Depression

[Mofo8]

I know this might me a wee bit too serious a topic for this place, but, I was wondering if anyone else in here either has had experience of, or is experiencing severe clinical depression?

By severe and clinical I guess I mean, it's not just feeling a bit sad, but is feeling low and depressed most of the time (for perhaps no known reason), and has perhaps sought medical help, perhaps in the form of counselling and/or medication.

TBH medication was the worst thing for me.

 

[Athan]

You've not been in the IRC channel much have you? This topic comes up now and then, and I am indeed one of the sufferers. In my case the core problem is severe anxiety, especially in social situations. The medical profession hasn't been much help for me so far, not finding any medication that actually helps me enough, and thus I always had trouble getting to appointments.

On the bright side, the past couple of months I've been getting not exactly better, but more able to cope and have more determination to see things through than ever before.

Pop into #freddyshouse on QuakeNet sometime and have a natter about it if I'm not busy.

-Ath

 

[jaba]

Tis quite a serious topic indeed, but a lot of people suffer it so its not something that is alien to any of us really...do you suffer from it?
I had a time in university when I was horribly depressed, and had been on anti depressants for a while to no avail, I eventually was persuaded to go to see a counseller after some even worse stuff happened that im not particularly comfortable talking about, but I found that the counsellor was a pretty good solution, and it helped a lot talking to them about what was going on in my life....surprising how much help talking to a stranger can be.
I wouldnt say I was clinically depressed and im sure im pretty much better now but there are still moments where you just think "fuck it all"...

Late night ramblings ahoy!

 

[Mofo8]

I've never been a big one for IRC, but I'll start popping in from time to time. Cheers! It's my opinion that most people are mentally fucked up in one way or another and that no-one is totally normal, but when suicidal thoughts start appearing and self-harm is involved it gets a bit more serious.

 

[Mofo8]

Tis quite a serious topic indeed, but a lot of people suffer it so its not something that is alien to any of us really...do you suffer from it?
I had a time in university when I was horribly depressed, and had been on anti depressants for a while to no avail, I eventually was persuaded to go to see a counseller after some even worse stuff happened that im not particularly comfortable talking about, but I found that the counsellor was a pretty good solution, and it helped a lot talking to them about what was going on in my life....surprising how much help talking to a stranger can be.
I wouldnt say I was clinically depressed and im sure im pretty much better now but there are still moments where you just think "fuck it all"...

Late night ramblings ahoy!

I do suffer from it. I was on Seroxat (Paroxetine) and self harming (cutting) for about 3 or 4 years. I'm kinda getting better (off medication), but I still get very low from time to time.

 

[jaba]

I never got quite as bad as self harming, but I did almost... I know how you feel when you get low mate, I still have that. Do you have anyone that helps you? or that you talk to? I also had a housemate who had a bad case of it, I used to sit and talk to him for hours whenever he felt bad, I would like to think that helped, whether it did or not I dont know.

 

[dave]

Through uni I've known many people who've felt depressed - it sure seems to be a very stressful time for all. It's also a subject I think more help and information should be provided about. Mention depression and most peoples response will be that you don't have it, you're just unhappy, being a clinical disorder and all that. But what about the people who DO suffer - how do they know if they fall into one catagory or the other?

 

[jaba]

I think now the problem is that the over subscribe things to depression though, they are now too willing to pin everything on it, one of my friends was diagnosed as being depressed, they put him on anti-depressants and nothing happened, he got worse, turned out he had multiple sclerosis...nice.

 

[Mofo8]

From a website:

Depression is generally ranked in terms of severity -- mild, moderate, or severe. The degree of your depression, which your doctor can determine, influences how you are treated. Symptoms of depression include:

Sleep disturbances -- usually insomnia (for example, consistently waking up very early in the morning) but may be excessive sleeping
A dramatic change in appetite, often resulting in either weight gain or weight loss
Fatigue and lack of energy
Feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, and inappropriate guilt
Extreme difficulty concentrating
Agitation, restlessness, and irritability OR inactivity and withdrawal from usual activities
Recurring thoughts of death or suicide
Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness
Low self esteem is common with depression. So are sudden bursts of anger and lack of pleasure from activities that normally make you happy, including sex.

