I was depressed and was walking to the train tracks to throw myself in front of the on coming train. I was minutes away when a thunderstorm hit and a car nearby swerved and hit a fire hydrant, which caused a big scene so I went home.

In the end obviously I didn't kill myself, but here's my personal experience.

When I was in middle school, I started staying up late at night. This is because my parents closely monitored what I was doing all the time so I needed a time after they went to bed, at 12 PM, to do things (no, not anything perverted, just things I liked like Japanese or Video Games that they prohibited on week nights).

This eventually developed into a really bad form of insomnia and/or bad sleeping patterns, and to this day as I struggle with going to bed 'on time' which is 1 AM for me, because out of habit I used to stay up to 4, 5, 6 or even just not sleep at all.
The sleep problem caused me to be more lethargic, quiet, and tired all the time. This wasn't a big problem until I moved and came to a new town and high school in freshman year, where I knew no one. My boring disposition caused me to have few friends and I often wondered why I wasn't as social as I was at my old school. Being alone only made my anxiety go up even more, and I began to over think every single little interaction I ever had with people. "I hope he didn't think that was dumb what I just said" " are my clothes too stupid looking, I hope people don't think I look bad" "That guy just looked at me he must think something bad about me" etc etc and it only got worse as time went on.

I was kind of gripping onto the fact that I got good grades, because that was pretty much the only positive thing I thought about myself at the time.

I slowly started opening up and around 10th grade I got a few more friends but I was still not satisfied with my situation and still had a decent amount of anxiety. My sleep problems were even getting better too, and I like to believe I was on "the road to recovery".

This all changed when I got the "Chem Teacher from Hell" for chemistry honors. Little did I know that a simple chem H class would be, according to previous students of this teacher, harder than their college chem classes. I studied my tail off in the first month or two and still struggled, as he didn't teach any material and expected us to do intensely hard tests and homeworks. I despised his homeworks so much, their duration and difficulty and the feeling of stupidness as I looked at the paper and had no idea how to answer a single question. I ended up getting a B- on the first and second tests, putting my grades for the quarter as a B, which was my first ever. I was frustrated because I felt my studying wasn't what was wrong, but the teacher.

My unhealthy obsession with that grade made me hate the teacher and all he did. The homeworks took 2-3 hours each day, and I just hated doing them. I started procrastinating it every day, waiting until 10, 11, 12 AM to start them, which of course only made me take longer because I was more tired. This caused me to stop doing homework for other classes too because of the anxiety I had come to associate with it. My grades in second semester quickly began to slip, I was regaining my bad sleeping habits, and I became a lot more angry and less sociable again, descending into the pits of hell once again.

It all climaxed at one point, but let me tell you a side story. By coincidence, right about the time that quarter grades came out for 2nd semester (Aka right before my parents found out how I was doing), an acquaintance of mine began boasting on facebook about some illegal thing he had done. I told him frankly that it was illegal to do that, but he replied with intense hubris that he would never get caught. I knew he was right but I felt that he needed punishment for the terrible thing he had done to stop him from keeping doing it. Unfortunately I took it too far and, after a talk with his family, barely escaped getting in a lot of trouble myself. My parents were extremely disappointed in me for that episode. Then, my report cards came with 3 Fs, 2 Cs, with only A's in PE and band. As a straight A student my parents were mortified and questioned me as to what happened. I had to lie to them over and over and they yelled and questioned me and wondered what happened, but their way of 'concern' had always been a little different, like they were intensely angry at me, stressing me out and boosting my anxiety to levels beyond ever before.

With all of these things closing in on me I felt like I was holding a ticking time bomb. My school was ruined, my parents hated me, I felt terrible all the time in my health because of my sleep, and I had few friends in school.

In my school there had been, at that time, a chain of 3-5 suicides all happening within 1 year. That was when I started looking up ways to kill myself. All the other kids who had done it did it at a particular train intersection, and so I planned to do it myself. There was a 3-5 day period where that was all I could think about, and I planned it out on how it would happen in my head. That's how the fire hydrant story happened and I ended up going home.

