Depression, who knew?

I have not written for a while and when I do I normally write about philosophical issues, news, technology, government etc but I never write about me an my life.  Strange given the original purpose of a blog was to capture and share things that occur in one's life.  So I thought I would try and have a go at writing some things down on a area of my life which affects large numbers of people today.

For some time now I have been depressed.  Its a strange term as in some respects it has been trivialised by over use and mixed up with concepts of sadness.  Yes, depressed people can be very sad but sadness is not depression.  It is an illness, let's not kid ourselves.  The documented symptoms of someone with depression are (not an exhaustive list):

• Feeling sad, anxious or bored 
• Low energy, feeling tired or fatigued 
• Under- or over-sleeping, or waking frequently during the night 
• Poor concentration, thinking slowed down
• Loss of interest in hobbies, family or social life
• Low self-esteem and feelings of guilt
• Aches and pains with no physical basis, e.g. chest/head/tummy pain associated with anxiety or stress
• Loss of interest in living, thinking about death, suicidal thoughts

I suffer from most of these.  I have studied the illness for a long time as this is not the first time this has happened.  I consider myself lucky in that I am very self-reflective and able to watch myself in terms of depression and know what to do about it.  It is rather like someone who knows they are susceptible to skin cancer checks their skin for abnormalities.  Not everyone is so lucky.

If you are lucky enough to have never suffered from depression then the symptoms may look understandable but all the documentation I have seen on the illness does not properly communicate how it feels to be depressed.  If you are not depressed you will probably think you have experienced those symptoms at some point.  But on the surface all of the above can have other causes and what is hard to portray is the underlying feeling of depression.  The above are all external manifestations of the issue but they miss out one important one which only the sufferer feels and it is one of the most horrible feelings I have ever experienced. 

Let me try and articulate this in another way.  Depression is not the collection of symptoms.  You are not depressed because you feel sad and cannot sleep.  Depression is the thing that causes all of the above.  Your depression CAUSES the sleep loss, the sadness and so on, you are not categorised as depressed because you feel all of the above things, it is not a collective terms for a set of the issues above.   One is not depressed about something.  One is simply depressed.

Depression is a 'thing' in its own right.  There is also no parallel.  You cannot say depression is exactly like xyx because there is no feeling like depression.    Different people feel it in different ways.  So what is it like for me?  On a bad day the inside of my head feels like it is overheating, it actually feels like my brain is aching and it is horrible.  I can no more escape that feeling than one can escape a headache (without medication).  But it lasts for weeks and eventually it drives you mad.  No matter what you do, where you go, whether you exercise, meet people, watch a fun movie the pressure and noise in one's head is maddeningly inescapable.  It is an itch you cannot scratch.  I have even tried to shut down my nervous system with alcohol to escape it eventually but even that does not work.  This is almost certainly the chemical imbalance aspects of what is happening.  What this imbalance is it not clear however the treatment is often dealing with serotonin levels.  But as one site says nicely, treating a headache with aspirin does not mean you have an aspirin deficiency!  What is real for me is a clear physical manifestation of fuzziness in my head.  And the 5HTP (natural remedy) restores serotonin levels in one's brain.  And it works and removes the physical feelings I get in my head.

That feeling is hard to deal with trust me.  I have thought a lot about what the cause and effects are to try and understand which is which.  It is not sadness.  I cannot speak for others but my depression manifests itself as an utter hopelessness and a complete loss or meaning to anything.  That is not a philosophical meaning, it is a manifestation of depression.  It is not that I have thought about it and decided that things have no meaning.  They just don't.  In fact what is worse is that you KNOW that it is not true but the feeling is unshiftable.  This is why there is sadness.  An one learns to cover up the external symptoms (not appearing sad) in public and when with friends and it is hard work.  Why cover up?  Well, there is nothing that can be said and if someone has not dealt with depression they tend to use techniques to cheer people up or tell them that it will all be ok.    Trouble is it won't because 'it' is hopeless and meaningless to a depressed person, there is no beginning or end, just depression.  We do not need cheering  up as such because we are not conventionally sad.  And in the end you just avoid friends and family because its too hard to put on a brave face.

Depression is debilitating.  There are many days I would just like to lie in bed and stare at the wall as anything else seems like a waste of time.  It stops you from doing anything!  It stops you wanting to do anything.  Its not that you want to go out and do something but can't.  It just removes any desire at all.  It strips and removes the motivation for EVERYTHING.

Many years ago a friend caught us by surprise by committing suicide and had no external indications that anything was wrong.  So I did what I normally do which is look into the subject and try better to understand what might have happened.  Again, I am lucky because although I have had bad thoughts I have never acted on them because I am able to almost watch myself and tell myself that I am having issues and I know where to get help.  But this is not the case for many.  The one thing that took me years to understand until I too suffered from depressive episodes was the advice that went as follows:

People who commit suicide do not want to die, they just do not know how to live.

