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!

<Upon conf. turnover, you can find this item in Inferno, the resident 
Psyche conference.  Should you wish to wait until turnover when this 
item is less visible to post personal words, feel free to access the 
item at that time.>

170 responses total.

When the fw of Recovery conf is decided, maybe this can be linked. 
jacklumen has a similar item there.

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

I remember there being a depression item in spring Agora.

The item in recovery is about mental illness in general.  It would be 
wonderful to link this item since depression seems to be one of the 
more common ones.  *chuckle* cmcgee, I guess it's your turn to bug 
Walter (i).  I got a very nice e-mail from him, and he stopped 
responding after that.

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.

As a member of the older twentysomethings, yeah, I think the stresses 
may be worse.

#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).

There is the fact, though, that lots of folks have been telling 
themselves to "get a grip," and for a while, it works, I think.  It 
feels so much worse when you're someone that has always been considered 
the "strong one," someone that's supposed to have it under control.  
Then you realize you didn't necessarily have control in the first place, 
just a major wall which acted as a bit of a self-defence mechanism, and 
you never had a filter for the depressing thoughts that most folks can 
talk themselves out of believing.  Then the wall comes down and you have 
no protection whatsoever.  You don't want to monopolize your friends' 
time, you don't want to make it difficult for people to be happy or 
enjoy themselves in your presence, and you chastize yourself for not 
being as supportive of others as you feel you have been in the past.

I don't think that the demands placed on people in my age group are any 
harder than they have been in the past.  The demands are diferent, and 
perhaps more unique that those in the past because the world has changed 
so quickly in the last 20 years.  The demands may seem harder simply due 
to the fact that they are harder compared to the obligations we had to 
fulfill as children.  Most of our needs were met without us lifting a 
finger, and we were partially shielded from many societal prohibitions, 
obligations, etc.

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.

When I worked at ASH, one of the things we did for people who were 
depressed was to strongly encourage them to get out and walk around the 
block a couple of times a day. It really does wonders even with folks 
who really need the medication. I also have had personal experience 
with depression and I have found that walking in the daylight makes a 
huge difference. Socializing helps too if I feel up to it but like 
others have described here, sometimes I am not. A walk around the block 
and good cry go a long way. 

I have also tried the water thing. Sometimes it works for me, sometimes 
it doesnt. The theory behind it is that a small bit of dehydration will 
make you feel low energy which can feel like depression. You wont 
necessarily feel thirsty. So drinking some extra water might help. I 
know that I feel really tired when I dont get enough water so there 
might be something to that.

Personally, I think that doing something, no matter what, does help 
lift depression. Taking action helps depression. I think it even can 
help if that something is simply talking about it with others. This is 
why it is a real shame that there is a stigma attached to depression 
and therapy. It keeps people from taking action to deal with the 
depression and ends up making the illness worse. 

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.

I think part of it might also be that in the past, people's daily lives 
involved a lot more physically hard work. And it was easy to get 
motivated to do all that exercise because if one didnt get up and farm 
the land, one ended up starving or in the poor house or whatever. 
People didnt have time to be depressed. 

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

That does in fact make sense to me . . .

For some, including myself, staying busy is a great way to forestall 
the worse parts of depression.  The more one focuses on their work, be 
it manual labor or any other type, the easier it is to ignore, if you 
notice it at all.  I was one of the ones without a clue.

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.

One set of stressers got exchanged for another, that's all.

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.  

Er, that was re #12.  

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.

My guess is that it comes in all forms, and that even the "me" circle 
that you talk about shows up even in the most subtle of ways, including 
self-critical behaviours.

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.

I get very self focused when I am depressed. I have no idea if the self 
focus comes first or not. I will have to pay attention to that. 

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

Exercise will definitely have a profound effect on mood.  Most people
don't get enough exercise -- the result of 20th century labor saving
devices.

So far as water goes -- if you're sendentary and you're going to get
more exercise, you'll need more water, even if you were drinking
"enough" before.  More exercise means you need more oxygen which means
you need more blood flow -- and hence more water.  A lot of people don't
drink enough.  In former centuries, when water wasn't always safe to
drink, natural selection favored people who didn't get as thirsty.
Basically, long-term problems like heart problems were less bad than the
short-term risk of cholera.  I know I'm one of those people who don't
get thirsty often enough, and sometimes it's a chore to drink what I
know I should.

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.

*glee*

again, I would that people could be convinced that depression and other 
disorders aren't necessarily temporary states.  Bipolar and some types 
of depressive disorders are chronic, but they can be managed.  Perish 
the thought (but perhaps some would rather remain ignorant than do the 
research) that anyone would seriously believe they are contagious.

