I once had a GP tell me that I needed to be on anti-depressants, not something for anxiety, because I needed the right drug for her diagnosis, just like the right antibiotic for the right infection. I wondered how one cultures out depression, and which anti-depressants kill the depression bacterium.
Truth is, as often as I have been sad, miserable, despondent even, or how many times I have cried uncontrollably in front of doctors or managers or other authority figures, or as often as I have toyed with the idea of suicide, I don't think I have ever been truly depressed, as the diagnosis goes. I was on anti-depressants when I should have been getting divorced. I tried them again when a manager was following through with me on anonymous complaints against my attitude, while I was dealing with a back injury, and the death of my beloved aunt. (Prozac interfered with my fine motor skills, bad when I am passing a scalpel and suture needles.) What I was feeling, despite looking like a weepy limp tissue, was fury. What I felt, was actually, scared stiff.
Exercise always helps, though I often feel too knotted up to do what I need to do. When I was running, marching, not sleeping all through those eight weeks of Basic, I was miserable, but not depressed. Since needing to walk here without benefit of car, I have been more stable.
Alcohol is a depressant, but it also eases anxiety, used moderately. And since living here, I have used it as such. It started out as an experiment, and I continue it as functional. As with any drug, there is a risk, which I am wary of. But all in all, it does seem to help.
Mostly, I simply overreact to stress, internalize it, make myself sick over it. Well, when I was sick as a child, I was granted some respite when ill. It has taken me far longer to defuse that bomb than it took to build the mechanism. I still fight the impulse to hide in illness.
I always wonder, when I feel ill, if I am really sick, or if I am just coping out.
I'm never really sure.
12 comments:
For years I was terrified that i would go insane and not be aware of it. I figured it would be O.K. to be sick as long as I knew I was sick. Then I realized that the entire society is deeply delusional, and that helped me relax.
It sounds to me like what you are is very sensitive, reactive, rather than depressive. This is not the preferred temperament in our society, which demands insensitivity to its bombardment of stimulus and demands, and which therefore often treats it as an illness. Like Dave says, its mostly society that's sick, not us.
this is like a mirror. my GP did the same thing for me, prescribing Prozac, which just made me feel worse in the end. Now, without it (and for many other reasons), i am "better." i am sad that this is the first solution some doctors turn to when you break down and cry and say, "I am just not feeling like myself."
and I agree with Jean...never thought of temperament this way. it is true.
Go easy, go well.
(o)
well, it does sound as if you're a bit hard on yourself. "go easy"--yes. "society"? I don't know about that. just individuals, really.
I've never been prescribed anything, but my mother always feared I was depressed. She sent me to a counselor once when I was a teenager...I remember feeling forced into it and I probably came off as a disinterested snot of a kid to the very nice woman who was talking to me.
I find exercise and writing have been the best remedies for my "darkside"
mostly I can't bear the thought of going back on antidepressants because while I certainly didn't feel so down when I was on them, I was incapable of feeling joy. At all. And that, to me, wasn't worth it. I needed the pills to get me through a bad stretch but was happy to get off them.
I'm sometimes tempted back. So I go for a walk or do a drawing. It always helps.
Thought for the day: perhaps there really are are moments and situations in which the only truly sane response is to howl like an abandoned dog. Big hugs, Zhoen.
(And some homework for myself: Why do I feel the urge to sound off about the dangers of "medicinal" alcohol but not other drugs, which I know can also be abused (in the sense of themselves becoming problems)? Perhaps because I've known alcoholics but never knowingly met a pharmaceutical drug abuser.)
I neither blame society, nor am I hard on myself, just trying to do the best I can with what I have. The generalized angst of living in this particular here and now.
I have come to the conclusion that I am deeply eccentric, but am passing for slightly weird.
An American psychiatrist told me that we in the UK are a million miles behind in interpretation & prescription of anti-depressants. For example, they are almost never given to children here, yet he uses them liberally for that group. I guess we feel that 'handing them out like candy' as a economically handy substitute for proper analysis is reprehensible. "Get real, so what do you do?" he says "let them suffer on with their illness in their dysfunctional families for which I have no cure? And queue up for behavioural therapy that can't be provided on welfare."
I had cause to be thankful for anti-depressants in the final stages of undiagnosed hyperthyroidism; without them I would have thought myself gone quite mad. My chemistry was off and needed help in the short term. It's when the drugs disguise a bad way of living that they become dangerous.
You have been watching your chemistry closely and know your in-house therapies, you have a self-knowledge tuned up to an unusual degree. You live a self-disciplined life, with love and achievement built in. I don't think you are sick, just a very sensitive & unusual person in a tough world.
You hardly need another comment on this one, considering the number of responses, but...
Sometimes when I'm sad, I treat it like illness. I give myself permission to lump about in my housecoat for a day, watching B movies and eating toast with peanut butter. I weep if I feel like it. I think of it in terms of something passing through - like a cold or flu - and that, for some reason seems to keep it from mushrooming into a longer-term problem. I think that stress does lower our immune systems, so this is one way to acquiess before the body has to take charge and make me physically ill so that I'll back up, rest and have a quiet day.
Of course, the hitch here is that often I don't recognize that I need to do that and slog through one day too many without recharging.
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