I strongly suspect that my depression is in part a reaction to my OCD -- I'm driven to PICK at things, mentally and physically, and the depression is my mind trying to tamp down the anxiety, but the cure is worse than the disease.
That makes a lot of sense to me.
I mean, you figure, depression has to, y'know, come from SOMEWHERE, right? I can think of three basic ways that diseases work: parasites, deficiencies, and something in the body that's supposed to do one thing screwing up and doing something else.
A virus, a bacterium, or something bigger like a tapeworm -- you can think of those all as parasites. The disease happens because making you sick somehow benefits some other critter.
A deficiency -- for some reason, humans (and guinea pigs) can't synthesize vitamin C. And our bodies need it to function. So, if we don't get that, we get scurvy.
One's own body screwing up and doing something it's not supposed to -- lupus would be a real dramatic example of this, where the immune system decides to go and attack the rest of the body. I think some cancers might be like this, too.
So, since there isn't, as far as I know, a "depression virus" or something like that, depression is probably in one of the other two categories. Or, y'know, it could be in BOTH those categories -- we lack something in our brains that is supposed to control and channel some function in the brain, and, without those controlling chemicals, whatever it is runs amok and forms depression.
At Arisia a year ago -- not this just past one, but the one before -- someone got an evening panel basically just to talk about some of the hypotheses he had come up with about depression. He was very clear that these were just hypotheses, but I found them interesting.
His question was -- "what if depression is, basically, an out-of-control version of something else, something that might be actually USEFUL?"
And he noticed that clinical depression mimics, in a few significant ways, parts of the early grieving process.
So he wondered if, in effect, we had a way to basically shut down our emotions, as, sort of, a circuit breaker, during periods where the feelings are too intense -- that we have some sort of reaction which allows us to react with numbness and then depression for a while, and THEN, after some of the emotions have cooled off a bit, feel them THEN.
And that clinical depression might be something in which this reaction gets out-of-control, takes on a life of its own, shows up without an external cause, and then won't go away in the time period that it's supposed to.
Again, this is just his hypothesis, but it's really an interesting one, isn't it? And it would dovetail with your experience -- the numbness that is like depression is supposed to be a reaction to emotional shock.
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Date: 2008-01-31 04:48 am (UTC)That makes a lot of sense to me.
I mean, you figure, depression has to, y'know, come from SOMEWHERE, right? I can think of three basic ways that diseases work: parasites, deficiencies, and something in the body that's supposed to do one thing screwing up and doing something else.
A virus, a bacterium, or something bigger like a tapeworm -- you can think of those all as parasites. The disease happens because making you sick somehow benefits some other critter.
A deficiency -- for some reason, humans (and guinea pigs) can't synthesize vitamin C. And our bodies need it to function. So, if we don't get that, we get scurvy.
One's own body screwing up and doing something it's not supposed to -- lupus would be a real dramatic example of this, where the immune system decides to go and attack the rest of the body. I think some cancers might be like this, too.
So, since there isn't, as far as I know, a "depression virus" or something like that, depression is probably in one of the other two categories. Or, y'know, it could be in BOTH those categories -- we lack something in our brains that is supposed to control and channel some function in the brain, and, without those controlling chemicals, whatever it is runs amok and forms depression.
At Arisia a year ago -- not this just past one, but the one before -- someone got an evening panel basically just to talk about some of the hypotheses he had come up with about depression. He was very clear that these were just hypotheses, but I found them interesting.
His question was -- "what if depression is, basically, an out-of-control version of something else, something that might be actually USEFUL?"
And he noticed that clinical depression mimics, in a few significant ways, parts of the early grieving process.
So he wondered if, in effect, we had a way to basically shut down our emotions, as, sort of, a circuit breaker, during periods where the feelings are too intense -- that we have some sort of reaction which allows us to react with numbness and then depression for a while, and THEN, after some of the emotions have cooled off a bit, feel them THEN.
And that clinical depression might be something in which this reaction gets out-of-control, takes on a life of its own, shows up without an external cause, and then won't go away in the time period that it's supposed to.
Again, this is just his hypothesis, but it's really an interesting one, isn't it? And it would dovetail with your experience -- the numbness that is like depression is supposed to be a reaction to emotional shock.