A couple of followups on previous posts

[xiphias]

Re: depression:

I want to clarify that what I was posting was NOT supposed to be exhaustive. It was merely supposed to be describing what I experience, personally. Several people posted really interesting and enlightening comments about what THEIR depression is like, and how it differs from mine. I encourage people to go back and read the comments to get more perspectives.

I also encourage other people who suffer from depression to blog about what their experience is like. I hope that, maybe, by getting more descriptions from the inside, people will be able to, y'know, come up with ideas about what depression is -- or, perhaps, what depressions ARE. I suspect that "depression" is a CATEGORY of diseases, not a single disease. Like "cancer". There are many different cancers out there, and a treatment for one may be useless, or harmful, for another. And perhaps, if we got more descriptions of different kinds of depression, we could get better diagnosis, and perhaps, from there, we could get better treatment.

I also wouldn't mind hearing from therapists on my friends list if this sort of descriptive stuff is useful.

In an entirely other direction, I was wondering if I had a distinctive authorial "voice." Specifically, I was wondering if it is possible for people reading the Purim shpeil to figure out which scenes I wrote the dialog for, and which scenes were written by others.

Comments

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, I was just as you posted contemplating a similar post re: anxiety disorders, which often get confused with and/or appear alongside depression. That'll show up at some point.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

I think it's a category, too.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I think depression covers a whole heap of different things that are superficially similar. And this probably applies to several other conditions.

[deerdancer22.livejournal.com]

I struggled with clinical depression all my life. Since seratonin re-uptakes helped, my guess is I either don't make enough or don't use it properly. It is particularly frustrating when life is very good to not be able to enjoy it and to be more vulnerable than seems normal when difficulties arise.

My experience is of waves of darkness that come over me even during the happiest times of my life. I don't know what it is like to wake up in the morning feeling happiness and a feeling of starting a great day. With my ex's family I saw first hand a whole family that didn't suffer from depression. I saw people who could experience life with joy and full engagement and had deep resources for tragedy. For the first time I really understood how debilitating physiological depression is.

I am currently taking Sam-E in the morning, St. John's wort and at night tryptophane which is a precursor for seratonin and helps for a really good nights sleep if your physiology needs that. I am learning some spiritual inner energy ways to move the waves out. How nice if I could eventually not have to use all this energy for the waves.

I did extensive therapies of all kinds which have made my a very processed and more whole human being but they had nothing to do with the depression although that is what drove me to try so many therapies. Physiology is physiology. My khavanah (a new favorite word), my strong intention, is to find out what it is like to be happy when life is happy. I do it now much more than in the past but I still have to tai chi the waves and it gets tiring at times.