Depression

↬ The Brigade

These are the words of Sgt Camacho of 2nd Recon Marines.

He talks about his battle with depression, PTSD and the challenges he faces after 4 tours in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

AS is usual these days when I have been thinking about something that is causing distress in my life along comes a blog post from someone else that sums up precisely how it is I feel, or what it that I am experiencing. This graph crudely explains it:

And this commentary from John Tierney more fully explains it:

Willpower—the popular idea is that it’s something that you use to resist temptation and to make yourself work. But they’ve also found that this same energy is used in making decisions, simply deciding what to have for lunch, what to do at a meeting; all these things deplete the same resource. After a while, when you’ve depleted this resource, it’s a state called ego depletion. You’ve got less self-control, you’re more prone to give in to temptation, it’s harder for you to work, and you tend to make worse decisions.

In this state of decision fatigue you’re looking for mental shortcuts, and sometimes you do something really impulsive because you just don’t think things through. You basically say, “Sure, I’ll tweet that photo of myself in my underwear; what could go wrong?” The other thing you can do is just defer decisions; you basically just duck them all day.

When in the depths of my depression i suffered this so badly that the mere act of going for a walk led to a myriad of decisions that overwhelmed my ability to actually make decisions. In deciding to go for a walk I pretty much expired all deciusion making options right there. Getting to the top of the driveway necessitated more decisions…right or left…long way round the block, short way…up the hill or down the hill…go to the beach or to the shops….it all was just too taxing to even think about it…resulting in sitting on my arse getting worse. Opening the freezer to work out what to cook for dinner was the same…steak or sausages…rump or sirloin…peas or corn…oh fuck it I’ll just have toast. I suffered from decision fatigue.

When you hear people say that depression is feeling just a bit sad you know they are full of shit and have never experienced it. You know when other bloggers and commenters say you should get off your arse and go get a job that they have no idea about how debilitating severe clinical depression is. But at the same time you simply just don;t care enough about yourself to combat it or do anything about it.

You need to learn the pathology of the illness and how it affects you. You need to learn that the drugs don;t help and you need to learn how to train your body to react the way you want it to react. For me I found that doing hard physical exercise, or complex tasks like researching and writing a blog post all in one go without drafts or thinking about it put the symptoms of depression into the back of my mind. I learned that walking vigorously for 2 hours a day sorted out my breathing, my fitness and cleared my mind and reset my system. I found myself again after 6 years of hiding from myself.

I can now make many decisions on the fly, and better ones. But it took a long, long time to train myself well. Even now when I feel myself sliding, I have to go for a walk, if I neglect my walks I neglect myself. I use the walks for thinking, for planning and for clearing my mind.

There were many maiden speeches yesterday, I watched most of them. They were all good. Here are the links to them: Maggie Barry, Ian McKelvie, Simon O’Connor, Scott Simpson, and Jian Yang.

I am posting this one by Mark Mitchell because his comments in the middle about mental health, depression and suicide moved me…I really felt for Mark as he made this speech.

His last line too shows a commitment that many other MPs never show.

Another great story about fighting depression with fitness:

A man has committed to making 425km journey down the mighty Waikato River – on a lilo.

After suffering from depression for over two years, Jimi Hunt decided he needed to get fit, but he wasn’t really one for gyms and marathons.

“Stuff like that’s just too boring so I sat down and came up with the idea of liloing from Taupo to Port Waikato and I ran with it. Now, six months, later it’s turned into a juggernaut like you wouldn’t believe.”

The Auckland-based designer decided to use his trip to raise awareness about depression and now has more than 7000 supporters on Facebookand is being sponsored by the Mental Health Foundation and Movember.

He’s even upgraded from a $4.99 to a $7.99 Warehouse lilo.

He used to be so depressed that he’d spend his weekends crying in bed, and even small things like deciding what he should have for lunch would seem overwhelming.

But he put on a “mask” whenever he was around other people, pretending everything was fine.

I know all about that mask…I lived with one in place for over 6 years. People mistake depression for “feeling a little bit sad”. It isn’t.

Good on Jimi Hunt for fighting his demons and getting out and getting fit in his battle with the black dog.

Regular readers know that I have had and continue to battle depression. I have also found that talking about ti honestly helps leave a breadcrumb trail for others to to follow so that they can seek help for their own battles.