In the end I learned that problems are never unavoidable and I was able to fix my grades (To all As... except a B in chem haha), my sleep, my relations with my parents, and I think of myself as leagues more sociable than I used to be.

However, if things had gone differently in that 3-5 day period, my lowest low ever in my life, I could not be here, and I could have just given up.

Was I depressed? I don't know - I never went to a doctor, or even told anyone about that whom I know in real life. But I think that in reflection, I matched a lot of the symptoms, and in combination with another thing I have, caused me to escalate to that point. But what I learned was that just trying to leave depressed people to 'deal with things themselves' can be self damaging and even cause them to lose their life like it almost happened to me. In my whole story, I had no one to help me. My parents were (in my eyes) against me, my school was (in my eyes) against me, or at least could not help me, and I had few friends who understood my situation.

If I look back, I probably would have refused drug medications even though I knew I was in a bad situation. I'm not the type of person who would take medications unless I am absolutely sure that they will help me and they are urgently needed to help me. And in the end, given with how I see medications mess some people up so bad, I don't regret that I never took them. However, I definitely would have jumped on the chance to be able to talk to someone, and tell them exactly what was going on in my life at that point. Maybe that would have helped me before I almost did something terribly wrong.

IceCream Wrote:Other people may have genes that predispose them to depression if combined with traumatic events. Still others may experience one clear emotional trigger. Even for those people whose depression is clearly triggered by an emotional event, it's not because they are particularly weak people, just that for whatever reason, that person's brain wasn't able to recover properly. In these cases, perhaps some kind of talk therapy is useful. But still, these people need their brain to work properly too.

So twice you say "people brains need to work properly". To my knowledge, only a small percentage of depressions can be traced to have brain disorders has a cause (contrary to schizophrenics for example), though one of the expressions of depression is brain unbalance. The main cause (in proportion) is still psychological (though with external causes such as stress, mourning...), then hormonal, then it can be a complication of other diseases (infection, zona...), or hereditary. As you know, the brain is a two-way system (open on the inside and on the outside), each way exerting feedback on the other. So you can compensate all you want the external aspects (brain medication), a psychological problem has often a psychological solution -- ie you have to remap the relations your psychological items have with each other. Of course, I say psychological, but cognitive is the exact word. And any activity can induce a cognitive remapping. Therapy, meditation, sport, painting, you name it. One can argue people regularly falling back into depression without showing any brain disorders are not doing the proper cognitive training that should cure them. And medication can do nothing about that but stall.

Quote:3rdly, there are good reasons doctors prescribe medication. One of these is it's effectiveness in preventing relapse as opposed to placebo. Another is that being depressed for significant lengths of time damages your brain pretty much irreversibly. One of these is shrinkage of the hippocampus. You can find more information about that in the videos above. Anyway, taking antidepressents protects against this damage.

And you forgot another good reasons why doctors prescribe medication: economy, and convenience.

Quote:4thly, about dependancy on medication... antidepressants are not habit forming drugs!

I'm afraid I'll have to disagree here too. Without even mentionning psychological dependance, a lot of long term anti-depressants users are known to show withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking their medication -- which is by definition what habit forming means (see especially a German study on Prozac)(Aderall too).

As for the rest, I feel for you, and I agree, depression is a disease, and all various ways of treating it should be used to make the life of the depressed person better; all I'm saying is not to be afraid to look into the psychological issues, because a pill doesn't always have the answer (because in my history, the couple of drugs I tried (Xanax, Hexomil) really made me feel like my brains were stuffed with cotton balls and I felt like I was sleepwalking). I'm not saying medication should be avoided, but I think it might be overrated (especially when you consider the number of patients (a societal disorder like depression can be considered to have societal causes, so to put it all on the brain of the guy makes me a bit uneasy)).

i was referring to a comedown as an example of how a depressed person might feel like on a day to day level, for those people who haven't experienced it.