The main types of depression include:

Major depression -- five or more symptoms listed above must be present for at least 2 weeks, but tends to continue for 20 weeks. (A mood disorder is classified as minor depression if less than five depressive symptoms are present for at least 2 weeks.)
Dysthymia -- a chronic, generally milder form of depression but lasts longer -- usually as long as two years.
Atypical depression -- depression accompanied by unusual symptoms, such as hallucinations (for example, hearing voices that are not really there) or delusions (irrational thoughts).

 

[Mofo8]

Jesus.... I've just noticed my Pet(z) is depressed too!!!! Pleasure at 0% and -35% happiness.... the fucker's definately going to die this week I reckon.

 

[Funkybunny]

well.. most of us do have something one way or another i think....
my biggest problems is my adhd.. wich also results in a depression some times... its not one of the symptoms of my illness i think.. its more as a "result of"... coz of my adhd wich is a illness who makes it very hard for me to concentrate on things, getting started on things, following up on things.. and that makes me really depressed.. im at an age now where i should be starting to get stuff in order.. but i cant get my act together... it starts out fine... but after a short while.. it just drops... when i was at my worst.. there were days almost WEEKS where i couldnt get out of bed... its very difficult to have such a disorder, since many ppl think that (even in these modern days) that adhd means youre "dumb", just coz you say stuff you dont think "through" before you say em...


wow.. very personal post for me this.. but i think ive come to a place in my life where i can stand saying that i have adhd without feeling ashamed of it...

 

[Furr]

Ok you've got me worried

Sleep disturbances -- usually insomnia (for example, consistently waking up very early in the morning) but may be excessive sleeping
A dramatic change in appetite, often resulting in either weight gain or weight loss
Fatigue and lack of energy
Feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, and inappropriate guilt
Extreme difficulty concentrating
Agitation, restlessness, and irritability OR inactivity and withdrawal from usual activities
Recurring thoughts of death or suicide
Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness
Low self esteem is common with depression. So are sudden bursts of anger and lack of pleasure from activities that normally make you happy, including sex.

I have regualr Insomnia
I seem to always feel tired and cant be bothered to get up and do anything
I feel that im not good enough to do alot of things
Im very restless and do go through periods where i cant be arsed to do anything
Nothing seems to make me happy, even going out and getting plastered i just struggle to have a good time doing anything.
At the moment im at uni and just dont concentrate, i think to myself i should be but i just cant....
Irritable isn't the word, i can go from being ok to pissed off over the most trivial things..

Am i depressed....

 

[jaba]

Its possible, I had a lot of those symptoms too, it might be worth just going and chatting to your doctor about it. Uni is a bastard of a time for a lot of people so dont worry too much cos at uni its a lot easier to get support for this type of thing

 

[Tinky]

Resist medication if you can unless there is a treatable cause of the depression - they rarely do any good, are addictive and usually cause more problems.

 

[Jupitus]

I'm with you, mofo. I've had a few spells recently and ended up promising the mrs I'd see a doctor about it.

I'm asking now for all the piss-takers to stay out of this thread.

 

[Vae]

I've had a couple of friends with depression and tbh unless there is a medical condition the medications e.g. prozac are only a temporary solution.

The best solution is friends willing to help you and cheer you up and to seek counselling at the earliest opportunity. I've seen a previously anorexic and depressed friend go through counselling and emerge a far more self-confident, capable and above-all happy person because she was able to sort through the problems she had with someone who didn't really know her. The medication in this case was a merely short term solution and because she was on them for a couple of years without sorting out the source of the problem I reckon they did here more harm than good overall.

