Hi All,
Welcome back to my blog. I'm getting a little more serious with this post as I feel it's something I need to discuss.
As a person who has suffered with depression for more than 6 years after the death of my mom, I hope I am not stepping out of line.
To non-sufferers (and the non-believers), I can only describe depression using a temperature similie. When, what I call, an "episode" hits me, it feels as if there's a spread of heat radiating down from my head down my body. The heat is a mixture of fear, panic, sadness, intense feelings of self-loathing etcetc. When I first began to notice it, I would spend literal hours, sitting on my bed staring out of the window in a state of catatonia. I couldn't move. I couldn't find reason to move. I started to deny myself food. I replaced these feelings of numbness with alcohol. Being a university student, I would go out a couple of times a week and binge drink until I often passed out, just to feel something. To remember what fun was, only for reality to set in once I had woken from my intoxicated slumber.
At one point, I had considered ending things. I was going to Reading Festival, and after that, I thought to myself, I don't think I can carry on. However after an great weekend at Reading , it gave me a little more will to carry on. This was 2011.
Over the years I have had a course of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), which I didn't feel did me much good personally, as mindfulness wasn't going to take away the bad stuff that had happened (however it does work for many people, so don't rule it out!), and more recently a course of EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing), which helped far more in terms of reprocessing the traumatic memories that I feel had largely contributed to my depression. I was there when my mom died. She had a sudden brain haemorrhage from a ruptured aneurysm none of knew were there. We had just gotten a puppy and my mom had bent down to clean up after her, when she had a severe pain in the back of her head. Not long after, she headed up to bed to try to sleep the pain off but within minutes, was screaming for a doctor, before falling back unconscious. I called emergency services and the operator talked me through CPR. The paramedics came, and half an hour of working on her, they carried her down the stairs with no equipment on her, no breathing apparatus even though she was clearly not breathing properly, in a sort of hammock, legs and arms dangling out in the least dignified manner possible. We followed the ambulance to the hospital in the fast response car, and were seated in the relatives room. I knew at that point it wasn't going to be good news. The doctor came in with a nurse and sat us down.
"When Kim was brought in, her heart had stopped. I'm sorry but there was nothing we could do".
In that moment, my world had fallen apart. This was no exaggeration. Everything I thought I knew about my life, the future, my family etc, was no more. Me and my dad were left to pick up the pieces of a life suddenly departed from us.
It was no secret that my mom was my best friend. We would go to gigs together, listen to music together, watch t.v together, go to the shops together, we just had a bond that was so special, I had no idea how I would cope. In a way, I was dependant on her.
And that security had gone.
What I should probably mention at this point is that this wasn't my first experience of a traumatic event. Two years earlier, we had a call that my dad had been in a severe car accident on his was to work and he was on a ventilator. After a few days on an ICU, and a surgeon"putting him back together", the relief was palpable. It took nearly a month for him to get back home, but he was alive, relatively well considering and home in time for christmas. A few years before that, my nan, who we lived with due to her declining mental health, passed away after she had fallen down the stairs and contracted septicaemia. The death certificate stated "septicaemia and alcoholism" as the causes of death. Alcoholism. I may have only been 10 years old, but the woman had fucking dementia. She was shitting on the floor, picking it up and asking what it was. She would try to turn the television over with her nebuliser. I am still so furious about that.
But I digress.
I guess these events led up to my depression first taking hold. In some people, there simply is no obvious reason or event. It is often forgotten that depression is a physical illness. It is an illness of the brain. This delicate and fine network of neurons aren't always biologically perfect (Quite frankly, it amazes me that they work so well most of the time), and if there is a chemical imbalance, this can cause depression in someone who is normally positive and hasn't been through a major event in their life.
