My complete and total inability to keep anything clean or tidy for any amount of time is a symptom of my depression. I may never be able to do this. Itās important that I remember that and forgive myself when I clean something out (like my car) and it ends up trashed within a week.
Depression IS A DISABILITY. Requiring accommodations is okay.
Medications donāt make you better, they donāt cure your depression. They serve as an aid. Their purpose is to help you get to everyone elseās minimal level of functioning.
Depression can cycle through periods of inactivity. This doesnāt mean itās gone away.
The reason I donāt feel like other people understand me is because ā¦ well ā¦ other people DONāT understand me. They canāt. They donāt have my disability.
Paranoia is par for the course.
Depression can and will interfere with your physical mobility. Forgive yourself when you canāt physically do something.
Itās entirely possible that I may never be able to live by myself. I canāt take care of myself. I need help to do it. And thatās okay.
As someone who suffers from depression and who experiences all these things as well I think this is important and needs to be reblogged. Depression is a very difficult thing, not only for people who suffer from it, but for everyone who knows a depressed person. My family doesnāt know how to deal with it, my friends try their very best to support me and I have tried to pretend I was fine until I was in ninth grade.
Everything makes so much more sense
Depression is a disease of the brain. The brain is an organ. When organs are not functioning properly, you are advised to see a doctor and get help. So why is it so hard to understand that the brain can suffer as well, and that we need help for it?
The brain controls the body. A sick brain means a sick body.
ā¦. Shit.
Donāt disregard it as just sadness.Ā Depression is life threatening.
me, talking about my trauma: haha yeah it was no big deal tho i donāt really care itās whatever honestly
somebody: validates my trauma and says i shouldnāt have had to go through that
me, suddenly crying: huh. weird
shoutout to depressed and anxious people who often isolate themselves because they donāt have the energy to socialize, theyāre scared, donāt believe anyone genuinely wants them around, etc.
When youāre a little depressed and nobody takes it seriously or wants to help you, itās really tempting to feel like if only you were MORE depressed, THEN people would realize you were in actual pain and actually get off their asses and help you.
As someone whoās been there: Nope, sorry. Our society is woefully inadequate at giving actual help and support to people with anyĀ level of depression. Like, when they realize youāre stuck in a really deepĀ pit they might lower you a rope to pull yourself up with, but the ropeās still ten feet short. When you let other people decide how much help you need, theyāll probably always underestimate it.
The sucky part about depression is that the best way to get good help for it is to demand it. Ā Itās to be, or have, a loud, active, pushy advocate for what you need. This disease is so deadly because right when you need to say,Ā āThat doesnāt sound like enough,ā it pushes you to dully say,Ā āOkay, I guess,ā and stop bothering people.
Or they lower you enough rope and then pull you up ā¦
ā¦ to that shallower pit you were in before.Ā
And leave you there, except now youāre tireder and more messed up.Ā
Yeah.Ā
i feel like if i were more obviously Ā suffering then i might be able to say i was Actually Depressed and seek help instead of, y know, just being unsociable, lazy, and lacking ambition. as it is, the last and only therapist i managed to drag my ass out to see seemed to be leaning towards Ā "bereavement" and i cant scrape up the motivation to try another
It should be noted that a lot of therapists canāt actually diagnose (thatās a medical prerogative) and definitely canāt prescribe. Depending on where you are, but especially US and Canada, itās worth going to your GP or even a walk-in, especially if you can bring one of the questionnaires and goĀ āI self-scored X, Iād like a medical opinion.āĀ
The thing is, from the inside, my own experience is that youāll never beĀ āsuffering obviously enoughā. Part of what depression itself will actually do is make it almost impossible to seeĀ āI am sickā rather thanĀ āI am unsociable, lazy and lacking ambition.āĀ
I have had a medical diagnosis for over a decade, I have outright scaredĀ multiple health-care and mental health practitioners, my score on the screening tests is still scary, I have massive amounts of other actual evidence and, you know, suffering, including active suicidality ā¦ and my hindbrain still tries to goĀ ābut what if youāre just lazy and moody? what if youāre just looking for excuses?āĀ
The disease literally does that. The chemical misfires in the brain trigger theĀ āworthlessnessā systems and they start attacking you. Guilt, shame, humiliation and the sense of Just Being Bad are literally symptoms of the disease. And it will always move the goalpost.Ā
So you say to yourselfĀ āwell if I were crying all the time, then Iād know Iām Actually Depressed, and seek help; but since Iām not, Iām just unhappy/grumpy, clearly Iām not Actually Depressed.āĀ
Six months later when all it takes to burst into tears is knocking over a teacup, though, that doesnāt seem compelling. Instead, you think,Ā āwell if I wanted to kill myself, then Iād know I was Actually Depressed, and seek help.āĀ
Six months later when every time you walk along the sidewalk youāre fantasizing about how easy it would be to step out in front of a high-speed car, or every time youāre driving you think how easy it would be to just ā¦ twist the wheel and ram headlong into the underpass, you thinkĀ āIf I knew I MEANT it, then Iād know Iām Actually Depressed and seek help.āĀ
