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

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.