I know that the trail works because I regularly get emails from people thanking me for sharing my stories about depression and sharing about how I came off anti-depressants. Each of us who has spoken publicly, people like John Kirwan and Mike King all help in their own way to assisting people with depression understand and overcome and mitigate the debilitating effects of depression.

I have been thinking over the holiday period about writing some more about the issues but i hadn’t quite worked out the shape of what i would write. As is often the way when I am researching about something a blog post elsewhere pops up and says what i want to say for me.

And so it was that I saw on Andrew Sullivan’s blog his snip from Jenny Lawson’s blog post about her battles:

I wrote this post a month ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to post it then.  I was too weak from fighting to shout, and so instead I whispered this into the night and left it unpublished until I felt like I could speak to it with the battle-cry it deserves.  Years ago, coming out about depression and anxiety disorder was something frightening, but now people are more honest and open and so much of the shame has dissipated.  We may not have pink ribbons or telethons but we know that someone out there understands.  That is, until we’re honest about how it affects us.  I’ve never written about this because I can’t talk about it without it being a trigger but I think it’s important to be honest even when it’s scary.  Especially when it’s scary.

But Jenny said so much more and it resonates with me, and so I will share it too:

When cancer sufferers fight, recover, and go into remission we laud their bravery.  We call them survivors.  Because they are.

When depression sufferers fight, recover and go into remission we seldom even know, simply because so many suffer in the dark…ashamed to admit something they see as a personal weakness…afraid that people will worry, and more afraid that they won’t.  We find ourselves unable to do anything but cling to the couch and force ourselves to breathe.

When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate.  Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive.  We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker…but as survivors.  Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it.  Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand.

Regardless, today I feel proud.  I survived.  And I celebrate every one of you reading this.  I celebrate the fact that you’ve fought your battle and continue to win.  I celebrate the fact that you may not understand the battle, but you pick up the baton dropped by someone you love until they can carry it again.  I celebrate the fact that each time we go through this, we get a little stronger.  We learn new tricks on the battlefield.  We learn them in terrible ways, but we use them.  We don’t struggle in vain.

We win.

We are alive.

It is now just over a year since I came through the roughest time of my life. The toughest time wasn’t being depressed, it was coming off the medication and all the side effects both physical and mentally that are associated with that. I have done a lot of rough and tumble things in my life. I have jumped from airplanes, out the back of Hercules, from helicopters, I have tramped, hunted, fallen off cliffs into rivers, white water rafted, kayaked, waveskiid and surfed, i nearly drowned once swimming across an estuary but none of those things were as tough coming off anti-depressants.

But as Jenny says above, I won and I am alive.

The single biggest thing that helped me deal with depression wasn’t drugs, wasn’t psychologists, wasn’t anything other than getting fit. Most of what I did was simple, I walked. Every time I feel depression stalking me I go for a walk and I don’t mean a sooky walk around the block I mean a good brisk 8-10km.

Dr Mike says so too:

Continuing on from my post of yesterday. During the worst time, de-toxing from anti-depressants I experienced the lowest and  nastiest time of the whole experience. I also suffered depersonalisation at the time…it is too hard to describe. I hated myself, I hated everyone else around me and I did and said and did hateful things, and I can barely remember them because of the depersonalisation. I am so grateful that I have good friends, understanding friends, I nearly lost them all.

This paragraph and this image helps a little to understand it:

I’ve always wanted to not give a fuck. While crying helplessly into my pillow for no good reason, I would often fantasize that maybe someday I could be one of those stoic badasses whose emotions are mostly comprised of rock music and not being afraid of things. And finally - finally - after a lifetime of feelings and anxiety and more feelings, I didn’t have any feelings left. I had spent my last feeling being disappointed that I couldn’t rent Jumanji.

I felt invincible.

This is the best short form version I’ve seen for understanding depression.

But trying to use willpower to overcome the apathetic sort of sadness that accompanies depression is like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back.  A fundamental component of the plan is missing and it isn’t going to work.

There is a new Listener on the magazine racks this week, the cover story is about antidepressants. It has been with subscribers since last Friday. I picked up a copy at the supermarket tonight to see what was written.

I was interviewed for this article by Ruth Laugeson. I gave it to her straight about my six years of hell and why my life is so much better now without the chemicals.

Go buy the Listener and learn a bit about antidepressants and what they do to you.

This just popped up in my RSS feed from Judy Callingham.

It cheered me up no end, thanks Judy.