Submitted by rlp on Thu, 04/24/2008 - 19:33.
This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post. Due to a clerical error, I was without my depression medication for a time. I tried to pay attention to what was happening to me so that I could describe it clearly.
Calling it depression was a mistake from the beginning. What does that mean, exactly? Depression. My grandfather didn’t call it anything. He was just moody and lost his temper sometimes. When he was in “one of his moods” you stayed away from him. And when he got one of his “sick headaches,” he just endured it.
My mother never called it anything either. She had sick headaches too, and would go to bed with them. Sometimes her face would be slack and show no emotion. You sometimes saw that in photographs. Then she started slowly pulling away from everyone. At holidays you would see her in another room sitting quietly on the couch. If you went in there she would try her best to engage you and be a good mother. She would ask questions and talk to you, but you could tell she wanted to be alone so badly that it made her jittery.
Then there were phone calls where she would talk so fast you couldn’t keep up. And dad told us of nights where she stayed up cleaning the house, happy as a lark, laughing, thrilled to be alive. She would hardly sleep.
And then one of those highs caused her to have a psychotic break from reality. She didn’t know any of us or who she was. She went to a hospital, and they named it. They gave this demon a name. Bipolar Disorder, the doctor said. My mother started taking medicine, and it was like she had been born again.
In my case it was the sick headaches - the migraines - that got my attention. There were other physical symptoms. And I had become withdrawn and uninterested in life. My family noticed that part; I didn’t. It happens gradually. The doctor gave me medication, and it was like being born again. I remember thinking, “Oh yeah, I remember that this is how I used to feel and think.”
It was absolutely wonderful to be living again. And it’s been great all along. I’ve never stopped taking the medication.
So what do you want to call this thing? Depression? Depletion? Mental and emotional dysfunction sounds like it fits my experience. People who suffer from the many emotional disorders that we put in the category of depression often have a hard time describing what is happening to them. What follows will be my attempt to describe my emotional and mental state when I’m not being aided by medication. This is fresh on my mind, having spent some days without any medication recently because of a problem with insurance. This was actually good for me. I had been wondering if I really needed to be taking the medication.
Last week, as my Wellbutrin dwindled, I waited to see if I would feel a sudden mood drop. I did not. What happened was a gradual loss of interest and emotion. As I think about it now, I wonder if what I experience with depression is something like the experience of a psychopath. I can’t love anyone. I can’t feel any love for another person. It’s like someone removed that part of my brain.
This is a marker for me: When my depression has gotten me into a bad place, I don’t want to be around my children. I don’t want them touching me. I don’t want anyone touching me. I don’t want to look people in the eyes. Any kind of social interaction causes levels of discomfort you might expect if you were asked to walk into a ballroom in your underwear and start talking to people. You don’t want to be there. If forced to go into the ballroom in your underwear and talk to people, you can do it. But you hate it, and you can’t wait for it to end so you can just go home.
It’s kind of like that, only there is no good reason for me to isolate myself. I’m not being asked to go to a ballroom in my underwear. My daughter just wants to hug me and sit close to me on the couch. The people at church just want to talk. Normal stuff.
All of my desire goes away. Everything inside me that I identify with Gordon seems to wither. I have a good sense of humor, and I like to laugh. Nothing is funny. I’m passionate and curious and want to know about everything. All of that is gone. I adore my children and love to hug them and talk with them and be with them. They become like someone else’s children who have been in my house too long.
I can’t feel any familiar emotions. I force myself to go on living. I do all the things I need to do. But eventually the emotional stress of it causes me to despair. I start to panic and feel what I can only describe as a deep, hopeless despair.
You see, you need the emotions and feelings that you are accustomed to. Whatever yours are, you need them. You must have them. We are emotional, relational beings. To rip away a person’s ability to feel and interact is a violent thing.
When I’m down, my wife is the only person I can be with and feel no aversion. But I don’t feel love for her. I know intellectually that I love her, but I can’t feel it. The piece I wrote recently called “If Only” was an essay that got away from me. I wrote it as the Wellbutrin was coming to an end. I started with one thing, and I ended up writing about what it is to feel love for my wife. I couldn’t feel love, so I tried to write love. When I was done I knew the piece had started out as one thing and turned into something else. I could have torn it apart and made two things. But some instinct in me said to leave it alone. So I did.
