Depression 101

Jun 26 15:29 UTC 2002

         This item is to discuss the feeling you get
         when you start to mistake the Bummed item
         for the Happy item, when your occasional
         down feelings become DANGEROUSLY commonplace.

Depression affects everyone in our respective communities in different 
ways.  It is a subject that is only beginning to receive due attention 
in open media, but remains a topic that is riddled with myths and 
misconceptions and the stigma attached to this treatable illness is one 
of the most common reasons why it is a hard issue for many to confront.

"Depression 101" is exactly what it sounds like.  An intro to a 
discussion with many twists and turns, tangents and subtopics.  It is 
for those like myself who are just beginning to uncover the surface of 
this problem, whether this is the first encounter or a lifelong 
struggle, as well as those who can (and do!) look on their experiences 
in a different way, having come out on the other side.  Of course this 
is also for those who are close to someone struggling with Depression 
and for those who are simply interested in learning more.  

Personal stories, questions regarding the illness, finding a therapist, 
impact on close friends and family . . . we can all discuss it here.

This is also intended to be a safe place for those who are dealing with 
this and want support.  Though no one here is a trained professional, 
those that are willing can certainly help steer someone in the right 
direction.  This also means, of course that it would be appreciated if 
those that participate be sensitive to those who choose to share.  It 
doesn't mean that humor is not appreciated, it means *be an adult*.

Anything goes folks . . . let's make this a great discussion!

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response 2 of 170:

Jun 26 15:34 UTC 2002

Um, I didn't realize this was also an Agora item.  Maybe link in the fall.

response 4 of 170:

Jun 27 06:26 UTC 2002

There definitely is still a stigma on depression.
Many people respond to your situation with the remark: 'get a grip.'
Like it's easy. Even my twin had the nerve to say something similar to 
me in 1996-97, when I had my depression. Harsh, no?
The way I dealt with the problem was, as it was so clear to notice, not 
to hide the fact I was in therapy, but be open about it.
Eventually I discovered one of the reasons for the depression: my worse 
than bad relationship withg my father, whom had committed suicide in 
1991. My therapist managed to make me get to terms with it. She did 
this by merely nudging me in the right direction.

I believe that depression in general increases. 
I have got the impression that the demands society puts on individuals 
is growing. Life nowadays is much more complex than it was, say fifty 
years ago. I have been discussing this idea with my own therapist 
(behavioral therapy, not an analyst), and she concurred.
See, depression happens a lot among people of my own generation (30+).
I fear that the generation coming after me (20+) is subject to even 
more strong demands.
For instance, keeping and maintaining a relationship is harder 
nowadays. The partners not only desire a sensitivity, loyalty, 
intelligence, wit, care etc, but also good providership and excellent 
bed performance. It's quite a lot to answer to, and it's only one thing.

Concluding I'll be the last to have an opinion on depression. I know 
how hard it is to cope with it. Anybody I care about can count on my 
(mental) support / empathy.

response 6 of 170:

Jun 27 13:48 UTC 2002

#4,5> Bah. Every generation says that, and it's rarely true. Why don't know
what it was like to be 25 in 1955, or in 1855, or in 1755, because we weren't.
 
#4> On getting a grip: I think there's a tendency for people who have mental
problems to allow the problems to rule their lives. That's close to the psych
distinction between functional and dysfucntional problems. Functionally ill
people can still do their basic life things, but they feel uncomfortable in
the realm of their disorder; dysfunctional people are actually blocked from
doing major things because of their disorder. Overwhelmingly, most people are
functional, and so it's tempting (I think) to respond to someone who's
claiming obstruction due to illness to "get a grip": It could be a statement
of callousness, but it could also be a statement of, "Look, I saw you do X
last week, and a few months ago, and several times last year, so I know you
can do X, there's no reason why you can't do X now." And the truth is,
sometimes that little "get a grip" speech is what some people need to crawl
out of the hole (while, unfortunately, sometimes it drives them in deeper).

response 8 of 170:

Jun 27 15:19 UTC 2002

I have a friend who's a clinical psychologist, who works with some severely
messed-up people.  His advice to people who are depressed is to drink a ton
of water (more than you're thirsty for -- like a couple pints) and get out
in the sun and exercise, even if it's just walking around the block five or
six times.  He doesn't claim this will work for everyone, because some really
will need medication and/or therapy, but it should at least lessen the effects
and in mild cases can lift the depression.