Having suffered from depression I know what that means.  If you look at what I have experienced above it might give you a clue.  If one is stripped of all meaning and motivation it is easy to see how small a step it is to not see any reasons to live and depression is so debilitating and unpleasant that it in itself can drive one over the edge. 

Emotions also become magnified.  Sadness being the one most people recognised.  It is hard to control one's emotions when depressed.  This leads to things in one's daily life that would normally have little impact becoming major events.  It may be one of the reasons depression causes suicide.  People see friends, family etc committing suicide after what appears to be relatively minor (even major) events (death, breakdowns of marriages, loss of children) which, even in the seriously bad events, we would consider that people should be able to cope with.  But witness those events through the eyes of someone depressed and minor emotional events can be massively magnified.  Major events that many cope with ok when magnified can be shattering and not survivable by someone with depression.  It is important to understand this concept.

Another feeling I get which apparently is common is that problems have no end.  Problems that, when you are not depressed will be experienced and then dealt with and put behind you do not work like that when I am depressed.  Problems become cumulative as if there is no closure.  For example, you have an argument with your partner.  Normally you would make up and get on with your life.  When you are depressed the emotions and the feelings do not go away.  So the next issue you experience then layers on top of those negative feelings and as you progress through your life they build and build and build and they give one the perception that life is an overwhelmingly negative experience when in fact most of the issues are in the past and done and dusted.  So for a depressed person the even trivial issues can create bizarre overreactions which are hard for others to understand.  Why did he blow up and break down when the he broke a glass?  Because it is not just a glass he is reacting to.  Its the glass, the x, the Y, the Z the A etc etc that goes all the way back probably to the trigger point of the depression.  This accumulation of negative state can make the world seem an awful place.  It becomes impossible to differentiate a negative events in terms of scale to the point where even positive events or experiences are seen from a perspective of massive accumulated negative position that nothing positive seems to have any real value.  I am not sure if any of the above will make sense to people reading this.

The final point I would like to make is how disconnected one feels from the world.  When depressed all the senses seem dulled and everything that occurs around you is like a dull documentary which just runs and runs and runs.  The issue of meaning and motivations stripped out means that it really is like watching paint dry.  One even looks at friends and family as something odd.  Not quite real.

There are many discussed causes for depression.  Mine comes and goes.  I rely upon 5HTP (a mild and natural and unprescribed) anti-depressant with few side effects which really does work.  But now and again (it happened this week) something will happen that will simply hit you physically.  My depression (head fuzziness) hit me during an event again like a tidal wave.  It was such an instantaneous effect that I actually witnessed it happen and I just felt utterly crushed.  It was very strange.  If you have every feinted then you will remember the very odd feeling one gets as you actually feel the blood drain from your head before you pass out.  It was a mental version of that.  It caught me by surprise big time. 

I sit here today writing this, not because it is a cry for help or anything (it isn't) but more about a recording of how it is to be depressed as in future it will be a good reminder if it occurs again in the future that it is manageable.  I am lucky to have some good help (my psychologist I see now and again) and the internet.

I also write it because it because I know others who suffer too and hopefully it will strike a chord.   Finally, I hope it will help people who read this better understand the issue so that they may guard against it themselves (nobody thinks they are susceptible until it hits them out of the blue) and their friends and families.

There is plenty of good information on the web on the subject.  Most people try and deal with it alone, some do ok, some end up dead.  We have campaigns on the TV about recognising stroke, skin cancer, heart disease, how to handle heart attacks etc.  Depression is dangerous and while it is seen as a weakness (especially in men) then people will not willingly seek help.

So anyone out there reading this, it is not a weakness, it is an illness.  Go get help, don't try and deal with it alone.  Despite the fact that I am mid episode at the moment, my analytical brain knows that it will pass and things will get back to normal and am able to ignore the hopelessness like you might know that a migraine will pass eventually.  For those who know someone who might be depressed, read the web.  They do not need to be cheered up, it won't be ok in the future.  What exasperates the situation for a depressed person is the feeling of isolation.  Being told to cheer up just demonstrates to the ill person that  people do not understand what they are going through and in some ways actually emphasises the feeling of isolation.

So what can be done?  Well, read the web.  There are loads of good techniques out there.  Type depression into google and hey presto, all you need to know.  I am pleased I understand depression as I have been able to coach 2 people into how to recognise it and deal with it when they were having hard times.  Avoidance is much easier than cure (like all illness).  This is why I have tried to articulate the feelings associated with it rather than the symptoms.  If you start to feel like any of the above then it is much easier to sort it out earlier than later.  Trust me on that one!

So a note to future me.  Read your own blog, take your own advice!  Lol.  Yer right.  When have I listened to anyone? :->