The Bare And Honest Truth About Depression
Oct 14th, 2008 by zania
What Many ‘Experts’ On Depression Fail To Tell You
When I began this Blog About Depression, I set it up for two reasons: to find out more information about different forms and depression and post about them here; and to help myself at the same time, with an outlet for my personal thoughts and to possibly harness some research findings in a way which would benefit me and others who had a similar form of depression to my own.
But the more I research, and the more readers have been commenting here and adding their personal thoughts and experiences, it appears to me that There Is No Complete Answer To Depression.
You can look for ‘depression help’ all over the internet; you can read reams and reams of books and articles on the subject. A great deal of the information you will find on (for example) blogs and sites set up purely to make money, will be either regurgitated text from other sites, or full of ‘pap’ which will not help you in the slightest.
On the other hand, there are many very good websites, blogs, books and articles on the subject of depression which will do their best to provide you with details about various forms of depresson and treatments for it. Some will go as far as providing details of the latest research, which will (sometimes) be even more useful.
(By the way, Fraying Edges, to my way of thinking, doesn’t really fall into either of these two categories. It is simply a personal depression blog with my own thoughts and findings, but I do try to keep it clear of any ‘just written to make money’ posts [hell, if I made a dollar a month from this site it would be a miracle 
]. I prefer to post here when I have something to say, rather than just because I feel I have to, and the blogs I link to in the sidebar are also, to my mind, of a similar design).
But getting back to the subject of this post - The Truth About Depression - I am yet to find anywhere something which will answer all of our many different questions and cries for help.
Because every single case of depression and other forms of mental illness relate entirely to the sufferer: to their genetics; their particular body build and chemistry; their environment (family, social, economic, political, geographical…); their eating/drinking/living/sleeping habits; their gender; their sexuality; other illnesses they may be suffering from; their reactions to medication; and so on… And even more so, in many cases, to their personal life history. We are all individuals.
For example, I am female, still relatively young. I am a mother and family provider, under constant pressure to earn enough to help us survive. My family has a genetic history of depression, but not that strong (and so, to be honest, do many families) and my first ’bout of depression’ (which was not termed as such then) was as a child, when I suddenly found myself unable to communicate with others without bursting into tears. My second ’bout’ was as a teenager with Anorexia, and the latter and ongoing one was after giving birth to my first child.
I guess from reading that, you would say I am an ‘ideal candidate’ for ongoing depression. But am I? Many women go through life without suffering from depression, despite having a family history of depression, ’slimming struggles’, giving birth, and being under constant stress from their ‘working mother’ role.
At the other extreme is a good friend of mine back in the UK. He is a successful graphic artist. He is physically healthy, has no money worries, a nice home, happy family, no pressure to produce more work (he has enough ‘in the vault’ to last him for years and because of its unique nature, it will still look ‘fresh’ in years to come) and he loves his work anyway. He has no family history of mental illness and is not taking any ‘illegal substances’ or drinking to excess. And yet he is just going through a period of major depression and it isn’t his first.
He doesn’t fit the ‘criteria’ for depression in any way, shape or form, and various doctors and psychiatrists have affirmed this. And that actually makes it harder for him to cope with his illness (being able to find ‘reasons’ can be very comforting…). It also makes it harder for the medics to find anything to prescribe for him which actually works.
It could be, of course, that he fits the criteria discussed in my previous post on A Different View Of Depression, in that he is creative and gifted, and thus perhaps more likely to be a ‘candidate for depression’, but that doesn’t really help him deal with his illness.
And when I read comments here and on other depression sites, from people suffering from depression, they are all relating different experiences, and the only thing they really have in common is this horrible illness (and even then, it manifests itself in many different forms).
But most of us will be ‘diagnosed’ according to a very similar set of ‘boxes’ which the physician will tick off one by one, and thus apply the ‘correct’ medication and/or other kinds of treatment accordingly. It’s no surprise that, in many instances, it takes months, years (or never) to help the sufferer recover completely from their particular form of depression.
Because people do not live according to those ‘little tick boxes’. We are all individuals, with our own set of ‘reasons for depression’, many of which we fail to understand ourselves.
This is not a jibe at the medical profession (or even the pharmaceutical companies - not this post anyway…), it is just saying, that until researchers find a way of getting out of their labs and into the minds of their ‘research subjects’ and then reach out even further and try (somehow…) to see depression as being related to a whole magnitude of different ‘events’, they will never get anywhere near to finding the answers they are supposed to be searching for.