Nevertheless, long term drug use depletes serotonin and dopamine levels, and can cause major depression.

I'm not sure what you mean, "people falling back into depression without any brain disorders". Depression simply is a brain disorder. You are making an idealised split between the psychological and the physical, when reality isn't really like that... environment, genes, neurology, psychology, all have a part to play. It's nowhere near as simple as "it's a psychological problem and therefore should have a psychological solution". Scientists now are coming to understand that things are a lot more complex than this.

Yes, doctors prescribe medication for economic reasons in some countries, but that's another debate. It's got nothing to do with the effectiveness of anti-depressants as a treatment.

No... showing symptoms on withdrawal of antidepressants doesn't constitute being a habit forming drug. A habit forming drug generally leads to gradually increased doses and craving when taken away. The withdrawal symptoms people get from anti-depressants are largely linked to not tapering the doses off. Doing something like that suddenly is bound to have effects such as rebound depression, and other symptoms, because it will kind-of shock your brain or something. But really major long term problems are reasonably rare, and mainly anecdotal.

What snapped me out of my depression was doing volunteer work. I think much of depression is caused by an extreme focus on our own problems. When you turn your attention to serving others, then you tend to forget about your own sadness.

If you want to be happy long-term, seek out people who actually are happy and learn from them. You will find the common theme among them is they don't rely on anything external to achieve this. The happiest people I have ever met endured extreme hardship in life, yet refrain from taking so much as an aspirin to deaden pain.

It's not an idealized split, it's a macro-split for operative purposes. Neuronal nets work in perpetual feedback from the environment, neuronal arrangements being modified through cognition. On the micro-level, psychology works as an auto-medication if you like.

Also remember antidepressant, as psychoactive drugs, modify your brain's chemistry in the long run. So excuse me if I believe that a cure you have to take for the rest of your life when in most cases you didn't even need it in the first place isn't a cure.

not everyone has to take antidepressants for the rest of their life. Studies show that in many cases, only a short while of taking them is necessary for significant reduction of relapse rates.

It is an idealised split though... hmm, how can i put this...

1stly, not every form of brain problem has a cognitive solution. Even if it WAS the case that you thought yourself into depression, that doesn't automatically mean you can think yourself out. It depends on many other, more physical factors. Many things in the world can only be caused in one direction (think breaking an egg). There may be some level after which you can't move in the opposite direction with depression through psychological means.

2ndly, take as an example Person A and Person B. They both experience the same traumatic event, and both have similar personalities, and outlooks on life. Why doesn't Person A get depression when Person B does?

One answer is, of course, some kind of psychological coping strategy. And probably this will account for some cases of depression.

However, we can also see a very linear link with genetics here. Person B has a different form of the gene that codes for certain neurotransmitters. If neither experience anything particularly traumatic, neither are at particular risk for depression. However, experiencing many traumatic events will slightly increase Person A's chance of becoming depressed, but will make Person B's chances close to 100%. So, in many of the cases where we consider that some form of psychological therapy may be the best solution, there's actually a good chance that it isn't going to help as much as we think. (that's not a reason not to do it, just something to be aware of. For those people, perhaps not focusing on it, and treating the physical part is also a solution).

EDIT: I want to stress, again, though that i don't think anti-depressants are the right course for everyone. For instance... Zachandhobbes case above. It does sound like he had a depressive episode, but he was young, totally lacking support and people to help, and once he'd grown up he found ways to change his life and thoughts, and gain perspective on things like grades.
If he suddenly found the depression recurs again though, he almost certainly should see a doctor and go on medication for a while to prevent it happening again.
Your chance of experiencing another depressive episode increases a lot with each recurrant episode.

I've been depressed quite recently. If you know me, you know I was contemplating dating a girl I met from Osaka. We spent time together in December. Since about February, though, she has had a boyfriend. I'm never straightforward with my feelings, and was unsure of how I felt, but now I know I love her. I did, however, let the opportunity slip by.