 

[Louster]

So hi. I've had a truly ridiculous life and have spent the best past of the last 7 years or so living in my room, on the internet. I was diagnosed with Coeliacs about 2 and a half years ago now, when I was 17 (I turned 20 a little while ago), which theoretically explained why I'd been vaguely unwell all my life, but, having adopted the right diet to "treat" it, doesn't seem to have made any difference.
So anyway.
Spending all my life in my room, as I do and have done, seems to be a pretty decent reason for being depressed, especially as I did rather well at school, and kinda feel like I've been royally fucked over. What's weird is, I seem to swing between being absolutely content, not really caring about the fact that my life is nothing at all, believing this would be the case, essentially, no matter what I do or could have done; and being intensely depressed, contemplating suicide and all that lovely stuff.
What makes it worse is that what few treatments there are all seem to be inherently flawed. I've talked to a psychiatric nurse, who absolutely fucking pissed me off with her pointless and pathetic word-games. I've talked to a psychiatrist who seemed pretty much solely interested in finding out what set of symptoms I displayed so that he could reference which drugs to administer, which was similarly unimpressive. The GPs are generally all vaguely weird and useless (I've encountered maybe two good GPs in my life - the one that actually managed to figure out this Coeliacs thing, and, possibly, one I've only recently met, who seems like a genuinely nice guy.)
I met a psychotherapist who I really liked, and seemed to actually understand some stuff about what I was going through, but it wasn't covered by the NHS, and the cost, having a family with an erratic income, wasn't feasible. Yay.

It seems like a vicious circle. I have to actually take some kind of action myself to stop being depressed, but to have the motivation to do that, I need to stop being depressed. Anti-depressants is a route that I really, really don't believe I could stomach, though, as I'm pretty sure that, at the very least, I'd end up horribly paranoid about what was "me".

 

[Louster]

Also, hooray for screwed up sleeping patterns and the loss of inhibitions that goes with severe over-tiredness. Too bad you can't edit stuff later for shit anymore.

 

[Trem]

I had kinda the same thing as Athan has. I had it from the age of 15 to 21. Medication didn't help me, drugs and beer did :/

Also meeting Samm helped me, then you have to HAVE to do the things you fear most. Think, we have as much right to be somewhere or go somewhere and fear nobody as anyone else in this shithole.

Its a terrible thing depression.

 

[Jonny_Darko]

My case is a weird one - I suffer from five of the aforementioned symptoms and have done for years. I have few friends, get overly anxious talking to anyone I don't know too well, have terrible trouble talking to women, have trouble sleeping and generally seem to never be happy (people always rag on me for never smiling!)

But the weird thing is I almost don't want to do anything about it. Firstly because I'm afraid people won't take it seriously (I still have this blokey belief that there's nothing wrong with me - "Depression? Rubbish! Just Buck up your ideas sonny.") but the oddest thing is that I'm almost more comfortable like this. I've been the way I am since I was about 13 and it's like I can deal with it - whereas the idea of getting better and maybe being happy actually scares me somewhat as I don't know what it's like. It's like a cycle - I bring down a lot of it on myself by starting each day with a sense of inevitable doom and that way I'm never surprised when something bad happens. Like Eyore from Winnie The Pooh! "Oh well, that would fucking happen to big, loser me wouldn't it?".

I've never had suicidal thoughts or harmed myself - mine is more apathetic than that. I'm quite happy to live through the shit in a kind of "Pah, I just dont care. Everything's shit, nothing's going to get better" kind of way.

 

[Wazzerphuk]

It's pretty damn tough.

There's no real 'advice' I can give to help, all I can do is tell you my own experiences.

For years, from about year 8/9 in secondary school until after I had quit college - I suffered from quite serious depression. It was truly awful; I had no motivation, no happiness, nothing. It's really, really tough trying to take your mind off of your problems so you don't get depressed about them. My problem wasn't so much a general depression, it was more that I couldn't stop thinking about the negative aspects in my life, which would thereby cause me to get depressed.

What's changed? Virtually nothing. The reasons for my depression are still there, and they still affect me quite a lot. It does not affect me all the time now, it only really lingers as a background thing as opposed to a foreground thing. The same things that really got me down back then are still applicable, but due to a few years of dealing with depression on my own (for the most part: during end of year 11, and the first two years of college I had a fantastic friend who helped me a lot and helped me see self-worth - I owe her a lot!), and then from going from someone who does nothing with his life to someone that now knows roughly where he wants to go and what he wants to do.

