Real life and (an LJ) one for the DSM...

[lady_schrapnell]

Feel free to skip. I'm not posting so much because I think this is likely to be of interest, as out of a strong sense that synchronicity gave me a helping hand this morning and I need to respond with due gratitude. (And so possibly help someone else.)

The helping hand came by way of reading Emma Bull/coffeem's post about being given her brain back by an anti-depressant and thinking 'Damn - her 'before' describes exactly how I feel'. (Well, obvously - without the writing ability!) And this when I already had an appointment for this afternoon with my GP, primarily to talk about the ongoing headache treatment slog, but at which I was seriously considering echoing Emma's 'Give me hormones'.

No prizes for guessing what prescription I have now and what I don't have. (If you haven't read her post and guess - you get a prize for the guessing, but lose it again for not reading the post, which is fantastic.) And you know what? I've known for a while that I was depressed and it wasn't getting better and I should just admit it and do something about it. The one purely undistorted bit of thinking going on was the knowledge that what I have is NOT a severe depression - I've seen those and do know. The rest was the kind of rubbish that unfortunately depression tends to bring: because other people have real depression, it's just self-indulgent or weak for me to get drugs when I should be able to cope without them. Or the other classic variant, which is that this is just more evidence for how useless a bit of humanity I am, when others etc, etc. (Hey, one ability even I won't deny is my ability to feel good guilt.)

I never got to the point that Emma describes of thinking it perfectly reasonable to believe that dying would solve everything. I just felt like an important fuse somewhere had been loaded and loaded and loaded and finally blew, and that left all the other circuits firing desperately, but not enough to make things run right. And then everything kept feeding back, so I'd look at all the things I should do and couldn't get the energy to do and feel even more useless and hopeless and inadequate, and then not manage to do something that used to be fine and feel more and more useless and without energy and sink a bit further on every iteration...

So, here's the LJ diagnostic tool. There's a point when your desire to see what your interesting, witty friends have to say about books, the world, writing, reading, the universe and everything is overlaid with such a heavy, dark cloud that it feels a huge physical effort to look at your friends' page. And it's because every line that makes you laugh or think or celebrate for someone else is also whispering that you're boring and stupid and have nothing to say of any interest and certainly haven't accomplished anything like they have. That's not a good place, and time to be sensible and see if you can't shut that whisper the hell up.

It shouldn't need to be said, but it does - I am well aware that I'm the luckiest person alive, in many ways - and none of this is anybody else's fault. (steepholm? A bloody miracle. Becca and Younger Daughter? Awesomeness personified.) And I'm not writing this looking for sympathy, which I certainly don't deserve! I'm also painfully aware that many on my flist have or have had much more severe depression and this could seem like whining about nothing. I'm just writing this because depression is still something about which horrendously stupid things are said by people who should know better, and I felt a passing impulse to say nothing because I was ashamed, which is horrendously stupid. And because, well - it seems really, really rude to ignore Synchronicity, whether she offers help by tapping you gently on the shoulder or whacking you on the head.

Comments

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure how best to put this, so I'll just quote what a friend of mine once said to me: "If you want to talk, I'm all ears; if you want to cry, I'm all shoulders. It makes me look pretty weird, but WTF."

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Heh. Thanks. Isn't the PC term 'anatomically different' rather than 'weird' though?

[amomandagirl.livejournal.com]

Someone once told me that Dick Cavett had described depression something like this: "when you're depressed, you could have a button right there that would magically cure you, and you wouldn't push it." That pretty much sums it up, for me. I hope you can gather up the strength from somewhere to believe it's worth pushing whatever buttons you need to push.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Good description, and I've seen that. But not feeling that way myself - just undeserving of any magic!

[breathingbooks.livejournal.com]

Uncomfortable resonance... I'm so glad you've found something to help you!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Oh dear to the uncomfortable resonance... Lovely, wonderful GP, so I'm feeling optimistic now, which is a good thing! Thanks.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

I hope you returned from your doctor with meds in hand!

I've often wondered if there isn't some physical link between migraines and depression, something to do with a seratonin deficiency, as so often people suffer from both and what cures or helps one can help the other.

I so know the feeling about reading about other people enjoying their lives or being with happy people. I always become reclusive when most depressed, which is probably the worst thing possible. And when I read my LJ from the time I was most depressed, you'd never know. I get sick of the sound of myself being depressed and don't talk about it. Also counter-productive.

Sorry - didn't want to make this reply all about me. Just wanted you to know you had my sympathy, and, no, I don't think you're whining!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Made it to the pharmacy with prescription before it closed, so meds were in hand in short order! Interesting about the possible link between migraines and depression - that fits with the greater incidence of both in women, and the hormonal involvement too, doesn't it? Reply was fine - thanks!