A lot of us who suffer with depression, and other mental health issues, are prescribed medication to help correct these imbalances. As much as people want to believe that "thinking positively" and "thinking about how others have it worse" will snap you out of depression, it's simply not the case. The brain is a complex organ. When things go wrong, it can override the body's survival instinct and starve a person to death. It can make people see things that aren't actually real. A simple positive mantra and a bit of empathy can't snap you out of mental illness.
How many of you have had a phobia? A phobia is usually without reason and defined as irrational, and yet your brain is telling you that you are in danger, even though realistically and in most cases, you aren't. It is the same with depression. Your brain forces you to feel sad. It makes the numbness hang over you like a dark cloud ready to rain down and ruin everything at any moment. I guess the difference is that phobias are temporary reactions, whereas depression, although it can be temporary, is often a chronic condition, whereby you cannot avoid the overwhelming sadness.
For anyone who questions someone's need for medication, ask yourself - remember the saddest moment of your life. Now imagine that feeling for weeks... months... years. Can you imagine being sad for that long? Now imagine someone offers you a pill. It isn't an "upper". It wont "make you happy". But it will take the edge off. Instead of facing a project with a feeling of inevitable doom because you lack so much self esteem thanks to your depression, you tackle it. You still struggle. But you put the effort in, and do it more positively. Rather than dragging yourself out of bed reluctantly and not bother with a shower because "what is the point", you get up feeling relatively neutral. You get in the shower and your energy level is okay. You don't feel as exhausted just moving one foot in front of the other as you usually do. This gives you a bit of pep. It gives you a boost to go and make yourself a nice cup of tea and breakfast. You go to work. Instead of hating every bit of your job, you arrange your desk and make a plan of how you will tackle your tasks. You maybe even do it without fear, without panic and with the hint of a smile on your face. This is why medication is necessary sometimes. You can plead with someone to think positively and try to make an effort with themselves, but unless whatever is going on in their head is corrected, they will suffer, just for you to sit on your high horse and berate anyone who turns to anti-depressants. How is it up there? Relatively happy huh? Lucky you.
I am aware some of this post is rambly, and boy is it long. But this is what is going on in my mind at the moment. Occasionally incoherent, often rushing, forgetful and negative.
I guess you could call me lucky though.
I can get out of bed in the morning and have a shower. I will put effort into my food, my clothes, my makeup, my hair. I will put on a happy face at work as best I can. I am fairly high-functioning for such a chronic depressive. I take 40mg Citalopram (Celex) daily. This keeps me on the straight and narrow for the most part, to the point where I almost feel like a fraud because I don't have a major depressive episode with constant use.
It is notoriously difficult to get a doctors appointment less than a week in advance of when you want it, so if you run out and you can't get an appointment, boy are you in for a ride. Within four days of being without, the withdrawals start to kick in. My head starts to spin like a top and if I turn my head, the roof of my mouth goes numb (does anyone else experience this?!) and I feel sick. Almost like a hangover.
So there are downsides to medicating depression, but there are downsides to many treatments.
At the time of writing, I am struggling somewhat. I'm quite teary, quite miserable about the future, irritable and panicky. I have just picked up my latest prescription of citalopram and hopefully I should feel better in a day or two.
I want to conclude this post with what my aim was with it in the first place. I wanted to make people more aware of how depression feels. I wanted this to be a reminder not to berate someone who needs medication. If you are suffering, I wanted you to know that medication is an option. As is therapy. I want you to know that just because you have "no reason" to be depressed, that doesn't mean your illness is invalid. I want people to know that just because I appear to function quite well, I am still struggling. I want people to know that if someone is visibly struggling to function, they should be helped. I want you t know that comments like "other people have it worse" and "you just need to think positively" are unhelpful the majority of the time. I want you to know that depression is a real illness, it isn't "feeling sorry for yourself" and it most definitely isn't wanted, cool, or to be romanticised. It is debilitating and painful and time-consuming and NO ONE would want to spend their life feeling this way.
Sending all the love to anyone reading this and feeling the same way. It will get better for us. I know it. We just need to get over this hurdle.