Last week I told her my feelings, but obviously she has a boyfriend so it's not like some magical fix for me. So lately I've been caught up on all of this, and the only real solution is to keep myself busy. Going into summer, that means starting to exercise and making sure I work consistently. Even though I sound like a terrible person, I hope they break up.

TheVinster Wrote:Even though I sound like a terrible person, I hope they break up.

It is guaranteed they will break up... one day.

Friedrich Nietzsche on the value of hardships Wrote:"To all those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities, profound self-content, the torture of self-mistrust and the wretchedness of the vanquished"

@thevinster: how about taking a trip to japan in the summer? it'd give you something to look forward to, and i'm sure you could meet tons of great girls there!!!

well... they say that's the best cure for a broken heart anyway...

IceCream Wrote:@thevinster: how about taking a trip to japan in the summer? it'd give you something to look forward to, and i'm sure you could meet tons of great girls there!!!

well... they say that's the best cure for a broken heart anyway...

I don't know where to stay, and it's a big investment. If this particular girl was single, she has her own place I could stay at in Osaka. I'm sure meeting someone else would help me move on, but I've never been good at meeting girls. For now I feel like I'll just keep waiting for her to break-up with her boyfriend; a stupid idea, at best, but it's all I've really got for the moment.

True love is wanting one's beloved to be happy. If another man makes makes her happier than you can, if you truly love her, you will be grateful to that other man. Otherwise, it is only attachment and will fade over time. Love does not need to possess. People often mistake jealousy for love, when it is actually a completely opposite emotion.

bodhisamaya Wrote:True love is wanting one's beloved to be happy. If another man makes makes her happier than you can, if you truly love her, you will be grateful to that other man. Otherwise, it is only attachment and will fade over time. Love does not need to possess. People often mistake jealousy for love, when it is actually a completely opposite emotion.

Sounds too deep for me. Love = wanting to be with someone a lot and caring about their feelings, but also considering your own feelings and how things affect you as well.

zachandhobbes Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:True love is wanting one's beloved to be happy. If another man makes makes her happier than you can, if you truly love her, you will be grateful to that other man. Otherwise, it is only attachment and will fade over time. Love does not need to possess. People often mistake jealousy for love, when it is actually a completely opposite emotion.

Sounds too deep for me. Love = wanting to be with someone a lot and caring about their feelings, but also considering your own feelings and how things affect you as well.

I think what bodhisamaya is talking about is the pure love, not simply the romantic one. The love that doesn't ask for anything in return, as you want them to be happy no matter what, whether you are in our out of the equation. Can also apply to family, friends, or even strangers. Easy to say, hard to do.

Back on the topic, I find interesting that people are missing the "for me" at the end of each post. It sounds like some went through very hard periods of depressions, and each dealt with it with their own relative successes. What works for some might not work for others. Hell, some might find their cure with surgery, while other through living in a mountain. People are different.

ファブリス Wrote:Received this email:

someone Wrote:I want to delete my account because I find your opinions on depression and antidepressants so objectionable that I want nothing more to do with this site.

Says the person who posted just once in eighteen months of membership. Guess we won't miss your opinions on here. Goodbye.

For the record I also think gay people are O.K. Feminists are annoying. Peak oil and global warming is a myth. UFOs do exist. Crop circles are cool. And so are Leprechauns. Sue me.

That just made me laugh. I don't agree with some of your posts, but I just love reading them. What about the moon landing?

It's reductive and questionable to simply elude the psychosomatic dimension and all its potential benefits (benefits that can be seen even in hereditary cases).

I've been depressed for the first time in my life recently, due to unemployment. It started off as a general feeling of frustration at getting rejected for so many jobs, then anger, and then a feeling of total worthlessness. It got worse as I stopped applying for jobs and it affected the rest of my life - I didn't feel like doing anything, didn't feel like socialising, most days it was hard to get out of bed. Also bad for relationship, as I was extremely irritable and snap at my girlfriend.