I don't know why this works, exactly, but I've seen it do the trick, and he's
got hands-on experience to back it up.

Your mileage may vary, but his method costs nothing and is good for you even
if it doesn't lift the depression, so it may be worth giving it a try.

response 10 of 170:

Jun 27 16:36 UTC 2002

In part, I think it's simply a part of larger picture.  We're emerging 
from a culture that taught people to keep their problems under wraps, 
whether it be illness, addiction, abuse, you name it.

Actually, I do think that everyone's moods can benefit to some degree 
with regular physical exerise of varying levels.  In my case, I used to 
work out 2 hours everyday, and it felt really great.  For me it was also 
a distraction, not just theraputic.  A double-edged sword. I think it 
will be easier for me to do the things I enjoy, including physical 
exercise, sports, etc., once certain variables are more under control.

response 12 of 170:

Jun 27 18:26 UTC 2002

My grandmother says that about divorce.  People didn't have the time to
examine if their marriage was good - they were too busy working.

response 14 of 170:

Jun 27 18:48 UTC 2002

People my age grew up facing the real possibility of global nuclear war 
and the expected result of most or all life on the planet being 
destroyed.  We had bombing drills when I was in elementary school.

My parents grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, then 
brought me into the world to face the aforementioned nuclear war.

Their parents grew up when smallpox and polio killed and crippled many.

The generation preceding them worked 15 hours a day on farms, every 
day.  They came here from various places around Europe, for the most 
part, so they could enjoy that kind of luxurious lifestyle in relative 
peace.

I don't think young people now have it all *that* tough.

response 16 of 170:

Jun 27 18:56 UTC 2002

That's an interesting comparison.  I like it because it says something about
the way we look at depression.  Everyone, I think, will agree that something's
wrong if you're too busy to tell how your marriage is going.  But I'll bet
that "too busy to be depressed" sounded pretty good to you, at least at first.
It sure sounded good to me.  

response 18 of 170:

Jun 27 19:05 UTC 2002

Something I've noticed about mild or moderately depressed 
people is that they spend a whole lot of time thinking about
themselves.  They are doing this moment to moment thing measuring
how they are doing in this situation and what is that person 
thinking about me and why in the world did I do that, etc. 

I'm not sure what comes first, they get depressed because they
see themselves under such a microscope (who wouldn't) or the
depression draws them into a "me" circle.

response 20 of 170:

Jun 27 21:16 UTC 2002

Good point, Mary.  Yeah, I find that my mood goes down when I'm not working
with kids as much, probably because when I'm working with a roomful of them
I don't think of me nearly as much as I do when I'm not.  The post-camp
depression is the worst.

response 22 of 170:

Jun 27 21:44 UTC 2002

Isnīt it a chicken - egg question?
I honestly canīt tell which comes first.
But, Mary certainly has got a point.

response 24 of 170:

Jun 28 00:15 UTC 2002

emotional modes i excel at when displaying include: glee, scorn, contempt,
lust, adoration, giddiness, anxiety usually of a contorted type, and
depression; i can do depression like a scarecrow of honey and suet coming
apart on the davenport; i can do depression like digging a dustbowl in my
stomach with a broken bottle of wine; i can even do a depression rich enough
to give my reflection in the mirror halitosis.
despite my talents in this latter modality, i gave it up. the reason i exude
these emotions with significant clarity (minimal disparity between interior
& exterior) is because i've been expressing them longer, more often, and more
freely than emotions i either tend to not have (like pity, remorse, and
boredom) or have in some way been restricted from expressing (such as sorrow,
anger, and pride). when i adore an object, or when i'm stimulated into (a
shallow wet bag of) anxiety, i don't make a mistake about how i feel, my body
responds along a thread woven back uninterrupted to early years. i'm better
at glee than at contempt; better at contempt than at lust. i was a gleeful
kid. i didn't take up contempt until 4th grade, when friends mike + stephan
and i entered personal competition making models of the solar system from
scratch. (i don't know where they are today, but if stephan isn't dead from
drugs -- he had an atrocious pair of parents to raise -- i expect and hope
he's excelling in some esoteric corner of some branch of science. about mike
i'm too unresolved to comment.) lust began occurring when i was 10, but i
didn't figure out how to display it until i was 17. frequency of occurrence
and opportunity for display has given me the chance to better learn
displayment in a shorter period of time than some other feelings.
i took up depression -- the optional, easy to swallow grape-flavored
child-formula depression -- when my family moved from the comfortably shitty
ranch house and trailer trash hood to the two a story subdivided
gentrification project, where we lived in a house of cards that rained down
quicker than i could keep the mawn lowed, so that'd be age 13. it was long
preceded by anxiety. anxiety is useful: it can be entertaining, funny, and
you can get work done. even sadness (i'm told, although i've tried out this
modality a handful of times only in the last year) can turn to song.
depression is like a nightmare spent eating spoonfuls out of a 5 lb bag of
quicklime.
by 'giving up' depression (oh if it were so), i mean, i think, that i replaced
it. suppose for sake of an argument that depression isn't itself an emotion
but a complex of sincerely beheld emotions gone unexpressed, thus a bilious
residue of stifled feelings, their potency choked and reduced to crap coating
the inside of your skull. imagine that every sincere emotion is NOT not-like
an orgasm; now attribute individual character and livelihood, here in the land
of make-believe, to each emotion and imagine the complaints of those
within you who never get to come, or at least not as much as the others
get to, or AT LEAST not as much as they get hard up for a pop. fucking
inhumane treatment of one's self, i'd believe.
is this an excessively cartoonish depiction of that oddball social enemy,
Depression -- an umbrella state of mind pushed open by complexes of
malnourished feelings? i don't go in for -- i'm not so far convinced of --
physical theories of mind, in which, say, every state of mind in an
individual ("in" an individual? a topic for another time.) corresponds
with a quantifiable brain-state; so i'm also not convinced that
depression, well and workably alleviated by rest, pharmaceuticals, and
exercise on sunny days, is solved (unknotted? discord!) other than by
expressing repressed thoughts and feelings. (belatedly noteworthy: i don't
think i want to include the phenomenon of depression in cases of clear
physical brain trauma, debilitating psychosis, and other messy odds and
ends, in the preceding exploration. not because i have some dividing line
in mind between these 'errors' or 'broken' people and the 'properly
working' humans to which the exploration applies -- i would have to accuse
myself of dense solipsism, nobody likes that. rather, instead, that the
capital-D depression much in the headlines yesterday and today is
something like an epidemic, which is of normative concern, mysterious in
origin But that we are human. possibly even contagious -- have you ever
caught a case of depression? answers below.
this is still murky, i think, but i don't intend to tell a man with a
butchered cortex that he just needs to let it all out to get rid of the
blues and expect it to work, even in cases where he could comprehend me. i
do wonder, though: people with life-changing brain injuries, and certainly
those with emergent psychosis, are probably disoriented (scared) enough
that without the ability to express it molts into depressed spells. this
is grossly speculative without being necessary but it occurred to me to
mention it.
so eat well, get plenty of exercise and rest, and strip yourself of all
self-censorship and inhibitions if you'd like to leave the poppy fields of
depression. and no, i'm not on meds delizia, you cocksucker.