You are all on notice.

[xiphias]

Too many of my friends are in emotional pain. Now, some emotional pain is because of genuine loss, because people are in bad situations, because of real, external things that cause people to be in pain.

There's not a hell of a lot I can do about that, except be a shoulder to cry on, and to listen, and to express sympathy. And I want to do that for you.

But there are also a lot of people I love who are in emotional pain because of depression, and other internal effects that people carry with them.

I have decided that depression is my enemy. I hate it. I've started to make a good dent on killing it in my own brain, and I am now getting sick and tired of this evil enemy attacking my friends, too.

Depression, you are my enemy. I HATE you, and I hate to see you fucking with my friends. And so, I am YOUR enemy, too.

So, people I love -- when I see Depression attacking you, I'm going to get mad, and I'm going to start pushing you to take care of yourself and to destroy it.

If you are sad and upset because of grief and loss, that's not depression. If you are sad and upset because of loved ones who have died, that's not depression. If you are sad and upset because your life actually does, genuinely, suck, that's not depression.

But if the worm of depression is eating away your mind from inside? That's what I declare war upon.

Now, I don't care HOW you fight it, so long as it works. For some of you, taking B12 vitamins will work, because your brains just aren't producing enough of those B-complex vitamins, but, if you take supplements, your brain will be able to use them to make the seratonin and other neurotransmitters you need. If that works for you, that's fantastic.

Some of you will be able to control your depression through exercise. Your brain will be able to use the endorphins and other chemicals released in exercise to synthesize the chemicals it needs.

For some of you, that won't work. Some of you will need antidepressants. For some of you, selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors will work -- you make enough seratonin, but other parts of your brain that don't really need it are slurping it up before it can do its job. For some of you, those won't work, either. There are several classes of antidepressants. If one doesn't work on you, try another one.

Talk therapy might work for some of you. For others of you, it will do fuck-all. At least, before you're on drugs that help. Once your brain DOES have the chemicals it needs, THEN talk therapy will be useful, because, at that point, your brain will physically have the structures to be CAPABLE of not being depressed. At THAT point, you can start to learn how to not be depressed. But you physically CAN'T learn how to not be depressed when, in your brain, that whole part is just plain missing.

Being depressed isn't your fault. It's a physical disability. It is your brain physically not producing the chemicals that non-depressed brains have. In order to NOT be depressed, those chemicals need to be there, some way or another.

And it is just about impossible to get out of depression on your own. Those chemicals which are lacking? Those are the chemicals which would allow you to do things about getting out of depression -- and they're not there.

I have a wife who pushed me into treatment. And pushed me into different treatments, one after the other, until we found one that worked.

So, that's it. I want these motherf-ckling depressions OUT OF your motherf-cking brains. And I'm going to be yelling at each one of you to DO something about it, and if that thing isn't working, to DO SOMETHING ELSE, until you kill the depression.

Unless you don't want me to -- feel free to tell me NOT to do that. I'm not your parent. There are a couple people on my f-list that I AM in some sense responsible for, and you don't get to opt out of this (temima, I'm looking at you) -- but the rest of you can.

I just hate depression. I hate that it attacks my friends.

Comments

[erin-c-1978.livejournal.com]

I suppose that basically sums it up. And the Luvox is helping, both with the OCD and the depression, at least in terms of giving me the mental space to get things done and enjoy life sometimes instead of contracting into a ball of anxious misery. It might help me deal better with crappy life stuff, but it doesn't make the crappy life stuff All Okay, because how could it?

Actually, one way I can tell the meds are helping is that I'm able to write something as reasonable as this instead of my usual written equivalent of a high-pitched wail of despair.

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.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

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.