Feeling better now as I'm planning this move to Taiwan, and have tons of stuff to keep me occupied and make my excited. But for a while it was seriously bad. I think the main thing I learnt is that unless you've experienced depression, it's very hard to imagine what it's like and how much it affects you.

Now on a side note, I have 2 friends who are long-term off work with depression - one for 1 year, one for 4 years. Both has the episodes brough on by traumatic events (failing uni course and being sacked from job, respectively)

The system is pretty broken in the UK, in that doctors are very quick to prescribe anti-depressants as soon as you see them, but councilling (which would have helped my frinends) is impossible to get with huge waiting lists. By the time you see a councillor (6 months to 1 year after you first see a doctor) it's probably too late, you're either already feeling better or your life has gone down the tubes.

Also interesting both of them are in receipt of DLA welfare to fully pay their bills, food, rent etc - a good thing for most illnesses, but for depression paying someone to sit at home by themselves until they're better is literally the worst thing you can do! Of course hasn't worked (actually their conditions have got worse as they've fallen into bad routines); instead they should be supported into going back into a normal working routine, maybe with volunteer work at the start. Just seems support is very lacking in the UK.

"Health outweighs all other blessings so much that one may really say that a healthy beggar is happier than an ailing king."

Arthur Schopenhauer
http://tinyurl.com/3lzb8nm
page 3.

EratiK Wrote:It's reductive and questionable to simply elude the psychosomatic dimension and all its potential benefits (benefits that can be seen even in hereditary cases).

yes, it is. That wasn't what i was suggesting though...

AFAIK, antidepressants are somewhat effective for severe depression, but worthless for milder forms. Depends on the type of antidepressant and the person in question.

cntrational Wrote:AFAIK, antidepressants are somewhat effective for severe depression, but worthless for milder forms. Depends on the type of antidepressant and the person in question.

i think this comes from the study kuma mentioned above that found that antidepressants are no more effective than placebo at curing depression.

Apart from the things i mentioned before, such as protection from relapse, and the proportion of people with mild depression who will become better with no help at all in the time it takes to complete the study, did anyone watch that 2nd video i posted yesterday?

It's from 2008 but one of the really interesting parts was the work he'd done on finding out exactly what goes on in the brain with the placebo effect in depression.

It seems that something about the expectation that you're going to get better engages the opiate system in the brain, which leads to the depression remitting. Since this is a different mechanism than the one antidepressants work with, there are significant differences in the brains of people who were cured by medication and those who were cured by placebo.

It's an interesting subject!!!

EratiK Wrote:To my knowledge, only a small percentage of depressions can be traced to have brain disorders has a cause (contrary to schizophrenics for example), though one of the expressions of depression is brain unbalance. The main cause (in proportion) is still psychological (though with external causes such as stress, mourning...), then hormonal, then it can be a complication of other diseases (infection, zona...), or hereditary.

My degree in college was Psychology and one of the classes I had to take was a physiology psychology class. On the first day, the teacher stated in the world of clinical psychiatry, the leading question is whether body affects mind or mind affects body. For me, this question didn't become concrete till we hit the section on depression in the class. I have had a couple of bad episodes in depression my self, even one where I turned manic depressant. So much of the section was interesting.

I would have to pull my phsy. textbook out again to check up on a lot of the things, but as I recall vaguely depression or the parts of the brain that can lead to it, have a concentration of receptors on the base/lower part of the brain. This is the part I'm foggy on and need to refresh, but the main thing was that as the receptors was activated/not activate (can't recall which), it caused a chemical increase which led to the receptor further activating/not activating. Essentially a perpetual loop (positive feedback loop) could be built up where the the chemical it was producing, if not used up could cause the system to go out of control. This state of out of control = depression. In the class we always looked at the equation of mind and body as "body affects the mind." However if you consider that the mind has just as much affect, then suddenly you have something that with a bit of a push could cause the system to become unstable. It offered a bit of support for the idea that some people will need chemical aid in order to bring the system back under control in order to return to a state of normalcy.
--

