So right after I published the last post, that I actually wrote weeks ago, I come across this today:
Judge Not by Honest Mom
and this:
We are only as sick as our secrets by the Bearded Iris
I don't know if I should be creeped out that these people have clearly crawled inside my head and stolen my thoughts or comforted to know that I'm not alone. I think I'll go with the latter. :)
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Depression: Stay out of my head and my medicine cabinet.
Let me be up front. I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m not a researcher who’s done an extensive multi-year study. I’m merely a woman suffering from and surviving depression. My sample size is n=1, but that’s enough to disprove any absolutes that some people claim, such as no one needs medication for depression. I know at least one person who does, so you’re wrong.
I was in my late 30s when I was diagnosed with major clinical depression. I had not spend the previous 30+ years of my life in a fog of unhappiness or anything else that marks depression. I was "normal." Then I had a series of medical problems (abdominal issues and then a back injury) and something changed in me. I didn’t see it coming and I didn’t know what it was until at one of many visits to my orthopedic doctor, he said, "I think you might have depression." As soon as he said it, a light bulb went off. He was right and I knew it. I didn’t argue with him. I told him I agreed. He said I should seek help and I did. Immediately.
I was relatively young, happily married with a young son, a well-paying job I’d had for over a decade, and a nice house in a good neighborhood. I had nothing to be depressed about. But that’s not the way depression works. You can have the world at your feet and still feel like shit. Why? Because depression isn’t a mood or emotion or anything that you can control or wish, think, or force away. It’s a physical problem and the body part it affects is the brain. Just like diabetes is a physical problem that affects the pancreas and hypertension is a physical problem that affects the heart and arteries. It’s simply a different organ.
That’s right. I just compared a mental illness to a couple standard ailments. If someone develops Type II diabetes or high blood pressure, do you blame them? Do you figure it’s something they brought on themselves? Yeah, yeah, you might think that they should’ve cut back on fast food or exercised more but if the person was doing everything right and then was diagnosed with diabetes or hypertension, you wouldn’t blame them. You would accept that something in their body changed. You might even go so far as to think their body rebelled against them. How could this crappy thing happen to this person?
So after they drop the "I have diabetes/hypertension/insert any disease name here" bomb, do you say, "You should go talk to somebody."?!
Do you say, "Just think happy thoughts" or "It’s all in your mind" or "You have nothing to be diabetic about??" Of course not. You expect that they’ll go to a doctor, have some tests done, and be prescribed a certain diet and exercise routine. If the diet and exercise don’t work, you expect the doctor to give them a prescription for insulin or Lipitor, right? It would be unreasonable to assume that chatting with a doc each week would lower their cholesterol or stabilize their body’s insulin production! Correct?
Then why do people do that with depression? "You have nothing to be depressed about," you say. Um, yeah, I know. Nonetheless, I am. "You should go find a good therapist, talk things out, and she’ll make you see there’s nothing to be down about." Yep, been there, done that, still feel like shit. Why? Because depression isn’t a mood I choose to have. Depression is some organic, biochemical thing that I don’t understand that has happened to my body, specifically in the northernmost region of said body. Just as a diabetic has no control over his pancreas’s physical make-up, I have no control over that of my brain. The pancreas goofs up, we give it medicine. The brain goofs up and oh wait… stop. No, we can’t just give you medicine for that. You should be able to work it out on your own or maybe with a little help from a licensed professional. (Don’t forget the pat on the head like you’re a child.)
Get real, people!!! Something has gone topsy-turvy in one of my body’s organs and I need something to set it right again!
By the way, do you think it’s easy figuring out which medicine is right for you? Do you think psychiatrists write the same prescription for everyone and send them on their merry way? They don’t. At least not the good and ethical ones. While ALL medicines have different effects on different people, psychiatric medicines really have different effects on different people. Prozac works for you? Makes you feel great? I could barely drag myself out of bed to go pee when I was on Prozac. Wellbutrin gives you energy? Makes you feel all nice and peppy? Wellbutrin infused me with uncontrollable rage. Yes, uncontrollable. I knew what was going on as it was happening but I Could. Not. Stop. It. Luckily for me, nothing bad ever happened while I was raging. Mostly just boiled my own blood until the situation changed.
After many, many months and many, many different meds and combinations of meds, the docs and I found the right combination that works for me. Yay.