And until that time, those of us who suffer from depression will just have to manage to get by trying out various methods of treatment and hoping that eventually, either we will find one which works, or the period of depression will pass under its own volition.
Because the one thing which does stand out from all the research, is that depression does abate. It may never lift entirely and the sufferer may have further bouts of the illness over the years, but major depression does usually follow a cycle and the sufferer will ‘come out at the other end’.
Scant help, I know, to anyone suffering from major depression (or who has a family member suffering from depression) right now, but it’s all I can say that I feel to be the truth about depression. And I truly wish there were more…
Hey there again, I’m finding myself drawn to this site a lot these days, I can’t seem to identify what it is particularly but I seem to identify with it in a way, from what I know about you through your writing we two are very different people but somehow it doesn’t feel like that when I read your musings. In regards to the topic at hand I feel I’m quite well qualified to speak about this because in my own dealings with depression I’ve been forced to confront that it is in fact ‘depression’ and that its effects upon my life and continued functioning have been severe and enough so that I’ve had to tell my family and friends and seek professional help.
This is where my lonely and private drift into apathy and personal collapse would change from desperate to frustrating. I tried counselors first because they were free at my university and I wouldn’t need at that stage need to tell anyone other than the counselor. This of course would prove to be a dead end, for price reasons the university only offered 10 sessions and these were useless for several reasons, not least because the problems ran deeper than I knew and on top of that, as policy the treatment they provided was designed to be in the context of assignments. They meant well but I couldn’t get any work done for reasons I did not and still do not understand that stemmed straight from the state of mind that compelled me to ask for help in the first place.
Psychotherapy was next, by now I’d had to tell the folks because things had long gone past crisis point, they payed for me to see a psychologist and this was better, but it was clear this would take a long, long time to be effective. I liked these sessions, it was helpful to analyse my perceptions and behaviour and in the context of the session it all made sense it was all clear, but the problem as I imagine many who’ve tried this before can relate to; was that it was all academic. It was like going to see an architect every week to agonise and lovingly pour over blueprints of my dream house when I KNEW I didn’t have the funds to even buy the plot let alone begin construction. Every session would be uplifting and assuring, I would furnish greater and greater detail of this hypothetical abode. It would look beautiful if only I could start it but of course I never would, so right after I left each session, all the good will would just evaporate into the wind as I opened the door leading out of the psychologist’s office.
My final recourse now has been psychiatry, this has been a very weird experience. Before I embarked on any of this I, like most people had preconceptions about any psychology based medical practice, I knew most of them to be hugely outdated and ill informed, but I hadn’t actually experienced it personally so my preconceptions were all I had to go on. The Strange thing with psychiatry is that it fit my image of Freud asking about your parents and you breaking down in cliche fashion on the leather couch (though it was actually a really tattered old cheap chair), it’s weird man, it’s weird. This seems to have been a more revealing course, but I don’t know how useful it’s been either, more just bruising, I leave every session feeling paranoid and abnormal, it makes me feel like a nut. Now the psychiatrist has me talking to psychologists again and they think that the conclusions he’s come up with are bizarre and unfounded and just wrong. I’ve never seen medical professionals disagree so much and approach things so differently and inconsistently.
I’m left now completely confused and I wondering whether talking to these people was all worth it, though I still feel like I can’t get out of this by myself so I need their help. The other thing they don’t tell you about depression and I think what helps create the situations I’ve gone through is that not only is depression not a complete picture, but the elusive, almost mythological goal for remission; is finding out WHY. Unfortunately finding this is so difficult because not only is it hard to find but it is not static, you can spend weeks trying to figure out what’s doing this to you and as soon as you feel close, you’re depressed for entirely different reasons. You once mentioned the analogy of a fellow blogger about depression being like fires constantly lighting in your head, like you I find this observation to be remarkably astute and to personalise it, I find that there is a prioritising of firefighting work to be done. When the everything is aflame and you have only so much water; you have to choose which fire is doing the most damage, which building needs to be saved the most, and since the fires are starting at random all the time - which particular blaze needs your attention the most will change too. This I believe accounts in part for the sense of futility in sufferers and how signs of improvement can be dashed so quickly as if they’d never appeared to begin with, they WERE real signs, they were really because people felt better, but only in the context of that one strand of their overall and hugely complex problem - one strand in an unknown structure of infinite complexity that changes pretty much everyday.
I posted my last comment at 4am during my recent bout of insomnia, please excuse spelling and grammar, they just slipped right past my weary eyes.