Taking time out of education helped me realise this: I reckon if I was at uni now I'd still be in the same situation. I had a year out with *no* commitments, spent most of that time with my friends and socialising, largely catching up on all the missed times as a teenager without any friends. After that year, I've spent another year working and in that time I've realised what I want to do with the next few years of my life, and I've never felt better about it. I had no direction before, I had nothing to aim for or to look forward to. I do now.

The one thing I know is that friends are the most important thing in the world for dealing with depression. The worst factor about it all is trying to deal with it on your own. Even if you can't bring yourself to talk about all your problems with people, that's fine. Most of my friends don't know/have a clue about the things that get me down, and I don't think any of them really know how bad it was.

To help kickstart removal of the process, generally from looking at people there needs to be a bold move on your part somewhere, a change of lifestyle. I don't know what you're doing now, but it took me a few different things until I realised where I'm going. For starters I found myself a different group of friends: ones that aren't happy to waste away their lives and refuse to help themselves, I got a job (even though that's not where I want my future to lie, it took me nearly a year in work to realise this), I started doing the things I wanted to do but didn't have the balls to do before (i.e. going to raves, going social places I wasn't sure about/totally comfortable with).

It's not easy, it's a slow struggle up a very steep hill. But if you find your goal, you find or you know what you want: and even if it's as simple as "I don't want to feel sad all the time anymore" (mine was to start with) - do everything in your power to make it happen.

And the most important thing to remember is that people, on the whole, don't or won't care/notice if you're doing something you think is 'twattish'. I used to get this all the time, worry about what I said/did a lot. It really makes no difference. If it makes a difference with people, you have the wrong peers around you.

Not much help I know, it's all very vague. It's hard to put it down here for you though because I've done a lot of self-exploring over the last few years, intentionally and unintentionally (an unfortunate side effect of loneliness). Sure, I properly hate I lot of the things I've learnt about myself, but learning the things you hate is where it all begins. If you can realise your brain's behaviour, negative or positive: then the negatives don't matter so much any more, you know the cause. It's about finding some of the causes, despite how painful it may be to face some of them.

During my time with depression, I did not get medication or counselling. I was too depressed/scared to go to a professional with help. I did manage to get appointments with college counsellors, but never turned up. The one thing I suggest is *NEVER* go to a doctor: they're only too willing to prescribe dangerous anti-depressants. My advice would be to see someone about it with no pressure, someone to talk to, just speak out everything in your system. I wouldn't suggest taking the route I did, it's probably very dangerous to fall in to the wrong thing. If I could change one thing about my 'getting-out-of-depression' thing it would be that I wouldn't have become such a pothead.

 

[Mofo8]

The best ever quote I ever heard from someone when telling them I had depression was "pah!, rubbish!, it's all in your head!"

Duh! I should fucking well hope so!

In case anyone's overly concerned, I was a wee bit low last night when I started this post, but I did it not because I was deeply depressed, but because I thought it would make for a genuinely interesting and perhaps useful discussion. The 4 year period when I regularly sliced up my left arm with scalpel blades and ended up in A&E every month is a good number of years ago.

My personal advice to anyone who thinks they might be depressed is, speak to friends and family about it first. See your GP if you get on OK with them, but resist medication if at all possible. Go for the psychology route instead of the psychiatry route if you can. The type of drugs they're giving for this sort of thing are getting a very bad name at the moment. Seroxat especially doesn't work well for some people, and for me it made me worse.

And finally remember that depression seems to affect intelligent people more than thickies....

 

[Trem]

And finally remember that depression seems to affect intelligent people more than thickies....

