for a while.
Well, I’m trying a new thing, which is doing some basic moderate cardio every morning. For two reasons - #1, because I keep falling asleep on my 90 minute drive to work in the mornings, and that’s not good, and caffeine makes me sick. Thursday I actually had to pull over my car and nap. I’m hoping the cardio will wake me up. #2 because I always feel nice after a hard workout and maybe exercising twice a day will help with my depression.
So I got up this morning and did some jump rope. After 100 jumps I was like, ‘‘okay, that’s enough.’’ I kill myself in the evening workouts and I don’t want morning sessions to be painful - I want it to be something I look forward to doing.
So I did cardio this morning and I haven’t felt depressed all day, which is unusual for days I work from home, especially considering I have been feeling sick. However, the first thing I did after my workout this morning was take a nap!
Will it work long term? Time will tell.
[QUOTE=Dunkelheit]
You’ll be doing yourself and your loved ones a big favour if you can find someone to address whatever your problem is.
[/QUOTE]
If nothing else motivates you, let it be this. Living with a loved one who has an untreated mental illness is really difficult. My husband was situationally depressed for a few weeks not long ago and it gave me some insight into how incredibly difficult it must be for him living with my illness day in and day out for years - and I got help! So please, if you can’t muster the self-esteem to do it for you, do it for your loved ones.
I can’t do it anymore, I just can’t. Usually my panic attacks are ephemeral or at least not so crippling that I can’t work through them, but this is killing me. I need to have a scholarship application done by the end of next week. I’ve always been a bit of a procrastinator, but I literally can’t do it.
Just today, I caught myself with almost two hours of lost time. I mean, I know where I was, but I had ended up just sitting there, totally stunned, for two hours. I’ve been in a state of literal constant panic since Monday. I’m hyperventilating, I can literally feel my heart beating. I’m tripping over everything and fumbling. My body is shaking uncontrollably. I feel out of breath all the time. My face is red and my skin feels warm (I checked, no fever). I can’t sleep, I just lay awake for hours thinking about how I can become friends. I either oversleep (sleep about 16 hours) or wake up from nightmares, usually crying.
Nothing helps. Walks don’t help, trying to program doesn’t help. I have no interest in video games or reading or TV anymore. I went to Phoenix Comicon, thought that would help. Even met up with some people I knew there on Sunday. But I just felt so faceless and alone with all the people there that it made it worse. I’ve never had a fear of crowds before. I was a little better when I talked with the people I knew on the way down (I drove them home), but they were asleep most of the time so I only got about 10 minutes of social contact out of a crowd.
And the worst part is that all this makes the thought of contacting people to try to make friends even harder. My brain tells me “You’re a bad person, it’s obvious you don’t value them as people, just crutches so that you’ll stop panicking” or “Why bother asking them to lunch? You’re just gonna sound desperate, especially if you contact one of the ones you have a crush on. They’ll smell it and run ten miles the other way.” and the best “It’s probably best not to, you think it’s bad NOW? Just imagine what would happen if you got rejected. You’d find the nearest cliff and jump. No, it’s much better to just be in a panic state because at least the panic means you have a shred of hope left.”
I’m also getting worried that it’s not just the lack of social contact, but it might just plain be the person I mentioned in the post above. After all, I WAS with people one day at Comicon, so maybe it wasn’t the crowd freaking me out and I’m just obsessed with this one person. Which would make me a really, really bad person. I don’t feel obsessed over them specifically, just with social contact, but maybe I am and don’t realize it. I just want friends that I can go to lunch with and talk with and maybe see movies with. I have nobody. Comicon was just another damned bumping into each other fluke. I tried to ask them if they wanted to do other stuff, but they were leaving town for a month or so. So I guess I’m alone again. Or maybe this is all just a proxy for some other anxiety, and even if I do get someone to hang out with everything will stay the same and I’ll have wasted my time.
I just can’t operate anymore. I don’t really want to commit suicide, or kill myself, but in some ways I kind of wish I just wouldn’t wake up so I wouldn’t have to feel like this. I’m jittery, and jumping at the slightest noise. Constantly drafting friendly “wanna get lunch next week” emails and discarding them. I think I might be developing nervous tics and odd behaviors. I’ve started biting my left index finger subconsciously and regularly. I can’t deal anymore. I just can’t.
I’m really breaking. I’ve even started imagining old friends I used to have and what I’d do with them – hanging out, playing games, just stupid mundane stuff. I’ve started having bizarre romantic fantasies about old crushes, I think I have my first two kids named for if I got married with at least four different people I haven’t seen in 5+ years. I’ve never been that kind of creepy obsessive person before, and I know it’s unhealthy, but I literally try not to think about it and the fantasies keep going. And the fact that I’m doing it really, really scares me and makes me feel like a bad person. I don’t know if I get a “pass” for possibly being on the brink of insanity, or if it’s “ok” because I know doing it is wrong, but it just goes to show how fundamentally broken I feel right now.
