Is depression a quiet epidemic?

Also, I wanted to share a depression website out of Australia that I stumbled upon on my internet travels. The inspirational poems on this site are just incredible (especially soulgirl's poems) as are the stories of the many people who suffer from depression.

http://www.depressionet.com.au/index.html

 

I agree completely; no wonder no one wants to go get any kind of psychiatric help when they're immediately going to be diagnosed with a "disease" and given something to calm them down so society won't have to fix the underlying problems. (This refers to those who have the occasional, recurrent kind mentioned above; probably includes most of us at one point or another.)

And PMS - don't get me started on that one. Is it a disease? Are you weird or sick just because you committed the sin of having two X chromosomes? You would be in a bad mood too if you felt like someone had punched you hard in the gut for about a day. There is a medication for it that works great. It's called Advil.

 

I always wondered how it feels. My old girlfriend said that she just wanted to sleep all day and basically, that is what she did for one whole year, and that when she did get up it was like some major accomplishment just to get out the door and go to class, and then she'd feel like she was swiming against the tide all day.

Even when she was getting treated, she used to skip class all the time, and I would always say in my head that she needs to get it together and do what she has to do. And I knew what she suffered from. But I just looked at her like everyone else. It's kinda strange but that's how I looked at it.

Apparently when she told me about her depression I was pretty focused on my Tuna Fish sandwhich. She was like "It was weird, you just asked me how it felt, and then was like, well, you have what you have, and then you went back to eating your sandwhich." It was a pretty good sandwhich. I remember it to this day, and barely remember our conversation about her depression. I think it's hard to come to the realization of what the person is dealing with. And I think sometimes they have a hard time explaining it. So you end up treating the depressed like everyone else. To this day, I'm not real sure what it feels like so it's hard for me to get into that way of thinking.

 

No offense, but this is a good example of how not to deal with a woman. If she's pouring out deep and personal stuff to you and you're paying more attention to a sandwich... That can't have been fun. Oh well, it looks like you found the sandwich more interesting...

I've never experienced that kind of depression where you can't get out of bed. Maybe slight hints of it... where I feel tired/ lazy/ overwhelmed more easily than the next person... but I've never skipped a commitment to lie around the house. I can imagine how it might feel, though... just what a lot of the rest of us have, but a lot worse. No fun. I hope she's found something that helps...

 

I have to admit I'm going through some anxiety right now with my job. It's a two month intern type job which ends this week. I'm not too wild about it. I'm doing crappy bottom of the line work, labeling video clips of a defensive driving video and pretty much watching a cameraman shoot new clips as i write down the timecode on a piece of paper. This after I quit a video duplications job 2 months ago because the boss there had unreasonable training standards.

I thought working at a video company would be neat, but I'm not that thrilled. and the biggest struggle I deal with everyday is wondering what kind of job I can be happy with.I feel like a lost person a lot because I still don't know what i want to do and i'm two years out of school.

 

I can guarantee you that I am not alone in the way I treated her. And I think it's an important point. Because no matter how much I knew about her depression it was always the same, I would fall back into, this person seems normal so she needs to get her act together. I think parents, boyfriends, and friends all end up in the same boat as me. You don't look at the person as having had or having a problem. You just don't. Even when they tell you, it's like whatever, because you seem perfectly normal.

 

There are several types of depression. Some are so purely biochemical that there's not much to do short of heavy medication (or sometimes they still do electroshock!) There are also short term chemical depressions, such as post-partum depression which is very much hormonal.

That having been said, there is evidence from PET scans that long-term brain changes resulting from extensive therapy vs. medication are the same, so one of the worst approaches is to always divide down neurological or psychological lines.

Often depression is a result of failure to edit self-depreciating thoughts. If you tell yourself you're a bad person enough, pretty soon the reaction to any situation becomes to think that you're a bad person.

In many ways, it is best to think of medication as a tool to make your brain more ameniable to plasticity and change by inducing chemical alterations. That's why they always talk about therapy in conjunction with drugs. Drugs alone will sometimes work, but it's unpredictable.

Depression is also best though of often as self-directed anger. If you despise yourself or are mad at yourself to the degree that you would become angry at another person, it becomes depressive.

In that way depression that is extremely focused can often be alleviated by acknowledging rage. For instance, if your girlfriend whom you really love dumps you and you get depressed, part of the problem is an internal conflict between your love for her and your hatred for what she did to you. An other example would be if your boss complains about your work, and you can't express the rage you feel at him, you turn it inward and become depressed about your professional life.

The same can be seen in animals and dominance games. When an animal like a dog or chimp decides that it can't assert superiority through an agressive display, it will assume a submissive posture which has quite a bit in common with depression, at least in terms of physical indicators.

In that way, depression as an epidemic can very much be viewed as a conflict between inner desires, anger at the outside world, and ability to vent that anger. As the demands of modern life become more severe, and the acceptance of outbursts becomes less acceptable, the epidemic grows.

One of the most effective ways to help you deal with depression that has a cause is to think through whom you should be mad at, and express that anger.

 

AB,

How did it affect your act?

Was it the classic "depressed comic has killer material" then it went away when the meds kicked in?

Did the meds mess you up?

 

i have had several bouts of depression( the ultimate kind). the way i get out of it is by watching comedy central and seinfeld re-runs all day long, till i laugh myself out of feeling sorry for myself.

 

I was diagnosed with depression and took meds (celexa, zoloft, Wellbutin, etc...)

They each had their own collection of side effects.

I went through this for one long year and I don't think they helped at all.

I finally bought into the concept that "You are what you eat". I try to eat healthier and take vitamins, instead of drugs and couldn't be better.

Yup. I'm the vitamin guy.

 

AB,

You got a shout out on 610 the other day about something funny you said. They said you were a former police officer and quoted what you said after you had confiscated mar1juana. It was pretty funny, I don't know if you heard it or not.

 

See, this is proof that it can happen to a well-adjusted person whom everybody looks up to. Hopefully things will be better from this point. Hang in there, AB... your BBS friends are with you in spirit...

 

This thread is depressing.

 

Not true at all funny man.

You rock, dude!

 

I think it was on in the afternoon, just one of the guys quoting you. Pretty funny stuff, if true.