Nah mate, I'm as thick as pig shit

 

[Mofo8]

LOL

 

[throdgrain]

Amazing innit? Us "thickies" seem to live perfectly normal lives...
Perhaps because we're so thick we dont realise how bad it is out there in the real world, and so just go out and do it, end up having girlfriends, getting jobs, having money, and therefore getting on with the mundaneity that actually is Real Life (tm). Gee I wish I'd gone to university

Seriously, most of what Ive read here is the symptoms of being a teenager, my advice is only "go out, get pissed, have fun, get beat up now and then, get over it" .
Give it a name, and it will become real. Look what they did with God for fucks sake

 

[fatbusinessman]

Seriously, most of what Ive read here is the symptoms of being a teenager, my advice is only "go out, get pissed, have fun, get beat up now and then, get over it" .

I guess the simplest way to say it is this: you're wrong. Depression is very real (I speak as someone who has almost lost two very good friends to it), and telling someone it isn't is just a really good way of making them worse. While it's entirely possible that some people who claim to be depressed may in fact just be suffering from teenage angst, it's downright harmful to suggest that this is the norm.

 

[throdgrain]

Heh, I said "most" I think you'll find, and I know im right.
Ive had loads of things happen to me in my life, but sitting in a room 24/7 is not the way to deal with it, certainly at age 18 or so. A couple of the people who have posted here seem to have genuine problems, particularly louster with an ilness, but some really dont, and however it might seem so serious now, for some people my advice will work very well indeed, give it a try.
If I thought this whole forum was inhabited solely by teenagers convinced they are manic depressives Id delete my account

 

[Mofo8]

If it was teenage angst, then I'd be far more seriously fucked up than I thought I was, as I'm 34 years old

 

[throdgrain]

Btw read this bit -

Taking time out of education helped me realise this: I reckon if I was at uni now I'd still be in the same situation. I had a year out with *no* commitments, spent most of that time with my friends and socialising, largely catching up on all the missed times as a teenager without any friends. After that year, I've spent another year working and in that time I've realised what I want to do with the next few years of my life, and I've never felt better about it. I had no direction before, I had nothing to aim for or to look forward to. I do now.

Swift

Its similar to what Im trying to say.

 

[dr_jo]

Well, I don't want to bore you all with my life story, but suffice it to say that I've been depressed for about 4 1/2 years now. I spent the first 2 years hiding it from everyone, and got to the point where I couldn't cope any more. I had (and still have) some very good friends who supported me through it all, but when I started to self harm I knew I had to go and get some proper help.
To start with I resisted medication. I had a course of psyco-analytical therapy, which is basically talking about stuff. It helped a bit I guess, but when we came to the end of it, I was still depressed. I finally agreed to go onto an antidepressant, and Effexor helped me a lot.

I've been an inpatient of The Dukes Priory Hospital for a while, I've had group therapy, and CBT, and a whole cocktail of drugs, and I'm still searching for the answers.

I've been lucky enough to be covered by my dad's health insurance, and have therefore been able to go private for a lot of my treatment. It can be difficult to find good therapists on the NHS, but it can be done, especially if you're at Uni, as they have their own team in most universities.

One thing I would say, is don't write off medication totally. I agree that they are overprescribed, and that they have some rather nasty side effects (I should know, I've tried most of them...) but without them, I don't believe I would be here today. And whatever people may tell you, they are not addictive. To be addictive, a drug must make you crave it if you stop taking it, and also you have to start taking more and more to achieve the same results, as your body becomes desensitised to it.
Antidepressants do not do this. When you stop taking it, you can get some nasty side effects, but these are not due to addiction or dependance. And if you are senisible about it, and come off a drug slowly, most people will not experience any problems.

A couple of people have mentioned low self esteem, and a feeling of worthlessness. You might want to consider some CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy). It's based in the here and now, not looking back into your past, and it's certainly helped my self esteem a great deal. You can get some very good self help books, because CBT is basically about helping yourself, and changing your own thought patterns, or most therapy services will run courses.

If you're not sure if you have depression, there are a couple of tests commonly used by psychologists which are available on the internet. The Beck Depression Inventory is one of them - this test is actually under copyright from Dr Beck, and is therefore quite hard to find online.
Another is The Goldberg Test.

I'm sorry if I sound like I'm preaching or anything, but I've done a lot of research into depression, and a fair amount of writing about it too. If anyone wants to know more, or just wants to talk, pm me.