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I, like most people had preconceptions about any psychology based medical practice, I knew most of them to be hugely outdated and ill informed, but I hadn’t actually experienced it personally so my preconceptions were all I had to go on.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.