Depression Talk

“I know why you’re depressed,” someone inevitably says when they somehow discover you are clincially depressed and single. “You just need to meet a nice girl/guy. That’ll cure your depression in no time! Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk!”

Going into the December holiday season, you may have to brace yourself for a lot of this if you are single or not in a committed relationship. I’m this < => close to telling people that I’m gay just to shut them up about me not being married or in a long-term relationship that could possibly lead to health benfits and tax breaks.

A Lot Of Married People Are Depressed

Being in a relationship has no bearings on your depression — no matter what kind it is. This is because depression is a medical condition and not a choice. No other person is going to be able to help you magically cure your depression with love, sex and a certain amount of prezzies.

In fact, being in a relationship can make your depression a lot worse.

Case In Point

I was once in an abusive relationship. It was so bad that I finally went to seek medical treatment for my major depression. After a year on Prozac, my lover wanted me to drop it because he thought it wasn’t doing me any good. Perhaps this was because I was beginning to fight back.

A year and a half after taking the Prozac, I finally realized that this guy was a looser and I left. However, that relationship was so traumatic that I highly doubt I’ll ever get into a relationship ever again.

Single And Lovin’ It!

Having a lover is highly overrrated. You don’t have to have one to be happy. Although it’s not good to isolate yourself from other people, you don’t have to date them to help be supportive have healthy relationships with them. It’s no shame to be an adult and live with your parents (unless your parents are paying all of the bills).

You can still be a vital member of your family and community without having to conform to the schedule and whims of a lover. Instead of just concentrating your energiues on raising your own biological children, your whole family, community or charity work becomes your legacy. Heck, once I stopped dating, I was able to run my own freelancing business.

It is possible to be single, happy and have depression.

Hi, all. I’ll give you an advance warning — I’m curently getting over an attack of the flu, so this post might be a bit wackier than usual. But, as we barrel along with flu season, an important question comes to mind — should you take your meds with an upset stomach? These medicines cost enough as it is — you really don’t want to waste them by tossing them back up.

Don’t fool yourself — as soon as your meds get in the least bit wet, they’re usless. Trust me — I once tried to get a fluoxetine capsule out of my vomit because it wasn’t discolored in any way. But it still dissolved in my fingers. Once down the hatch, there’s no going back.

Call Your Doctor

If you do wake up with the flu and feel queasy but haven’t vomited yet, if you can, call your doctor or therapist to ask if it’s okay to skip a dose. I always seem to get sick on my doctor’s day off, so I have to wing it.

Know Your Meds

The two prescription medicines I have to take everyday are fluoxetine (for depression) and verapamil (for migraine prevention). I’ve been taking fluoexetine since April, 2003. This is more than enough time for me to not the quirks of this drug on my system. Skipping a couple of days is not going to mess me up. But if I skip for a week, then I’m in trouble and start to think suicidal thoughts again.

But I have only been taking verapamil since the spring. I don’t know what would happen to me if I missed a couple of days of it. So, I decided to wait until my stomach calmed down before taking verapamil.

Sometimes, You Have To Experiment

Please keep in mind that I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on the Internet. I’m also only talking about depression medicines and verapamil. With some classes of medications — like insulin — you don’t have a choice. Take it, no matter what gymnastics your stomach is doing.

But sometimes you can’t get a hold of a doctor or therapist about your own meds when you have an upset stomach. In these cases, sometimes all you can do is experiment. Cross your fingers, swallow the meds (or however you take them) and note the results.

Hope this helps.

Canadians may be the but of some jokes (especially my brother who moved to Canada), but sometimes they put out some really good television. Unfortunatley, about a million Canadians and anyone living around the Great Lakes region often get SAD. As you’ve probably figured out from this post’s title, this is CTV’s look at seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Although light on special effects and lacking a background soundtrack, it’s heavy on information.

Why I like this clip:

• Tells the difference between SAD and winter blues (or winter blahs).
• Shows one of those lightboxes touted for SAD treatment and talks a bit about how to use one.
• Points out that SAD is NOT caused by temperature, but by lack of sunlight. I thought it was both, plus the pressure of Christmas/Yule/other holiday. Ooops.
• Dr. Ganz Ferrance, the doctor interviewed. I’ve never heard of the first name of Ganz before — I kinda like it. It was also comforting to hear a doctor talking about a medical problem that he himself has gone through, so he knows what it’s like.

Although this YouTube clip contains a lot of information on SAD and winter blues, it should not be used in the place of your doctor’s diagnosis.

Before you watch this, get used to hearing that little question mark put on the end of all sentences. I think USAToday claimed this verbal quirk began in Australia, but who knows who is to blame for this. Anyway, try to stay active and enjoy the clip.

Ok, not my most inspired of blog post titles, but I bet a lot of people Google “December sucks”. Why would they do this? Just to be sure that they aren’t the only ones who feel miserable while it seems the rest of the world is having a bloody good time. But you aren’t the only ones. Some people are just very good at hiding their Yuletide misery in public.

Remember — even Charlie Brown got depressed around the holidays, and he wasn’t even a real person. That shows you just how powerful December depression is, in that it penetrates into the alternate universe that is popular fiction.

Pressure’s On

I feel like I’ve been dropped into a pressure cooker as soon as the clock ticks over into midnight on December first. This manifests into phsyical symptoms such as body aches and constant fatigue. Curently, I have a headache. It’s all over my head and my eyes feel normal, so at least it’s not a migraine.

Many people’s jobs intensify in December. You may have several papers due in class before Christmas break. You may work in retail. You may suddenly get several clients dumping work on you due by Christmas (which has happened to me two years in a row now. At least I’m not in retail anymore.)

And on top of this, you have to put up decorations full of emotion-laden memories and have to find a bagfull of perfect gifts.

No wonder many of us wish we could sleep through December.

You Don’t Have To Be Perfect

Take a deep breath and realize that this December, you will make mistakes. You may even be like me and make several every day. (”No, Rena — just you.”) The sky does not fall and life goes on.

If you can get out of doors in the daytime, please do so — even if it’s only for twenty or thirty minutes. Even if you are not diagnosed with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), your body will still feel sleepy just because it’s not getting enough natural light. No wonder you’re cranky — your body is tired.

And through it all, keep chanting this mantra:

January.

Did they really need to do a study on how many college-age Americans have personailty disorders? I think we already knew the results to this one. According to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the New York Psichiatric Institute, every one in five college students has a personality disorder to the extent that it screw up their ability to try and lead a normal life.

College age students studied had ages ranging from 19 - 25. (And yes, you can start college or uni much younger or older than that). The study interviewed 5092 college kids in order to get their findings. The interviews were done in 2000 and 2001 and apparantly the kids must have talked a long time, because the findings only came out this week. The study only looked at college kids. So, the study doesn’t mean the one in five Americans have personality disorders (which may be mistakenly implied), just one in five college age kids.

What’s a Personailty Disorder?

There is a lot of quibbling over just what constitutes a personality disorder and I’ll admit up front my opinion — if you are alive, you probably have a personailty disorder. Here’s the Mayo Clinic’s definition of a personality disorder:

“Personality disorder is a general term for a type of mental illness in which your ways of thinking, perceiving situations and relating to others are dysfunctional.”

The study included a variety of mental conditions under the heading “personality disorders”. These include bipolar disorder, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, phobias, alcoholism or drug abuse. There is some debate in medical and social care circles as to whether alcoholism or drug abuse is a personality disorder, but the study includes them. I’d consider alcholics and drug abusers to be mentally ill, but then again, I’m not a doctor (but I am mentally ill).

The Practical Upshot

The finding of so many young Americans with personality disorders isn’t what’s disturbing. It’s the study’s findings than only about 25% of college kids with these problems actually go get help. It seems a lot of the kids didn’t get help because they didn’t want to be branded as crazy.

I remember college. It was the one place where you never had to worry about being crazy because everyone else was, too.

All kidding aside, most college campuses (even community colleges) have counseling services free or low cost for their students. The good news is that at least there is someone for college-age kids to talk to. You can also call 1-800-SUI-CIDE or 1-800-273-TALK for someone to talk to if you don’t go to college.

Getting bullied is inevitable, whether you have depression or not. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to define bullied as “someone or something giving you a hard time.” You can be bullied by people such as school mates, co-workers, employers, businesses, Internet trolls, family. You also can be bullied by intangible entities like poverty, injustices and chronic illnesses such as depression.

Those School Yard Bullies

Think hard about your days at school when you were bullied. If you weren’t bullied, then you never went to school. If it wasn’t the other kids beating you up literally and metaphorically, it was the teachers, the cschool administration or the parents of your classmates.

Those days weren’t fun, but you survived. You learned how to deal with bullies in your own way. These ways could be:

• Act far more damaged than you already are and work on the sympathy of others
• Ignore them, when possible
• Get a bigger friend to hang around with
• Suffer quietly until graduation and then become a professional freelance writer and complain about them for money (HA! HA!)
• Fight back

This is the same strategy you can use to combat depression in your day to day life. You get sympathy from as many as you possibly can, and then fight back by getting together good allies like doctors, medications and good food. Thinking about how you survived your encounters with your childhood bullies can help give you encouragement, because if you handled that, you can handle just about anything.

Wow — I guess the bullies at school were actually good for me in a way. But I still want to punch them right in the mouth. But I can’t. But I can take that anger and use it for other means to help my mental health.

Those Other Means

There are many things you can do with the anger you feel about being bullied — whether it’s by people, circumstances or a chronic illness like depression. What you don’t want to do is take the anger out on yourself. You did not do anything to deserve being bullied — we just all get bullied (even bullies get bullied). Use the anger to:

• Clean something
• Create something
• Learn something
• Chop firewood (preferably, if you have a wood stove)
• Listen to other people’s problems
• Do charity work

Hope this helps.

According to the National Insititute of Menatal Health, one in four adult Americans has a mental illness (including all of the types of depression). This comes to about 57.7 million people. That’s a big market. It’s a wonder that Hallmark and other 1999 greeting card companies haven’t got in on this action.

The US Government won’t bail out the health care industry, so maybe they can at least send all of us who are mentally ill a greeting card whenever we try to kill ourselves.

Suicide Ettiquette

Two weeks ago, my Mom’s friend tried to commit sucide by taking a lot of pills and then wanted to jump off a roof. She’s doing much better now. But Mom got these strange phone calls from her other friends asking if they should send get-well cards to the friend who tried to commit suicide.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mom told them. “Perhaps you should call her instead.”

After Mom told me about this conversation, it’s been going over and over in my head. Would “glad you messed up your suicide” cards be that bad of an idea? Please bear in mind that practically everyone in my family has tried to kill themselves at one point or another and I’ve tried to kill myself so many times, I’ve lost count. Would I have really minded getting a get well card after yet another suicide attempt?

Yeah, I probably would … at first. Then, knowing me, I’d get a really good laugh out of it.

Do They Exist?

If you enter any random words in Google or Yahoo!, you can usually find several thousand links on it. And through the magic of the Internet, there are greeting cards for the depressed, as long as you keep your tongue firmly in your cheek. Here are some links I’ve discovered. Enjoy.

• Cafe Press: Maniacally Depressed Greeting Card Share the love.
• DGreetings.com Has several designs to choose from.
• Zazzle in the UK Has T-shirts and coffe mugs, too. Why should American depressives have all of the fun?
• Depression Card Does what it says on the tin.
• Just be sure you use your cards for the depressed in order to cheer someone up, not as templates for suicide notes, as happened to Moshe Pergament. That wouldn’t be too polite.