That aside. I actually recently got more support for the idea that depression ducks around with memory. I have had a long running theory (formed in that phsy. class and supported by the fact that I have chunks of time missing in my memory during the periods when I was experiencing depression) that the decrease in serotonin in the brain (caused by depression) actually hampers memory formation. The formation of long term memories depends on serotonin to do so.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...cells.html
This pretty much states it out right. Depression hampers neurogenesis in the hippocampus.
Actually the other interesting thing that come out of this report though is if you consume/abuse antideps when you are happy, you actually can BOOST your memory formation capability. Although I question whether the boost would be in episodic formation or in more concrete stuff, like language.

Either way. This is an interesting discussion.

bodhisamaya Wrote:The happiest people I have ever met endured extreme hardship in life, yet refrain from taking so much as an aspirin to deaden pain.

I'm glad volunteer work help you, but I disagree with this conclusion completely. Sorry, won't work for me. I did that for decades, with no relief.

bertoni Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:The happiest people I have ever met endured extreme hardship in life, yet refrain from taking so much as an aspirin to deaden pain.

I'm glad volunteer work help you, but I disagree with this conclusion completely. Sorry, won't work for me. I did that for decades, with no relief.

This was not to encourage anyone to purposefully endure hardships. Of course effort must be made to seek out realistic thought as to what makes one happy. Most people are not taught those skills as part of receiving traditional education.

Looks like a number of people here have a history of or are currently suffering from depression. I have as well, and I`m of the opinion that you need to try all of the different methods available and see what suits you. Exercise, medication, changing one`s habits, keeping busy, friends, whatever. I did them all and for me, moving to Japan and having adventures here pulled me out of the rut I was in. I took meds for a few years and they may have helped a little (didnt make things worse at least), but experiencing a new place like this, being independent, and learning about myself really changed things for me.

BTW, I think someone earlier asked about how dangerous suicide rates are that they would require meds, and in the US at least, 1 in 5 of those with depression commit suicide. Suicide rates are higher in other countries, particularly Japan and some European nations, so I dont think prescribing medication is out of the question.

Also, my favorite book about this subject that I think really describes how it feels when you`re in the throes of depression is Darkness Visible by William Styron. Its short and very readable.

My 2 cents. Depression is quite a beast. You can do a lot to reduce it, but if your environment sucks, your body is on its last legs from neglect and you don't treat your mind with care, it's all over.

Environment
# Different for everyone.
# Childhood experience effects this greatly.
# Shitty peers are an issue.
# Job-relationship-friendships-lifestyle-finances really effect this a lot.

Example: Living in a slag pit with abusive ##tty people who regularly make life impossibly hellish with no job, violent druggy friends, a girlfriend who cheats and brings home diseases (but you can't fire her because she's all you can get - or think you can) and, for the final nail, a job with an abusive boss doing something super unpleasant.

Neglect the body and...
# Physical health affects your brain.
# If diet and exercise are regular, for some, there will be major issues.
# Your body often effects your relationships.
# No energy = nothing getting done.

Example: You're so overweight you start to breath hard just thinking about going to the fridge so you store your super high sugary foods and drinks under your bed in easy reach. You get tired sleeping and if a girl actually liked you enough - it'd be physically impossible anyway.

A well built mind?
# Not loving yourself is bad.
# Not focusing on good stuff is bad.
# Believing you suck is bad.
# Just talking to yourself in a crap way is bad.

Example: You hate yourself so much you tell yourself out loud in front of important people that you are crap and round that up by describing why in detail until you run out of the room in tears to cry for several hours as you continue to run over your failures before looking in the mirror and giving the same speech again while feeling consistently very, very bad.

Bad environment + bad body + badly treated mind = depression (maybe).

Best treatment = medicine + doctor + counselor + exercise + life change + environment change (although everyone's different).

By the way, getting to a stage where you even want to treat yourself or can summon the desire to when depressed is one of the biggest hurdles to getting treatment - as an added point.