Bartender Geek

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.

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.

I'm feeling dizzy, feverish, muscle aches, chills, and sweaty palms. I can't find our thermometer, but I suspect that I'm running a fever.

This is good. See, yesterday and today have been completely nonproductive days for me. I fell asleep for several hours yesterday afternoon, and I didn't manage to shower and dress before Lis left for work this morning.

So I was worried that I was falling back into a depression.

But, nope! I'm just sick! Yay! Normal sickness! Nothing weird or long-term crippling! Hooray!

Also, Go Sox!

So, a couple days ago, I all of a sudden had enough energy to take care of normal tasks. I was able to mail letters, do laundry, do some cleaning.

And the weirdest thing happened that day. As I was walking to the post office, I passed the donut shop, and considered stopping in for a donut. And I realized I didn't really want one. That totally threw me, so I decided to stop in on the way back from the post office, instead.

When I came back, I still didn't want a donut.

I felt greatly uneasy and disturbed by this. So I went home and ate a tub of marshmallow fluff, which made me feel sick, rather than elevating my mood. (Okay, to be fair: there was like half an inch of marshmallow fluff in the bottom of the tub. It was really only like a half-cup of fluff, not a whole tub. Which makes the fact that it made me feel sick truly strange.)
( Read more... )

I haven't tended bar since once last September, when I was at a wedding for a friend of lagaz, not_the_angel, and sokmunky. And before that, I hadn't tended bar for nearly a year.

I've been dealing with depression, of course, for all my life, and medication helps some, but it's not enough. Because, while part -- most -- of my depression is chemical and won't go away without drugs, some of it is philosophical. Working at the Hebrew School is WONDERFUL for that: I need to be doing useful work, making a contribution to society.

But it's only one day a week, so it's not enough.

Lis has been pushing me to get more work, partially because there's nothing wrong with more money, but also because she knows this about me, and wants me to be happy. So, a few days ago, I finally put together a bartending resume, and dropped off a copy at a restaurant being built on Rte. 1, which is hiring for all positions.

I'm not going to hear back from them for weeks, but it meant I had a resume. So I made a .txt version, and emailed it to every interesting-sounding opportunity on Craigslist. I applied for like six or eight jobs in ten minutes.

I got a call that night.
( Read more... )

It's been bad for several weeks, if not longer, and it got incredibly bad over the weekend. And this morning -- well, when I'm depressed, I often just sit in front of the computer instead of doing useful things, but today, it was a genuine challenge to even get over here to sit in front of the computer.

And then I got an email, from Julian Murphy, who was one of my students:

hi ian, julian here!
i would like you to know that my soccer team beat our division so we went to
the cup and won it against the hardest teams we ever faced!

i miss you!

I'm still really depressed, but that email's given me enough of a boost that I think I'll be able to get a couple things done today, anyway. Thanks, Jules. I love that kid. Okay, I love all the kids.

Dr. Sagov is very difficult to make appointments with, so I saw Dr. Altman, who's the other physician in the practice. I'm starting to really like him. Not as much as I like Dr. Sagov, because, well, Dr. Sagov has been my doctor since I was a wee tot, but Dr. Altman has many of the same traits that make Dr. Sagov a good doctor.

Anyway, the upshot is he upped my dosage of Lexapro, with the comment that it looked like the medication started failing about when the days started getting shorter, so we'll revisit the dosage in six weeks, and, if things are getting better, possibly cut back to the original dosage, with a note to go back up to the higher dosage in November.

And we also talked briefly about therapy as a possibility. I said that, while I wasn't resistant to the idea in principle, I wasn't enthusiastic about it, because I've seen maybe a dozen therapists of one stripe or another in my life, working with six of them fairly extensively, and had really nothing to show for it.

But Lis and I were talking about it further, and I'm trying to figure out if it's time to re-open the question and maybe start again.

And, well, as my friends list is chock full of 1) therapists 2) medical personel of various sorts 3) generally wise people 4) people who've benefited from therapy (with lots of overlap between categories), I figured I'd ask here.
( Read more... )

One thing is that I've been, for no reason I can tell, feeling resistant about taking my antidepressants. I just don't want to take the damn pills. I have to cut them in half, because I was perscribed 20mg pills with instructions to cut them in half, in order to save money, since they charge per pill, so that gets you twice the antidepressants for the same money. And it's just annoying, and I just don't want to do it.

I suppose I've got external reasons to feel depressed, too, but I don't really want to talk about them. And besides, I think the chemical reasons are the more important ones.

I read an article in a magazine today which claimed that there are now forms of talk therapy which can treat depression. That seems so absolutely bizzare to me. I mean, I know myself pretty well -- I'm very self-aware, and am aware of my thought patterns and stuff like that.

And the causality between depressive states and thought patterns, for me, starts with the state, and the thought pattern is a result of that.

There's no correlation between depression and external events, and little correlation between depression and therapy in my life, and incredibly strong correlation between depression and whether I take Lexapro or not. I mean, if I skip the meds for two or three days, I'm depressed. If I don't, I'm not. The correlation between my depression and my antidepressants is just about exactly as strong as the correlation between my Prilosec and my heartburn.

Hannukah has mostly sucked. I lit candles at home on the first night. We were at my parents the second night, and candles were lit. We were at Mystery House last night, and candles were lit. And that's it. That's all we've done. I've been working so many nights, and been so depressed the nights I HAVE been home, that I've not even managed to do Hannukah, and I'm really feeling resentful about that.

Anna, our upstairs tenant, is apparently in the hospital. I know this from her daughter's LJ. I have no idea what's going on. I'm annoyed at basically everyone who lives in our house, including myself, and every single cat, even the ones I never see, just on general principles.

Lexapro does seem to make me tired. But it also makes me not depressed. Since I started taking it, I got involved in a G&S production, have gotten more hours at work, been a better Hebrew School teacher, dealt with some emotional curveballs life threw at me with grace and without falling apart, and, in generall, I really like the stuff. This whole "not being depressed" thing is very, very strange, but I think I could potentially get used to it. I'm not used to it yet.

But I am tired. I find myself sleeping for ten or twelve hours and waking up tired. But healthy. A lot of the niggling health problems I always have -- annoying rashes and aches and pains -- are gone, so it's not like the sleep is useless.

Maybe I should start using caffeine. I don't drink coffee, like, ever -- I like good coffee well enough, but I tend to drink maybe one cup of coffee every two or three months. Maybe that would help. Lis suggessed tea, which I drink much more than coffee, and has caffeine. Or colas or other caffeinated sodas.

My appetite is somewhat lower than it used to be, and it feels like my metabolism is higher. Or, at least, I find myself snacking unconsiously less than I usually do. Sometimes I go to sleep, and wake up a pound or two lighter than the previous day. Now that clearly has to be water loss, not fat loss, but there is some sort of fat loss going on, too. My body looks different.

So, if my body is reshaping itself, that would explain why I'm so tired -- that's got to take a lot of energy.

I wonder what I'm going to be like at the end of this process.

Yes, I saw that depression meme that's going around. I just don't feel up to DOING anything about it.

Sadly, I'm more-or-less serious about this. I've been intending to participate in the meme for the past couple of days, but just haven't been able to work up the motivation.