So pardon me if I get a little pissed when people who are not psychologists, not researchers, and not depressed say that psych meds are the scourge of society, responsible for mass murders, and should be taken away or more highly regulated. Fuck you. You don’t know. You don’t know how hard it is to find excuses for why you have weekly doctor appointments (i.e., visits to the therapist) because god forbid you tell someone you have a mental illness. You don’t know how hard it is to go through the ups and downs of finding the medicine(s) that work for you. You don’t know how hard it is to know you have to get up and shower, go to work, make dinner, clean the house, do the laundry, go grocery shop, play with your kid, and all this other stuff that used to be routine when you feel like you’ve got a lead blanket weighing you down and try as you might you physically can not bring yourself to get up. You don’t know what it’s like to hold your urine for hours because you simply can’t muster up the gumption to get up and walk to the bathroom. You just don’t know. And now you want legislation that’s going to make me jump through hoops… no, make that MORE hoops… to get the medicine that I know I need to feel like a normal human being? Go to hell. Take your crappy, uneducated opinions with you and hightail it to Dante’s 8th Circle.
I am forever grateful to that orthopedist who had the balls to tell me something that he probably figured I wouldn’t want to hear. Something that was out of his realm of expertise and something that many other doctors might have assigned to the None of My Business file. I am forever thankful that I found a good therapist on my first try. I have yet to find a prescriber (my therapist is a Psy.D., not an M.D.) who floats my boat and sticks around. I’ve been through at least half a dozen of them all in the same practice but they never last long. I’m now seeing one of the heads of the practice and I think I figured out why all the others left. The guy’s kind of a dick. Luckily, so far he’s maintained my regimen and hasn’t messed with my meds. The jury’s still out on whether he’ll ever grow on me.
I am thankful for my family. I know they don’t understand but they do their best. I am thankful for the handful of friends and coworkers I’ve felt comfortable telling about my diagnosis. As much as I’ve said that it’s a physical disease that I can’t control, I know that many people still don’t think that way and I’d just rather not deal with their reactions to the news. (Is it still news if it’s a few years old? Should we call it “olds?”)
But I want to slap a bitch when someone goes on a rant about something they know nothing about. Just like lots of women want politicians "out of their vaginas" (abortion and birth control stuff, if you don’t get what I’m saying), I want them out of my medicine cabinet and my head. So until you find yourself sitting there with a diagnosis of major clinical depression, I’ll ask you to kindly shut the fuck up and stop spreading your idiotic opinion to other even less educated people.
kthxbye
Note: This post was my reaction to the wonderful January 15, 2013 Chicago Now blog post called Depression - S*&t that everyone should know by Nicole Knepper as well as some posts I saw on Facebook around the same time that blamed the Sandy Hook, CT school massacre on the assailant's alleged medication use as an alternative to blaming it on a lack of gun control.
I was in my late 30s when I was diagnosed with major clinical depression. I had not spend the previous 30+ years of my life in a fog of unhappiness or anything else that marks depression. I was "normal." Then I had a series of medical problems (abdominal issues and then a back injury) and something changed in me. I didn’t see it coming and I didn’t know what it was until at one of many visits to my orthopedic doctor, he said, "I think you might have depression." As soon as he said it, a light bulb went off. He was right and I knew it. I didn’t argue with him. I told him I agreed. He said I should seek help and I did. Immediately.
I was relatively young, happily married with a young son, a well-paying job I’d had for over a decade, and a nice house in a good neighborhood. I had nothing to be depressed about. But that’s not the way depression works. You can have the world at your feet and still feel like shit. Why? Because depression isn’t a mood or emotion or anything that you can control or wish, think, or force away. It’s a physical problem and the body part it affects is the brain. Just like diabetes is a physical problem that affects the pancreas and hypertension is a physical problem that affects the heart and arteries. It’s simply a different organ.
That’s right. I just compared a mental illness to a couple standard ailments. If someone develops Type II diabetes or high blood pressure, do you blame them? Do you figure it’s something they brought on themselves? Yeah, yeah, you might think that they should’ve cut back on fast food or exercised more but if the person was doing everything right and then was diagnosed with diabetes or hypertension, you wouldn’t blame them. You would accept that something in their body changed. You might even go so far as to think their body rebelled against them. How could this crappy thing happen to this person?
So after they drop the "I have diabetes/hypertension/insert any disease name here" bomb, do you say, "You should go talk to somebody."?!
Do you say, "Just think happy thoughts" or "It’s all in your mind" or "You have nothing to be diabetic about??" Of course not. You expect that they’ll go to a doctor, have some tests done, and be prescribed a certain diet and exercise routine. If the diet and exercise don’t work, you expect the doctor to give them a prescription for insulin or Lipitor, right? It would be unreasonable to assume that chatting with a doc each week would lower their cholesterol or stabilize their body’s insulin production! Correct?