[emmaco.livejournal.com]

I think it's great that you not only overcame the insidious voice saying you weren't bad enough to need help but shared your story here. I hope you start feeling better soon and remember that you're a wonderful person! *hug*

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

You're a wonderful person too! Thanks!

[vierran45.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you got help before it got too bad. I didn't even recognize I was depressed until afterwards - the hardest thing about it was the feeling where you just don't feel like doing anything about the situation and just want to draw into your shell and not contact anyone.

I hope the meds help and you will start feeling better soon!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Yeah - my GP is lovely, but I don't think she had too hard a job getting a diagnosis, as I could talk about the migraine meds totally calmly and started to cry every time she got back to my mood! But I can imagine all too easily exactly how things went that way for you. Thanks for the good wishes!

[generalblossom.livejournal.com]

I have not looked at her post yet ( later, really, you come first) and a virtual hug. BTW the LJ diagnostic tool is a great one, years ago my version was when you go to a bookstore and want to peek, pick up, check out (even if only to smirk) nothing there :(

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Thanks T! (Sorry about the belatedness of the thanks - lost internet for a while there, and then it was on-and-off before I went away for a few days.) That bookstore diagnostic tool is chillingly imaginable - shudder.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

I went through about eight months of the same hideous feeling you describe -- like you say, not major depression, but an inability to think clearly or feel happiness about one's achievements or to take pleasure in any of the things that I used to enjoy.

In my case, my doctor suggested it could be seasonal affective disorder and to a) wait for spring; b) try to get more exercise; c) try St. John's Wort if I really wanted to (though that was my suggestion and he didn't seem overly convinced it would help). He also offered talk therapy as a matter of course, but we both agreed that I didn't really need that. (There was nothing wrong that I could see with my circumstances, or my family life, or anything else I could think of that would justify that.)

Anyway, after much flailing and despair (and fruitless taking of St. John's Wort), what finally helped was... taking a B-complex vitamin every day. And when I say "helped", I mean, "lifted me out of the Slough of Despond and made me feel like my old self in under five days". I wondered if it could really be the vitamins or whether it was just coincidence, until I forgot them when I went on holiday for a week and by Thursday of that week I was in tears over nothing whatsoever.

So apparently my body was severely B-vitamin deprived for some reason. But I would never have guessed it would affect me so severely as that, or in that particular way.

All that being said, hello! I picked you off a list of LJ users who have Catherine Fisher in their interests, because I loved INCARCERON and now SAPPHIQUE with a mad passion. (Oh, all right, I loved Jared/Claudia with a mad passion. Whatever.) And I had seen you around before (probably on sartorias's LJ?), and thought that anyone who takes their user name from one of my favorite books of all time clearly has wonderful literary taste. :)

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Hello to you!

Working backwards, you have no idea of the joy of having someone recognise (and approve) my user-name! It was amusing to see comments on one of your essays by someone with "penwiper" as their user-name, as that was one I'd found taken when I was trying to come up with something for my new LJ account. And yes, it would most likely be sartorias's page where you would have seen me.

Possibly it's only right for me to give fair warning about my Sapphique failure, as I wasn't as taken with it as with Incarceron. Or several of her other books. I wasn't entirely sure why, but it had something to do with the increasingly-frequent switches in character-setting, which was fine in the fist book, but started to feel annoying, something to do with the similarity of the group-dynamics to her other series' group-dynamics, and something about the almost perverse refusal to have any straight-forward romantic pairings when there was quite so much intense 'shipping. Does that make any sense? It might have been easier to let it ride if I hadn't heard there isn't likely to be a third book in the series, though.

To compensate, I did get to meet her - in real, non-virtual life and all! She was very nice, interesting and intelligent, as you'd imagine.

Oops - have to relinquish this computer now, so will just say I read your "The Problem of Susan" essay last night, and it was excellent.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Yes, I definitely agree that the rapid switches of POV get frustrating (particularly if you are much more interested in one subplot than the others, as I was) and that it's maddening to have so much unresolved sexual tension floating around with barely even a hint that it ever will be or CAN be resolved.

Still, I just adore the world and characters of INCARCERON and SAPPHIQUE more than anything else of Fisher's I've read. I never really warmed to the SNOW-WALKER books (heh) and although I enjoyed the Oracle trilogy, it didn't hit all my imaginative buttons the same way that Incarceron does.

I really, really, really hope that Catherine Fisher is wrong about not writing that third book. Because I didn't even feel that the plot was properly resolved by book 2, either. DO NOT MAKE ME WRITE FANFIC JUST TO EASE MY PAIN, MS. FISHER. :D

And thank you for reading my Susan essay! I'm very glad you enjoyed it.