as small as a world and as large as alone

6:49pm May 10, 2013

feliscorvus:

clatterbane:

adriofthedead:

bloodmothers:

pleatedjeans:

Depression Part 2 by Hyperbole and a Half is the most important thing you’ll read all day.

wow

I know everyone and their mother has probably reposted this link already but, please please please read this. It’s really the most accurate and straightforward description of depression I’ve ever read

Especially the part with the dead fish

A lot of people who don’t really understand depression reduce it to simply just “being sad a lot”, when it’s actually much more than that. If I could try and boil it a single phrase it’d be more like “long periods of intense apathy punctuated by feelings of helplessness”. It’s not about just feeling sad, it’s more or less about not… really feeling anything. All while still trying to deal with going about day-to-day life and holding tight to whatever sort of distractions you can manage to care about enough to find, just to keep yourself from thinking about it too much.

Glad she’s able to start posting again.

This experience actually sounds more like what I got from bad reactions to a couple of medications…for depression. But, it works differently for everybody.

The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief.  I had always wanted to not give a fuck about anything. I viewed feelings as a weakness — annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn’t have to feel them anymore.

But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there’s a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don’t feel very different.

Advanced zombie level: when you know intellectually that it’s just not right that you suddenly can’t give a fuck about anything, but are also totally unable to give enough of a fuck about that to even try to do anything about it. (Also, when people around you view that as improvement because you’re not crying as much…)

I have tended more toward staying in the “nothing but feelings” space, with the depression being pretty much totally an exaggerated reaction to actual things that were going on in my life. (Though it was treated as just inexplicable neurotransmitter storms for years, because nobody else wanted to look at the not-so-great situation.) But, that version is not a lot of fun, either. To put it mildly.

Also, I particularly had to get a (sympathetic) chuckle at the “when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable” section. Though, IME, more from trying to avoid “inappropriate” displays of emotion than finding one to try to express at all.

But, yeah, “everyone feels sad sometimes” just doesn’t come anywhere close to covering it.

I’ve never been what I’d consider “depressed”, mainly because I can’t recall ever actually wanting to die or wishing I didn’t exist.

I *have*, however, had periods of like…extreme existential angst. Mainly in my 20s, which IMO is actually fairly common from a developmental standpoint, because you’re sort of going “holy crap, there IS life after being a kid!” and it’s like this massive black hole of unknown, especially if lots of things in your life are as precarious as they were in my case.

Sleep deprivation, chronic dehydration, and malnutrition also plagued me during those years. At one point, when I was getting maybe 3-4 hours of sleep a night and taking way too many classes…I guess it all caught up with me, because I went into this bizarrely detached state that involved:

(a) a level of visual overload so extreme that I could not even resolve what I was seeing into discrete objects without intense cognitive effort, and sometimes not even then, and

(b) a generalized feeling that somehow I “didn’t really exist”. Or that the outside world didn’t really exist. I guess the name for this is depersonalization/derealization (I know those are 2 different things, but for me there was a lot of overlap).

I ended up being diagnosed with “dysthymia” during this time but I really think what I was going through was situational (as in, “this is what happens to an extremely overloaded autistic person on too little sleep and next to no downtime”). But when things started getting better, I did a lot of crying…not because I was sad, but because a lot of things suddenly seemed incredibly and exquisitely…poingant, or something. 

…but in any event, the only time I’ve had the “can’t make self give a crap” thing was as a teenager when I was briefly prescribed Risperdal. It was AWFUL. Horrible emotional blunting to the point where the only thing I could feel was terror and despair at not being able to feel stuff properly. I still think I “dodged a bullet” in that people didn’t force me to keep taking that particular med after I reported how bad I felt on it. Not everyone is so lucky. :/

I didn’t get off so easy with the neuroleptics. I’ve been on, AFAIK, in alphabetical order:

* Clozaril - clozapine * Compazine - prochlorperazine * Haldol - haloperidol * Mellaril - thioridazine * Navane - thiothixene * Prolixin - fluphenazine * Risperdal - risperidone * Seroquel - quetiapine * Stelazine - trifluoperazine * Thorazine - chlorpromazine * Trilafon - perphenazine * Zyprexa - olanzapine

Also I’ve been on Reglan (metacloperamide), which isn’t in that family but it’s related enough to cause similar side effects.

I think one of the problems is actually that this isn’t always a side effect of these drugs. Sometimes it’s the desired effect. Desired by the doctors I mean, not the patients of course. Same with the way it disrupts motivation and the connections between thoughts and actions. A lot of that is how it’s “supposed to work”, for many of the prescribed uses. Especially when the prescribed use is behavior control.

That’s one reason that the psychiatric doses of these meds tends to be ridiculously high, compared to the doses when they’re used for other medical conditions such as nausea. I’m on what’s considered a high dose of Phenergan for nausea right now. And I doubt it’s anywhere near what it would be if it were being used for some psychiatric reason. Which it’s almost never used for.

Unfortunately, there’s very little honesty about the way this class of meds is frequently used as a means to control people, more than as a means to help people. I remember reading notes about myself years after the fact, where people were wondering why the doses required to control my behavior as a kid were so close to the doses that left me totally incapacitated. But there was no question at all why this was actually the case.

I suspect that when the meds actually work for uses agreed on by the patient (when the patient isn’t seeking total obliteration of thought and feeling and movement, anyway), the doses tend to be lower and less incapacitating. But frequently they use things like this to control the behavior of children, elderly people, mental patients of all ages, etc. I remember at one point they tested how much one place had put into my system, and it was over twice the toxic level of the drug in question. The place had blamed my severe seizures and other beyond-horrible side effects on anxiety or attention seeking depending on the day. Then they tried to blame my parents for checking into what was going on.

But yeah. That entire class of drugs actually screws with the way the brain forms connections between thought, emotion, motivation, and movement. Including not just between each one and each other, but each one and itself. So when I was on psychiatric doses of any of them I pretty much felt like my entire being had been ripped into shreds at uneven parts, and then pulled so far apart that there was no travel between all the pieces. It was far worse than the worst of what depression has ever done to me on its own.

I’m now on a lot of nausea drugs. Most of which have some similarity to neuroleptics, even when they aren’t neuroleptics. And being on the combination is pretty taxing to my brain, even if the doses aren’t enough to cause that total obliteration that only high dose neuroleptics can cause.

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