In the worst of times, I could feel something when writing. That may be why I was so driven to write in the first two years of this blog. I suppose that’s why so much of what I write has a kind of sad, longing, emotional feel. My writing voice has always seemed to connect to people emotionally. Maybe you can feel the hunger and desire in me as I try to write emotions into existence.
So there it is. What can I do about it? That’s how I was feeling by Tuesday night. Empty and dead. Lillian came in to hug me goodnight. I put my arms around her and stared over her shoulder, gritting my teeth. I couldn't wait for it to be over. Now see, that's just not right. That is not me. Lillian is our last little girl. I've been treasuring her hugs, knowing that little girl hugs are just about gone. But Tuesday, I could hardly stand being near her.
I got my Wellbutrin back on Wednesday. It is now Thursday afternoon. I feel my interest in life returning. I’m at the church alone today, and I still want very much to be alone. But I can feel things again. Ironically, one of the first feelings to come rushing back is fear and anxiety. I’m very jittery. I feel like you might feel if you’ve done something wrong.
So I guess I’ll keep taking Wellbutrin. I hope very much not to have to take it for a long time. I don’t know how you stop taking something like this. I take three white pills every morning. Whatever that is doing to me is being done. Whatever that says about me is true. Whatever will happen to me because of this medication is going to happen. Because I don’t know what to do but take the pills.
I like being Gordon very much. And my wife and children love Gordon and want him to be around.
So okay. Give me the pills. I don’t care. I’ll do anything.
rlp
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Thank you for being open and
Thank you for being open and vulnerable about this issue. Too often, we think we can just pray these things away.
Why can't we recognize it like we do cancer?
Depression and meds
After my first marriage (of 20 years) ended because of my wife's breast cancer, I began taking Effexor. The Effexor did an apparently irreversible number on my libido; Wellbutrin was prescribed as a companion med, but there was no change. I'm now on Paxil + Wellbutrin, but the only change has been a noticeable decrease in sweating. Thank God I'm off Effexor!
Depression isn't a cold. It isn't a swollen ankle. It isn't a tooth ache. All those conditions are easily alleviated and will eventually go away with treatment.
Depression is like cancer in that it doesn't go away. I've compared cancer to fire ants; you can make it hide for a while, but it still lurks in the shadows looking for an opening for its reappearance.
If you've never personally dealt with depression, you can't imagine what it is like. Even with meds, you feel inferior and inadequate. The meds just help you chop wood and carry water. Without them, you can't.
My second wife (and, good Lord willing, my last!) is very understanding and supportive. Not all my friends have been, simply because the condition is so hard to understand. "Oh, just get over it!" is the usually refrain to their lack of understanding. Believe me. If we could get over it, we would. And we'd do it without these bleeping meds.
Sometimes
it freaks me out that a pill can bring back the joy.
I took Wellbutrin for about two years and then I was cured. Sometimes the dark clouds start to gather and I worry about whether I should go to the doctor before it gets away from me again.
The idea that the fizzy brain chemicals can reboot a whole personality makes me wonder exactly what reality is, after all.
But anywhoo, thank god you're back, RLP.
I Know Depression
I've suffered from depression since my teens and have been in treatment for it (therapy plus medication) for the past nine years. My psychiatrist had weaned me off the Lexapro last summer, but when my mood gradually returned to persistent melancholy, even weeks after leaving the job from hell, I went back on a half dosage of it with his consent.
But there is a difference. This time my mood was *only* persistently melancholy. Ten years ago my unmedicated mood was suicidal. Somehow the years of talk therapy and cognitive restructuring have worked healing in my brain. So I have reason to believe at some point I will no longer need the medication. (Being on the medication allows me to do the healing work; otherwise I would be too mired in depressive thinking to focus.)
Perhaps that will happen for you, too. I hope so. In the mean time, I am glad you are doing what you have to do to truly live.
I would agree with this --
I would agree with this -- I've been there too.
It's a combination of deep emotional work with a therapist/ counselor/ spiritual director type along with the medications. Alone each work wonders, together they can work miracles.
At times it felt to me that taking the pills without taking care of the underlying problems was just a masking of the symptoms of the disease.
And the meds gave me the strength to do the deep emotional work.
Both/and.