L xx
Welcome back to my blog. I'm getting a little more serious with this post as I feel it's something I need to discuss.
As a person who has suffered with depression for more than 6 years after the death of my mom, I hope I am not stepping out of line.
To non-sufferers (and the non-believers), I can only describe depression using a temperature similie. When, what I call, an "episode" hits me, it feels as if there's a spread of heat radiating down from my head down my body. The heat is a mixture of fear, panic, sadness, intense feelings of self-loathing etcetc. When I first began to notice it, I would spend literal hours, sitting on my bed staring out of the window in a state of catatonia. I couldn't move. I couldn't find reason to move. I started to deny myself food. I replaced these feelings of numbness with alcohol. Being a university student, I would go out a couple of times a week and binge drink until I often passed out, just to feel something. To remember what fun was, only for reality to set in once I had woken from my intoxicated slumber.
At one point, I had considered ending things. I was going to Reading Festival, and after that, I thought to myself, I don't think I can carry on. However after an great weekend at Reading , it gave me a little more will to carry on. This was 2011.
Over the years I have had a course of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), which I didn't feel did me much good personally, as mindfulness wasn't going to take away the bad stuff that had happened (however it does work for many people, so don't rule it out!), and more recently a course of EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing), which helped far more in terms of reprocessing the traumatic memories that I feel had largely contributed to my depression. I was there when my mom died. She had a sudden brain haemorrhage from a ruptured aneurysm none of knew were there. We had just gotten a puppy and my mom had bent down to clean up after her, when she had a severe pain in the back of her head. Not long after, she headed up to bed to try to sleep the pain off but within minutes, was screaming for a doctor, before falling back unconscious. I called emergency services and the operator talked me through CPR. The paramedics came, and half an hour of working on her, they carried her down the stairs with no equipment on her, no breathing apparatus even though she was clearly not breathing properly, in a sort of hammock, legs and arms dangling out in the least dignified manner possible. We followed the ambulance to the hospital in the fast response car, and were seated in the relatives room. I knew at that point it wasn't going to be good news. The doctor came in with a nurse and sat us down.
"When Kim was brought in, her heart had stopped. I'm sorry but there was nothing we could do".
In that moment, my world had fallen apart. This was no exaggeration. Everything I thought I knew about my life, the future, my family etc, was no more. Me and my dad were left to pick up the pieces of a life suddenly departed from us.
It was no secret that my mom was my best friend. We would go to gigs together, listen to music together, watch t.v together, go to the shops together, we just had a bond that was so special, I had no idea how I would cope. In a way, I was dependant on her.
And that security had gone.
What I should probably mention at this point is that this wasn't my first experience of a traumatic event. Two years earlier, we had a call that my dad had been in a severe car accident on his was to work and he was on a ventilator. After a few days on an ICU, and a surgeon"putting him back together", the relief was palpable. It took nearly a month for him to get back home, but he was alive, relatively well considering and home in time for christmas. A few years before that, my nan, who we lived with due to her declining mental health, passed away after she had fallen down the stairs and contracted septicaemia. The death certificate stated "septicaemia and alcoholism" as the causes of death. Alcoholism. I may have only been 10 years old, but the woman had fucking dementia. She was shitting on the floor, picking it up and asking what it was. She would try to turn the television over with her nebuliser. I am still so furious about that.
But I digress.
I guess these events led up to my depression first taking hold. In some people, there simply is no obvious reason or event. It is often forgotten that depression is a physical illness. It is an illness of the brain. This delicate and fine network of neurons aren't always biologically perfect (Quite frankly, it amazes me that they work so well most of the time), and if there is a chemical imbalance, this can cause depression in someone who is normally positive and hasn't been through a major event in their life.