This can go on forever. I have known people actually in the hospital after surviving a suicide attemptĀ who didnāt want to go see the psychiatrist after because, after all, this wasnāt Actual Depression, it was just them being a loser and doing something really stupid. If you make that kind of goalpost, the depression will move it. Constantly.Ā
Thereās different ways to address this. I personally do tend to self-score on the questionnaires on a regular basis. The most common score on the BDI is 0, and the vast majority of people, even in stressful situations, donāt score higher than 10. I know thatās hard to believe; I know a WHOLE BUNCH OF PEOPLE READING THIS who live with mood disorders just wentĀ āthatās impossibleā. Itās not. Itās true.Ā
Thatās HOW BADLY our brains not only fuck us up, but then lie about how theyāre fucking us up.Ā
So I self-score. I have gone into my psychiatrist sayingĀ āso I donāt FEEL like things are that bad and mostly I just feel like Iām being whiny, but on the other hand Iām napping all the time and my BDI pushed over 30, so ā¦āĀ
Internally, thatās what our brains do.Ā
Externally, the problem is that honestly there isnāt a lot of help that isnāt driven by you – as @star-anise notes in the OP – before someoneās calling 911 on you. And thatās not a lot of fun. Moreover, the help that you do get at that point is focused on getting you out of crisis: out of the point where youāre a danger to yourself and/or others. And once you are youāre ā¦back where you were before.Ā
Itās kind of a bugger.Ā
the teal deer version is:Ā go see your doctor. If youāre miserable, youāre Depressed Enough. Promise.Ā
in the US, your GP can prescribe certain antidepressants. there is no reason not to give it a go. you canāt get high on lexapro or sell zoloft on the black market. if you have symptoms of depression, and there isnāt a VERY OBVIOUS outside cause like divorce, getting fired, death of a family member, etc QUITE RECENTLY, then ask your doctor. and if your first try doesnāt work out, ask for another.
itās a well-known phenomenon that whether an antidepressant will work is pretty individual, and most people have to try several before finding the right one.
i was lucky in that my only false try was wellbutrin ā it helped me quit smoking, but made me even more passive and unmotivated than before, and when i went off it i immediately started smoking again. then my gp gave me lexapro to try, and it worked beautifully.
about two weeks after my first dose, i was able to look back on my life and go, āholy shit. i have been severely, cripplingly, horrifyingly depressed since i was a very small child. i am AWESOME for surviving this long!ā
when youāre in the shit, it looks normal. but itās not. and you can get out.
What I found absolutely impressive and stunning about this comic is the way the artist explained the identification and elimination of the confounding factors in the Rat Park study. This is one of the hardest parts of experiments to explain to the public, and I think it was just brilliantly done.
WHEN THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED TURNS OUT TO BE CLINICAL DEPRESSION
Ā
Me and the monster
wake up together.
Ā
Every morning,
he sits at the kitchen table
pouring salt into my coffee cup.
Emotions are not innately programmed into our brains, but, in fact,
are cognitive states resulting from the gathering of information, New
York University Professor Joseph LeDoux and Richard Brown, a professor
at the City University of New York, conclude in the latest issue of the
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
āWe argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content,
arise from one system in the brain,ā explains LeDoux, a professor in New
York Universityās Center for Neural Science. āSpecifically, the
differences between emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of
inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a
network essential for conscious experiences.ā
As a result, LeDoux and Brown observe, āthe brain mechanisms that
give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not fundamentally
different from those that give rise to perceptual conscious
experiences.ā
Their paperāāA Higher-Order Theory of Emotional
Consciousnessāāaddresses a notable gap in neuroscience theory. While
emotions, or feelings, are the most significant events in our lives,
there has been relatively little integration of theories of emotion and
emerging theories of consciousness in cognitive science.
Existing work posits that emotions are innately programmed in the
brainās subcortical circuits. As a result, emotions are often treated as
different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related
to the perception of external stimuli. In other words, emotions arenāt a
response to what our brain takes in from our observations, but, rather,
are intrinsic to our makeup.
However, after taking into account existing scholarship on both
cognition and emotion, LeDoux and Brown see a quite different
architecture for emotionsāone more centered on process than on
composition. They conclude that emotions are āhigher-order statesā
embedded in cortical circuits. Therefore, unlike present theories, they
see emotional states as similar to other states of consciousness.
interesting! kind of a slippery distinction, isnāt it? i mean from the end-user point of view. from the neurological point of view itās pretty significant.
This is just a very short article based on an abstract, so itās difficult to assess it. Typically emotions are thought of as a response; an event happens, your brain is hardwired to respond to it with a specific, autonomic biochemical and anatomical reaction, which we label āemotionsā. But what theyāre saying is that emotions are how particular inputs, particular sorts of experiences, are processed by the brain using a single cognitive system. Iām going to talk this through for myself under the cut.
just moving along like everyone else 