This is true for a lot of
This is true for a lot of people, and I am very happy for you that you got the help you needed and got better. I often feel hurt and frustrated, though, by the fact that most people believe, because depression affects the emotions, everyone's depression is caused by emotions or by emotional events. This is not true for everyone. Certainly not for me.
I have been chronically depressed since I was a child. This is not because I have deep emotional work to do. It is because my brain doesn't make the right levels of the right kinds of chemicals. I have seen therapists, who determined that I am emotionally healthy and well grounded, but depressed. The meds correct that, and I suspect that because my brain has never been able to balance the chemicals correctly, I will always need them.
I hope this is not the case for you, RLP. I am guessing that, since you remember an old, not-depressed Gordon, you will recover and be med free someday. This is a very good thing.
The Family Perspective
Thanks for this Gordon. This helps me to figure out how to make sense of that year of darkness. I never got to meds, but I think that's because I didn't know it was happening until I was getting out. Unlike you though, Gordon, I have a hard time feeling but I need to be touched. I craved it above anything else in the darkness.
I also come from a family of that travels the dark roads. Both sides, all my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my father, my brother. It comes and goes for all of us, at different levels. Alcohol, for the most part, has been the medication. In fact, in my family that's what my family calls it, in hurting whispers.
I remember when my brother was first diagnosed (finally) with depression. That night, I found a picture of him from 10 years before, smiling - something I hadn't seen him done since...well, probably since that school picture - when he was 8. I (We) couldn't help him until we could give it a name. We just tried to be there, or not, whatever it took. He got on meds for a few years and came out the other side. It was a good feeling.
My heart aches for people who are told to suck it up. I've been there, and I know my own symptoms when the darkness nips at my heels. I'm praying for you, Scott, that you do have people you can go to to get what you need, whatever that is.
Very true description of
Very true description of depression. . . I've been on meds now for over 7 years and right now I'm feeling normal. Haven't taken a break from meds since the last time I tried to wean off of them two years ago. . . Not pretty. Since I'm feeling normal, sometimes I wonder whether it is all in my head. . . if I'm just weak. Or unspiritual. Or. . . whatever. Then I remember the "bad old days". . . so much of what you describe. . .
Yay for anti-depressants. I
Yay for anti-depressants. I resisted for a long time because I'm from New England and y'know, we don't admit weakness there. :) I'm glad you're getting your medication. I really like your blog.
Just can't relate
-
My wife was on anti-depressants before I ever met her. So she could surely relate to what you're feeling. Me? I've never experienced anything worse or longer-lasting that the sadness at the loss of a family member, or the occasional and fleeting deep funk.
To know, intellectually, that you actually disassociate completely from your emotions is pretty much unfathomable to me. All I can say is that respect you so much for baring this much of it out her for public ingestion.
Thank you.
Thanks for this. You
Thanks for this. You described exactly what I feel most of the time - especially the can't love anyone/can't feel love part. I've often worried that some crucial part of me was missing, and that the deepest darkest truth about me was that I'm just a cold hard bitch who can't feel for anything for anybody.
I've tried absolutely every alternative to meds - therapy, yoga, regular exercise, meditation, various forms of journalling, cutting out all alcohol, making major life changes and some herbal stuff that was a waste of money - and while all that keeps me from spending my life curled up in the fetal position, I still struggle to get out of bed in the morning and be reasonably functional. And no matter what I'm doing, I can't wait to go home and be alone.
I recently came to the conclusion that even though the thought of taking anti-depressants really scares me, I need to get over myself and get some happy pills. For some reason, this decision feels like failing or giving up or something. (and I've had plenty of time to think about it, since after my eval, my HMO is making me wait 5 weeks until I can get an appt. with a shrink, giving me more than enough time to scare the crap out of myself by researching SSRI side-effects on the internet.)
I needed to read this today. Maybe the drugs will be about getting me back, rather than losing myself. I don't know. But this helped. Thanks for writing it.
you are describing me
I have had the same things going on in my life and was diagnose as a depress person. I have three boys, who now starting to understand that Mom is having moodswings. I try to blame it on menastruation time so that I don't look or seem mad or sad everyday. I hate how I feel at times. I take no medication for I fear the side affects but eventually I'm gone to have to do something because I'm so tired of being tired.
