Posted by JohnD
Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:28:00 GMT
Photo Credit: Jane M. Sawyer and MorgueFile
Recently, I’ve started asking myself a basic question: Why get well? What do I really want in fighting depression? After all, if I’m working on recovery, I ought to be able to see what I’m aiming for. I thought for a long time that what I wanted was to be free of depression. That would be tremendous, of course, but then what? What do I expect my life would be like? I tend to hear several formulations of this. One person wrote to me and mentioned happiness as what he’s looking for, and I’m sure that’s what most people would say.
Saying I want to be happy seems like a self-evidently true thing. A person with major depression can mean by this that he or she wants the ability to think positively and hopefully about life and about self. It’s possible to imagine a life free of depression and all the harm it causes oneself and others. But happiness goes beyond simply not being depressed. There are plenty of unhappy people who don’t suffer from this mood disorder. So if happiness is the goal, it means a lot more than just getting over this illness.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Connecting, Fighting Depression | Tags depression, discovery, fighting, happiness, recovery, self | 6 comments | 1 trackback
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:14:00 GMT
Photo Credit: Eric Gevaert
Today gave me a lesson in the value of anger. Yes, I’ve heard it all: anger bad – positive feelings good. Fine. Too much anger, and I’d better manage it or I’ll be out of a job, family, the whole works. Right. But there are times when the purely valid human feeling of anger can save me.
That’s what happened today. I’ve been moving along at a nice clip for the past week, getting a lot done, full of a sense of well-being, as if (dare I think it) I might be done with depression and all the life saboteurs that keep it company. Then today, I’m sitting in my office, and – wham – I know I’ve got to get out of there. I just have to pack up and leave. Now!
Some force is pushing through from within, like one of those wet toothy jack-in-the-box aliens that like to pop out of normal-seeming bodies in the movies. Come to think of it, that’s one way to imagine the big D, Depression, stirring around in there, getting ready to emerge, to blow apart my mere host personality, to trot around as a substitute me. Is Mr. Big D getting ready to emerge?
That’s motive enough to move. The voltage of fear keeps building. As that nervous pressure increases, my mind suddenly empties itself out. One minute I’m buzzing with ideas of what I have to do, and then, poof! Nothing. I look around to see where those thoughts have gone – where are my mental lists! I’m dead without my lists! I try to seize a new thought – but as soon as I get one into that neuro-flow, it’s gone. Those thoughts know something I don’t. I’d better get out of there too! Perhaps I can step out of this troubled mind, go somewhere else and try a new one on for size.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Surviving at Work, Fighting Depression | Tags anger, depression, mind, rebellion, recovery, work | 7 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 21 Oct 2007 05:40:00 GMT
One of the hardest admissions I have had to make about the effect of depression was to say bluntly to myself, after years of denial, that my performance in my profession had steadily deteriorated under the impact of this illness. The truth had been obvious for some time to colleagues depending on me to be a consistently outstanding performer, but it only came home when facts kicked me in the teeth. The experience was a bit like what alcoholics describe as hitting rock bottom.
I was in danger of losing not just a job but a professional practice that I had built over years whether self-employed or working through an organization. Clients were unhappy, I was taken off assignments after fogging through meetings under deep depression, and I was not carrying my weight with colleagues in bringing in new work. That was hardly surprising since my basic will to act so often disappeared. The director who had hired me was deeply disappointed and angry at this mediocre performance. I, who had done so much in the past and come in the door with such great promise, was not measuring up, pure and simple.
Of course, the last thing I wanted to say to them or to myself was that depression might have something to do with it.
If I could just admit to myself what was obvious to others, I could begin to work with the people running my program to address these limitations. They were upset with me, but they were human and they knew exactly what depression was all about. God, what tortured lessons in humility have to be learned in order to do that! After all, how many sources of self-esteem does a depressed person have to turn to?
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Posted in Surviving at Work, Fighting Depression | Tags accommodation, ADA, alcoholic, Buddhist, defeat, depression, support, work | 3 comments | 1 trackback
Posted by JohnD
Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:17:00 GMT
Photo Credit: Kenn Kiser – MorgueFile
Not sure where the following came from, but it turned up on my cyber doorstep recently. I guess some men have trouble living up to their fantasies.
Ok – everybody knows depressed people have these outbursts of grief and crying for no apparent reason. At least some people do. But certainly not me, a guy – I’m not going to start springing leaks in my well-caulked hull of a head. Real depressed men don’t do that. Certainly I never do that – not ever – well, hardly ever. And should an accident like that happen, a spill of mental incontinence when least expected, it’s not going to happen in public. No way.
So what happened the other day was totally out of line. I was driving to work, having picked just the right time to miss all the jams and fly down the freeway, when I’m listening to the radio. Not just any pop tune bouncing beat kind of thing but the stealth ego breakers of NPR. Serves me right. The story had something to do with concentration camp survivors. They had been contacted by this dying veteran with a shoebox full of snapshots taken of a liberated camp at the close of the war. The guy found out who was in the pictures and delivered them to the survivors. Then they all had a celebration to honor the guy after his death – all those happy tears – and somebody made a movie of the whole thing. OK, very moving, very ennobling, but I don’t know these people. What’s it to me? And there I am exiting the freeway onto the downtown street a few blocks from my office when these lurchy guttural swellings started rising up in my throat. What the hell is this? Am I about to throw up as I’m pulling into the parking lot? No, it was worse than that. I’m fighting down this sobmachinegun choking my breath and pushing wet stuff out of my eyes.
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Posted in Surviving at Work | Tags crying, dreams, fantasy, grief, men, motorcycle, work | 4 comments | 1 trackback
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 13 Oct 2007 22:28:00 GMT
I have a hard time being a patient or thinking of myself in that role. In one sense, to be a patient means to be sick, to be under treatment by a medical professional, to be undergoing all sorts of tests and therapies. See the trend there – the intolerable passive voice says it all. I am having things done to me – I am leaving it to others to cure me. Of course, they ask for my cooperation (be a good patient), which means I should do what they tell me to do. “Patient” comes from a Latin word that means “to suffer.” And suffering comes in two varieties: you suffer when you feel pain and you suffer when you allow something to be done. Both fit the classic role of the patient – you’re in pain and you allow doctors to treat you. So, what’s wrong with that, especially if you seek out the best treatment you can find?
The problem is that none of the treatments I’ve encountered can get the job done. I can’t wait around for treatments to work on their own. If I don’t take an active role in treatment, then nothing will help for long. That’s because the human factor, the will to heal, makes such an enormous difference. As I found in dealing with cancer, I have to function as a partner with each new tool I use and see it as one element of an overall strategy for getting better. As is true of every depressed person, though, there are those times when I am so severely ill that my active contribution to healing fails. Standing up can be hard enough, let alone trying to wage a campaign against the illness. The hope then is that whatever external treatments are applied will soften the impact of depression so that I can get back enough energy and presence of mind to activate myself once again. That’s the partnership.
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Posted in Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags activist, cancer, emsam, partner, patient, recovery, treatment | no comments | no trackbacks