Then why do people do that with depression? "You have nothing to be depressed about," you say. Um, yeah, I know. Nonetheless, I am. "You should go find a good therapist, talk things out, and she’ll make you see there’s nothing to be down about." Yep, been there, done that, still feel like shit. Why? Because depression isn’t a mood I choose to have. Depression is some organic, biochemical thing that I don’t understand that has happened to my body, specifically in the northernmost region of said body. Just as a diabetic has no control over his pancreas’s physical make-up, I have no control over that of my brain. The pancreas goofs up, we give it medicine. The brain goofs up and oh wait… stop. No, we can’t just give you medicine for that. You should be able to work it out on your own or maybe with a little help from a licensed professional. (Don’t forget the pat on the head like you’re a child.)
Get real, people!!! Something has gone topsy-turvy in one of my body’s organs and I need something to set it right again!
By the way, do you think it’s easy figuring out which medicine is right for you? Do you think psychiatrists write the same prescription for everyone and send them on their merry way? They don’t. At least not the good and ethical ones. While ALL medicines have different effects on different people, psychiatric medicines really have different effects on different people. Prozac works for you? Makes you feel great? I could barely drag myself out of bed to go pee when I was on Prozac. Wellbutrin gives you energy? Makes you feel all nice and peppy? Wellbutrin infused me with uncontrollable rage. Yes, uncontrollable. I knew what was going on as it was happening but I Could. Not. Stop. It. Luckily for me, nothing bad ever happened while I was raging. Mostly just boiled my own blood until the situation changed.
After many, many months and many, many different meds and combinations of meds, the docs and I found the right combination that works for me. Yay.
So pardon me if I get a little pissed when people who are not psychologists, not researchers, and not depressed say that psych meds are the scourge of society, responsible for mass murders, and should be taken away or more highly regulated. Fuck you. You don’t know. You don’t know how hard it is to find excuses for why you have weekly doctor appointments (i.e., visits to the therapist) because god forbid you tell someone you have a mental illness. You don’t know how hard it is to go through the ups and downs of finding the medicine(s) that work for you. You don’t know how hard it is to know you have to get up and shower, go to work, make dinner, clean the house, do the laundry, go grocery shop, play with your kid, and all this other stuff that used to be routine when you feel like you’ve got a lead blanket weighing you down and try as you might you physically can not bring yourself to get up. You don’t know what it’s like to hold your urine for hours because you simply can’t muster up the gumption to get up and walk to the bathroom. You just don’t know. And now you want legislation that’s going to make me jump through hoops… no, make that MORE hoops… to get the medicine that I know I need to feel like a normal human being? Go to hell. Take your crappy, uneducated opinions with you and hightail it to Dante’s 8th Circle.
I am forever grateful to that orthopedist who had the balls to tell me something that he probably figured I wouldn’t want to hear. Something that was out of his realm of expertise and something that many other doctors might have assigned to the None of My Business file. I am forever thankful that I found a good therapist on my first try. I have yet to find a prescriber (my therapist is a Psy.D., not an M.D.) who floats my boat and sticks around. I’ve been through at least half a dozen of them all in the same practice but they never last long. I’m now seeing one of the heads of the practice and I think I figured out why all the others left. The guy’s kind of a dick. Luckily, so far he’s maintained my regimen and hasn’t messed with my meds. The jury’s still out on whether he’ll ever grow on me.
I am thankful for my family. I know they don’t understand but they do their best. I am thankful for the handful of friends and coworkers I’ve felt comfortable telling about my diagnosis. As much as I’ve said that it’s a physical disease that I can’t control, I know that many people still don’t think that way and I’d just rather not deal with their reactions to the news. (Is it still news if it’s a few years old? Should we call it “olds?”)
But I want to slap a bitch when someone goes on a rant about something they know nothing about. Just like lots of women want politicians "out of their vaginas" (abortion and birth control stuff, if you don’t get what I’m saying), I want them out of my medicine cabinet and my head. So until you find yourself sitting there with a diagnosis of major clinical depression, I’ll ask you to kindly shut the fuck up and stop spreading your idiotic opinion to other even less educated people.
kthxbye
Note: This post was my reaction to the wonderful January 15, 2013 Chicago Now blog post called Depression - S*&t that everyone should know by Nicole Knepper as well as some posts I saw on Facebook around the same time that blamed the Sandy Hook, CT school massacre on the assailant's alleged medication use as an alternative to blaming it on a lack of gun control.
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