A lot of us who suffer with depression, and other mental health issues, are prescribed medication to help correct these imbalances. As much as people want to believe that "thinking positively" and "thinking about how others have it worse" will snap you out of depression, it's simply not the case. The brain is a complex organ. When things go wrong, it can override the body's survival instinct and starve a person to death. It can make people see things that aren't actually real. A simple positive mantra and a bit of empathy can't snap you out of mental illness.
How many of you have had a phobia? A phobia is usually without reason and defined as irrational, and yet your brain is telling you that you are in danger, even though realistically and in most cases, you aren't. It is the same with depression. Your brain forces you to feel sad. It makes the numbness hang over you like a dark cloud ready to rain down and ruin everything at any moment. I guess the difference is that phobias are temporary reactions, whereas depression, although it can be temporary, is often a chronic condition, whereby you cannot avoid the overwhelming sadness.
For anyone who questions someone's need for medication, ask yourself - remember the saddest moment of your life. Now imagine that feeling for weeks... months... years. Can you imagine being sad for that long? Now imagine someone offers you a pill. It isn't an "upper". It wont "make you happy". But it will take the edge off. Instead of facing a project with a feeling of inevitable doom because you lack so much self esteem thanks to your depression, you tackle it. You still struggle. But you put the effort in, and do it more positively. Rather than dragging yourself out of bed reluctantly and not bother with a shower because "what is the point", you get up feeling relatively neutral. You get in the shower and your energy level is okay. You don't feel as exhausted just moving one foot in front of the other as you usually do. This gives you a bit of pep. It gives you a boost to go and make yourself a nice cup of tea and breakfast. You go to work. Instead of hating every bit of your job, you arrange your desk and make a plan of how you will tackle your tasks. You maybe even do it without fear, without panic and with the hint of a smile on your face. This is why medication is necessary sometimes. You can plead with someone to think positively and try to make an effort with themselves, but unless whatever is going on in their head is corrected, they will suffer, just for you to sit on your high horse and berate anyone who turns to anti-depressants. How is it up there? Relatively happy huh? Lucky you.
I am aware some of this post is rambly, and boy is it long. But this is what is going on in my mind at the moment. Occasionally incoherent, often rushing, forgetful and negative.
I guess you could call me lucky though.
I can get out of bed in the morning and have a shower. I will put effort into my food, my clothes, my makeup, my hair. I will put on a happy face at work as best I can. I am fairly high-functioning for such a chronic depressive. I take 40mg Citalopram (Celex) daily. This keeps me on the straight and narrow for the most part, to the point where I almost feel like a fraud because I don't have a major depressive episode with constant use.
It is notoriously difficult to get a doctors appointment less than a week in advance of when you want it, so if you run out and you can't get an appointment, boy are you in for a ride. Within four days of being without, the withdrawals start to kick in. My head starts to spin like a top and if I turn my head, the roof of my mouth goes numb (does anyone else experience this?!) and I feel sick. Almost like a hangover.
So there are downsides to medicating depression, but there are downsides to many treatments.
At the time of writing, I am struggling somewhat. I'm quite teary, quite miserable about the future, irritable and panicky. I have just picked up my latest prescription of citalopram and hopefully I should feel better in a day or two.
I want to conclude this post with what my aim was with it in the first place. I wanted to make people more aware of how depression feels. I wanted this to be a reminder not to berate someone who needs medication. If you are suffering, I wanted you to know that medication is an option. As is therapy. I want you to know that just because you have "no reason" to be depressed, that doesn't mean your illness is invalid. I want people to know that just because I appear to function quite well, I am still struggling. I want people to know that if someone is visibly struggling to function, they should be helped. I want you t know that comments like "other people have it worse" and "you just need to think positively" are unhelpful the majority of the time. I want you to know that depression is a real illness, it isn't "feeling sorry for yourself" and it most definitely isn't wanted, cool, or to be romanticised. It is debilitating and painful and time-consuming and NO ONE would want to spend their life feeling this way.
Sending all the love to anyone reading this and feeling the same way. It will get better for us. I know it. We just need to get over this hurdle.
L xx