Naming Depression
Sometimes naming it "depression" can be harmful too. If it is just 'you' then maybe it isnt so bad, perhaps its something you can take responsibility for and even decide you don't want to 'own' it so work on healing yourself in whatever best way is available to you. By naming it, the thing can become something you accept and live with.
My thoughts on depression are written here: www.discoveraid.com/category/depression-self-esteem-anxiety
in and through
parker palmer writes so beautifully about his own depression in "let your life speak" - this moved me like his words. i was on medication for around 6 years and it saved my life. i think it was about 5 years ago i slowly weaned off of it. i was in therapy and under the supervision of a good doctor.
it allowed me to do the deep emotional work i needed to do to live life without it.
thank you so much for your transparency on this. i think so many would be helped if they availed themselves to it.
Gordon, I know exactly how
Gordon, I know exactly how you feel. Twenty years ago I was diagnosed with "mood swings". Mood swings? What the hell is that? Mood swings. It's like manic depression, but without the wide pendulum swings. People love me when I am up. I am the funny, caring guy that can do no wrong. When I am down my wife and I fight and I can't stand to be around the kids,just as you described. Meds helped for a little while, but I didn't stay on them for very long. When I was 30 I had a spiritual experience that I credit with taking away my suicidal thoughts. I still get angry, even enraged. And then there is the pornography. I am a minister, and I use porn to control my emotions. Of course it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what men do when looking at that stuff. I am ashamed of myself, but I have managed to control the guilt that originally came with the daily abuse. Now I "walk in grace" as if God were looking away while I engage in my habit. I live depressed most days. I know there is an endorphin relationship between all the above; receptors and begging, the body doing whatever it takes to supply the need. Food helps, lots of it too, hence I am a 340 pound Baptist, but that is okay, Baptist can get by with it, right? Stay on the meds, lest you attempt to find some other way to console yourself and one day lose touch with reality - which is my biggest fear. What if I stop my medication? What will it do to me? It sure is one hell of a fight.
Most of us experiment from
Most of us experiment from time to time to see if we still need the meds. Your experiment was unfortunately forced on you, but in any case you don't have to answer that question for awhile.
I so know how you feel about human beings, even beloved ones, grating on you when things are bad. Such an awful feeling. If the meds make that go away, it is totally worth it to me.
don't know what to say
i am constantly amazed at how your writing speaks to me. your fictional characters and your real-life writings always seem to strike a similar chord with the situations i go through, but i believe you do with many people - i know i'm not special in this regard.
i just want to say thank you for your words. also, thank you to all the commentors, you help me to know i'm not alone.
i used to be on meds for OCD, the insurance company wouldn't cover the med i was on and suggested i start the whole process over with another drug. so out of bitterness i refused to give the bastards the satisfaction of controlling the situation and said NO. i stopped taking the meds and have been battling OCD/depression ever since. i hate myself and my inability to control my life.
yesterday i started back on making sure all the rugs on the hardwoods were in line, today i picked up a new habit about not stepping on cracks on the sidewalk or on the street. i have no eyebrows because i pulled them all out. i am making my wife turn against me because i hate hearing anything she says. i'm becoming more and more jealous when she talks to other men.
and yet i can't ask for help.
how could i let it get this bad?
I would say you just did ask
I would say you just did ask for help.
Call your family doctor right away, please. That's all you need to do for now. Just setup an appointment. Then send me an email and tell me that you did.
Then go to the appointment and tell the doctor what you have said here. You need not think about anything beyond that. Let what happens after that appointment be a thing you will deal with on that day, with the help of your doctor.
I hope I hear from you. Use the contact button on the left menu.
Thanks RLP for your honesty.
Thanks RLP for your honesty. My father was bi-polar, severely and psychotically so, before there were meds that helped much. It helps for me to read "That's not me." My brothers and my sister and I have internalized so much of his rejection of us as being because we weren't good enough kids to be loved by our dad the way we saw other kids being loved by their dads. (I am not comparing you to my dad, he was really, really sick.) I feel so much pain over it, I don't quite know what to do sometimes. Get over it --"snap out of it" ? Feel it? Putting my trust in redemption and healing and miracles and the power of love is a good thing for me.
Depression, Headaches, and Wellbutrin
RLP,
I was just thinking about the connection between my chronic migraines and depression when Bob Carlton twittered about the real and helpful post.