This is true - but many people get slapped with meds after an initial
diagnosis, seek no counseling and thus, never get their meds readjusted. 

26
what organizing cause do you suggest underlying chronic cases? or causes.
do the causes of chronic cases lead us necessarily to pharmaceuticals as
method of management? 
my suggestion of contagious depression is pointed at cases where organizing
cause can smoked out with psychoanalysis; the easiest example of adapting
depressive modes of thought and responsiveness to feelings is a depressive
parent to dependent, learning child. if the child grown to adulthood becomes
depressive, what is there to assure us that it's physical illness (mental as
physical) and not complex of neurosis?

resp:28  Well, yes, trauma, family dysfunction (cases of nuture, not 
nature) could be treated fairly well without pharmacopia.

The important thing to remember is that patients need to be informed 
and knowledgable of both the conditions and treatments they are 
receiving, know what options are available to them, and be sure that 
their doctor is willing to work with them to achieve the best possible 
outcome.  Talking to my last psychiatrist was like talking to a brick 
wall sometimes.  I'm glad I'm rid of him and hope to see someone new.

I'm looking into Rapid Eye Therapy (RET) as a means to treat addiction; 
perhaps mood outlook might improve.  It's nothing for sure, of course, 
but after 17 years of traditional counseling, I'm ready to try 
something new.

a friend of mine began RET six months ago. i don't know if she's still doing
it, and i haven't heard any update. between me and my friends (we talk about
our shrinks a lot) this usually means it wasn't successful, but i'm not
prepared to settle on that conclusion. it sounded fascinating as hell when
she told me about it.
i've seen shrinks off and on since i was 14, and, of 8, 2 have been worth a
damn. the first was a fluke, a chill fella who wore hawaiian shirts open at
the chest and his hair long and in a tight braid. (a lot like happyboy,
really.) because i was assigned to him by the court and because he was
changing his schedule to work with alcohol-troubled teens in groups, i had
to stop seeing him. the 2nd good shrink, my current one, was found on referral
from the first one. this, along with the multitude of tales from friends and
acquaintances on the difficulty of finding a decent shrink these days,
combined with the decor of shrinks' offices changing over to pamphlets,
calendars, clocks, inspirational posters, and stress-relief squeeze sponges
all bearing the corporate logo of some pharmaceutical company or another, has
suggested to me a crisis in the current state of american psychological mental
health.
email me if you'd like any contact info for my current so-called good shrink.

What's the difference between RET and EMDR?

what's EMDR?

This response has been erased.

EMDR is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.  It's supposed 
to be a way to move irrationally strong feelings from seeming immediate 
to seeming more remote.  My therapist wants me to try this for my anger 
with regard to my divorce.

RET= Rapid Eye Therapy.  Apparently, RET and EMDR may be similar yet 
independently produced theories.  I am not sure of the second, but RET 
is recreating and using rapid eye movement (REM) as in active sleep 
(dreaming stages) to reprocess thoughts and memories associated with 
certain traumas, addictions, etc.

RET is a philosophical, spiritual thing.  EMDR is a psychological 
treatment.  That's about all I know about them.

What are your thoughts on trying EMDR, John?  Do you know yet how it's 
supposed to work?

I suppose one of hardest things to do is to know where to begin?  
Despite the fact that  a lot of the depression discussion can consist 
of chicken or egg first arguments sometimes, somtimes it's a matter of 
figuring out from which angle to begin, to help you focus on other 
things, progressively changing certain learned behaviours.  (I don't 
know if that made sense to anyone.)

I've told my therapist I'm all right with trying it.  He says he's 
worked with it for several years and seen it work a lot.  I don't know 
how it's going to help me exactly.

He gave me some examples.  One was a mid-30's man who broke down and 
was unable to stand up to his mother whenever she was critical to him, 
going through EMDR and then he was at least able to say "no" to her.

No one knows *how* it works, from what I understand.  It just does.  
Okay, fine.  I can live with that.  It's supposed to take feelings that 
seem very immediate and move them into a part of your brain where they 
seem less immediate.

It won't help me get over what he calls my grief over the divorce.  It 
could help me get over being unable to control my inappropriate anger.  
The problem for me is, I don't consider my anger inappropriate.  I 
guess I have to get over it anyway.  That's a hard part for me.

My depression is pretty specific and situational.  I don't think I was 
depressed before the divorce came along.  I don't know of a good way to 
deal with the divorce.  That's my whole problem.  I guess.

I risk taking over this item and turning it into another divorce item.  
I don't want to do that.  

Don't worry, I don't think we'll let that happen. :)

On your anger in general . . . not admitting or not believing that the 
anger is inappropriate, I would think, may hinder your ability to make 
a success out of the EMDR.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss