How I’ve Dealt With Depression

Full Disclosure:

I’m not a medical professional (or any kind of professional, for that matter), I’m just someone who has spent most of their life dealing with depression. Along the way, I learned a few things that helped me. The purpose of writing this is to pass them along in case they’re helpful to somebody else.

IMPORTANT! READ THIS FIRST!

What’s Going On?

The hardest thing for me to learn and accept was that depression was not reality. It is my view of what’s real. It’s what I really, truly deep in my heart feel and believe. And it hurts like hell. [Very tempting to use stronger language here.] It is MY reality.  

But what is it?

I heard one explanation from a doctor that made a lot of sense to me and even changed my perspective on something I had been living with for a very long time. Bear with me as I try to explain.

Cars have warning lights on the dashboard. They come on if the engine gets too hot, oil pressure gets to low, you’re close to running out of gas. They’re helpful. People have their own warning signals like fear, pain, hunger, even sadness and loss. In my opinion, the last ones are a big part of what makes humans human.

A car can have a wiring problem that makes those warning lights go on at the wrong time. The light is on and blinking madly, but it turns out that your oil pressure is fine. The warning light is broken. Mood disorders like depression and anxiety are like those malfunctioning warning lights. We are convinced that something or many things are really wrong. But our feelings can be way out of proportion to our realities. So, it’s basically a wiring problem. In the case of the car, there are ways to fix it. In humans, it’s a good bit harder but not impossible. The hard part with humans is discovering that it’s the warning light that may be broken.

How your mind is responding to a problem may be what’s taking you over the edge. Sadly, if you’re overcome with depression, this can be really hard to see. Things like depression and anxiety can have a big effect on one’s judgement. That’s why getting some professional help is important. When it gets bad, it gets dangerous.

It’s a cruel comparison to make, but I can’t help it: drunk drivers feel like they can drive just fine. Their judgement isn’t working. They can’t.

Lost in the Tunnel

Hopefully, if you’re still reading, you’re no longer in the crisis phase and, if you were, you’ve taken some action to get assistance. The rest of this goes over some of the things I’ve learned about dealing with depression in my life.

When I get depressed, I feel like I’ve always been depressed and will always be depressed. In fact, I’m convinced of it. But for me, the depression does let up for a while after a while. For the longest time, I was completely blind to that fact. This, I discovered, is why:

When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I lived out in the East Bay. To get to the City, (when you call San Francisco “the City”, you always use a capital “C”), I had to drive through the long Caldicott Tunnel. What was interesting about the Caldicott was that at the very end, it curves rather sharply so you don’t see the end, the proverbial “light” until you are just seconds from the end. That’s what my depressions are like. It took a lot of years of experience to learn that, despite what I am feeling, it will eventually let up. It always has, so I am assuming now it always will.

This doesn’t cure anything, but it is one less thing I have on my list to feel hopeless about. I just remember my “curved tunnel” theory of depression.

About Medication

This section will be very short because I’m not qualified to say much about it.

There are lots of medical treatments for depression. To the best of my understanding, nobody knows why some work for some people and others work for other people. Sometimes one worked for a while and then stopped working. (“Prozac crap-out” became a thing for a while.) Finding something that works and kept working for me, became a lot of trial and error.

My best friend may rave about something they’re taking, but that might not be true for me. (In a lot of cases, I’d already tried it.) The key was to learn to keep trying and be somewhat patient.

The one other thing I want to stress is how important it is to follow your psychiatrist’s instructions to letter when it comes to how start taking a medicine (ramping up) and stopping (tapering off). A lot of these medications can cause big problems if I don’t. I also said “psychiatrist” instead of just “doctor”. Though family doctors can prescribe these things, psychiatrists know a whole lot more about them. Just sayin’.

Counseling

This is another section I have to keep short because I can’t speak as a professional. But even with my medication thing going, I went through a couple of life things that I just wasn’t handling well. (I’ll save the details for my memoirs, which I hopefully will never write.) What this involved was finding the things, mostly negative thoughts and ideas, that were throwing me off and finding ways to counteract them.

The technical name for this is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). I got into this being very doubtful about the results and I was quite surprised to feel it working when it did. For the record, this is something that I had read about I books (ironically, I started college as a psych major), but I needed a real councilor to make it work.

Ruminating

For me, one of the more insidious parts of depression is what psychologists call “rumination”. If you’ve lived on a farm, you may recognize the word. It’s the biological term for what cows do when they chew their cud, undigested food in their first stomach (they have three) before it passes along to the next stomach. When you’re depressed, you are figuratively chewing over (and over, and over) an event or conversation or something that is unsettled in your mind. Unlike when a cow chews their cud, this isn’t breaking it down to be more digestible, it is hardening it so it becomes even more upsetting and painful.

It is like when I had a conversation at work with somebody I didn’t like, and I found it really upsetting. I admit that that these days, it also happens with something I hear about in the news. It stays unsettled, undigested in my mind and I keep playing it back over and over. This never helps and the longer I do it, the worse it makes it.

This can be really destructive for me. It saps both my energy and attention, consuming me with negative feelings. Worse, it is almost always something I can’t do anything about. The conversation/argument at work is done. I can’t change what is happening in government.

I learned something valuable from other people this has happened to that does help. They refer to this ongoing, unwanted discussion as “their committee.” It’s a very good name for it. I’ve been on a lot of committees and one thing they all have in common is useless discussions that go on and on forever without leading to any action. (This isn’t exclusively a feature of a committee meeting. It happens in a lot of meetings.)

What have I learned to do when this happens in my head? I do what I wish I could do at work. I get up and leave the room.

Recognizing the Problem

I admit, I keep getting pulled back there, but the more I recognize how useless and destructive this committee talk is, the sooner I get up and leave. All I needed was to develop the awareness that this was happening, the easier it became to take action to resolve it. Like everything else here, I’m not presenting this as a cure for depression. It’s just one of the things I do to chip away at it.

I highlighted the word recognize because that’s something more important than I ever realized. Remember back when I talked about faulty engine lights? It was extremely important to recognize what the problem really was (the light, not the engine).

CBT and Me

One thing that I found surprisingly helpful was CBT. No, this isn’t a medication. I told you I wouldn’t talk about those kinds of things. CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (Wikipedia link). It was developed in the 1950’s by the same psychologist who developed the set of questions still in use to that help determine if what you’re experiencing is clinical depression, Aaron Beck of Beck Depression Inventory fame.

It is something you really need to go through with a trained medical professional, but I thought it may be worthwhile to give you a quick overview of it here in the event that it’s ever suggested for you.

The idea is that we get depressed by some of the negative things we say to ourselves without really noticing. I make a mistake at work and think that I’m being careless. I drop the ball on something and think I’m being irresponsible. Everybody around me feel so much smarter than I am or should be. (“Should” is an important word to watch out for. It can be pretty toxic.)

Either during the day or at night, reflecting back on my day, I note these self-recriminations. And I keep doing that for a week or two. At the end, I go over the list with my therapist, and they help find some patterns and help come up with a few positive affirmations I can say to myself to counteract them. I write these down and make a point of repeating them several times a day, whenever I have a chance. Doing that is very important for this to work. And for me, it did work. I didn’t even notice it working at first. Without realizing it, I was training my subconscious in how it reacts. It took a few months, but those negative thoughts just stopped happening and I felt better in a way.

A (Temporary) Conclusion

There is more I have to write about, but there’s a reason why I want to get what I’ve written so far posted as soon as I can. (If I can figure out to do it in a way that is perfectly private and anonymous, I will make it possible to subscribe to this series.) However, there’s one thing I believe that is almost as important as the very first section.

I truly believe that people who have lived with depression are too insightful, caring, and empathetic to lose in this world. I know what it is like to suffer with these feelings and, no matter how bad things are at the moment for me, I just can’t turn away from someone who is going through the same thing. As much as I would love to, I can’t cure anyone. But if I can say something about my experience that can help lead them to someplace better, I will try my best. To anyone who is reading this, you are too valuable for this world to lose. You may be able to say something to someone down the line that makes their life just a little better. At least you will be the one who understands.