It’s official, my brain doesn’t know how to process emotions anymore. I’m getting these bizarre combinations of emotions I didn’t even know were possible, like sadhappy and weird things I can’t describe.
Huh… should’ve seen this coming when I started feeling “weird emotions.” I just hit that “dead inside” feeling. That’s great. Oh well, maybe I can at least slog through my scholarship paperwork now without emotions screaming at me in every direction. Or not, it’s hard to tell exactly how much motivation this feeling will allow you to have.
If you continue to feel this way, I think it’s time to go somewhere for crisis intervention, like psych ER. It sounds like you could really use some structure and professional support right now. Hang in there.
Jragon, you obviously have this scholarship paperwork on your mind. Maybe this deadness will help you crank it out. Olivesmarch4 makes an excellent point though. You might benefit from some crisis intervention - I know you’ll want to make the deadline for your paperwork but can you allow yourself to submit to some intensive help after the deadline? You don’t sound like you’re going to be able to get better through sheer will. I had a bizarre and upsetting episode in a psych ward recently but as hard as it was, I actually came out in a better state.
Here is an update on a potential new antidepressant that will represent a whole new class of drugs - ones that work on the glutamatergic system. This system has previously been implicated in studies of the antidepressant effects of ketamine as well as other research but this will be the first drug to take advantage of those insights. Info below is from phase II trials so the drug is progressing.
I just wanted to update:
Financially I’m not doing too well, but I’ve always had that problem. Creditors can put a lot of pressure on you. I’m in betwenn letting it all go and being able to do something about it.
Medically I’m better than I have been in years. My new liver is removing toxins that were affecting my brain (hepatic encephelopathy) and the result is that I’m thinking a lot more clearly. I’m not an any more depression meds, I stopped taking prozac when I got the transplants and haven’t wanted or needed to since. The only issues are scar tissue on my lungs and my ongoing fight with diabetes.
Now I’m in the middle. If I try to get work in this economy, am I going to get enough money to afford my expensive maintenance meds? I am getting SSI but it’s nowhere near enough to live on, even with medicare to pay for the meds. If I start working again i can keep medicare under a return to work program offered by SS, but the problem is that i live in a depressed rural area and have no transportation. Getting started is my major obstacle.
It’s hard to be optimistic, but I have hope- I should be dead already but I’m beating the odds for now. If I could ask a few of you to send positive thoughts my way, I would be grateful that you cared enough to do so.
[QUOTE=The Mad Hermit
It’s hard to be optimistic, but I have hope- I should be dead already but I’m beating the odds for now. If I could ask a few of you to send positive thoughts my way, I would be grateful that you cared enough to do so.[/QUOTE]
I’m hopeful for you. The lack of transportation is a problem, sure, but you’ve overcome huge problems before. Whether you go back to work now or in the future is a decision only you can make. I hope you’re taking advantage of all the help that’s available. Maybe there’s even a way to get help with transportation?
Dammit, I thought things were getting better. I felt good this weekend. Went out, did some gaming, got a new nice looking shirt, actually felt pretty good about myself. And I wake up this morning feeling like complete hell. I want to forget all these things, all these people, like none of it ever happened, but my brain keeps bringing them up. I keep alternating between anger and sadness in the space of minutes. I was feeling better. 
This year is starting to look like it’s going to take a nose-dive for me.
I’ve just gotten the “You are a horrible person which is why you are not getting anything good” speech from my boss. No, scratch that - I can’t even be sure what I am hearing. I was putting up my case for higher wages today and he brought up a litany of issues customers have with me (I’m a programmer) which I have never heard off which he claimed he swept under the rug for me because of my condition. Or at least this is what I thought I hear.
(The sucky thing about depression and my raging insecurity is that I can never be sure if my interpretation matches the reality)
In particular he brought up my defensiveness. Which is true. I have no idea why, but whenever a supervisior or someone ask me anything pertaining to schedule or progress, I got tense up and start giving reasons for why I am late, or pre-emptively saying it is difficult and why it is so. I kept thinking people are trying to find fault with me, and boss said that I’m a very hard person to approach and get to. It’s like they don’t want to talk to me not because they hate me or despise me, but they aren’t sure if they’ll set me off, 'cos I look so stressed and tensed all the time.
I got the problem, but I don’t have the solution.
And as the company has some changes, I got a massive paycut. I do not have enough to afford any therapy at the moment - actually by now I am rather sick about it. I felt like an invalid. Someone mediocre. Condemned and left to one side to rot, can’t get anything good done, will never get alone with others.
Help.