Which comes first, the chronic pain or the depression? Chicken, egg. Egg, chicken. I still can't tell. All I know is that between the postpartum depression and the five years of migraine, there's been a lot of pain and a lot of darkness.
Finally, after years of trying different treatments my neurologist put me on Wellbutrin and both my headaches and my mood issues improved. I'd say the wellbutrin helped about 60%. Alternative treatments got me the rest of the way to a low enough level of pain and a high enough level of energy that I would call it health.
Sadly, that dark period of my life exactly corresponded to my years as a traditional pastor. Now I cannot seperate the two and some small, possibly irrational part of my brain thinks the one will always come with the other. (But there are other, bigger reasons not to go back to trad. pastoring, so I guess leaving it unresovled is not so bad.)
I'm grateful that you, I and the others who have written here have found healing through whatever means neccessary. Perhaps we should raise our glasses and write a nice toast to Wellbutrin?
Yours in the journey,
Rachelle
Hi Gordon, Thanks once
Hi Gordon,
Thanks once again for your honesty in expressing your struggles with this. It clearly helps a lot of people to be allowed this window into your experience (myself included).
One question popped into my mind today, when I was thinking about how do people "know" God exists.
I seem to remember in the past you've said you don't "feel" the existence of God -- many people cite this as a reason for believing or following God, but that this feeling of presence is not usually there for you.
Has this changed at all with depression medication? Is the ability to "feel" God related at all to what you describe as not being able to feel other emotions? Just curious.
thanks for your writing,
Holly
maybe i should try
maybe i should try medication. maybe i need to deal with my fear of appearing weak for taking medication. maybe that is a stupid fear.
did you notice your
did you notice your depression at a young age? Childhood?
No, though I think I always
No, though I think I always had higher levels of anxiety. I base this on a number of compulsive habits I had as a child.
I guess you weren't away
I guess you weren't away that long this time, but welcome back.
I can soooooooooo relate!
Thanks so much for your courage and candor. More people need to know that Christians can - and do - suffer from depression or ride the "beeper" roller coaster. Then maybe we won't have to waste so much energy dealing with ¢®@p like:
"Real Christians don't get depressed. You don't have enough faith. You should pray and read the Bible more...."
....Or its more extreme variant: "Come to our prayer and healing meeting on Wednesday night, and we'll all pray over you." [What? You can't all pray for me in my absence so I don't have to suffer through it?]....
....Or my well-meaning but ignorant-as-dirt Fundamentalist brother saying, "GOD DOES NOT MAKE JUNK. [Yeah, that's a direct quote, including the all-caps schitck.] Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get a job."....
....Or one of my old college roommates walking around being relentlessly cheerful and singing Christian "happy" songs to cheer me up. [I finally told her she was only turning up the contrast between how I felt and how I was "supposed" to feel... fortunately she "got it" and I didn't have to tell her a second time - thank God!]....
....Or my former pastor saying, "You've got a little demon." [He wasn't speaking literally and I knew it, but the expression still made me feel just a teeny bit evil even though I don't think there's any such thing as a "demon."]....
....on top of already being drained by the depression in the first place. Quite a few times that sort of BS has driven me right out of the church for several years. [Right now is one of those times.]
Bah. Humbug. Floop. Thalldrap. Piffledygook. =RAZZBERRY= and other rude bodily noises. I wouldn't really wish the condition on my worst enemy, but every once in a while I get so frustrated, I almost think I would like to see some of those well-intentioned fools walk around in my 9-extra-wides for a couple of weeks.
--------------------
Just 2 brass farthings' worth from another walking-pharmacy-for-life......
When I read your post If
When I read your post If only a week ago or so, I didn't get the connection between the two poles you described your wife and writing about death at the same time. I almost commented that I didn't get it but I hesitated. I find it interesting though in a sense of what you are writing now and then because at times it feels like death one when can't feel and obviously your wife brings you life; it makes sense to me now that you went in that direction of your wife--to me we have an innate drive to survive to feel life and be alive. She is obviously your compass and guiding light.
becky
weakness
My uncle was a borderline schizophrenic and hating having to take his meds to function. He seemed to think that needing those pills was a sign of weakness. He fought being on meds his entire life, until he was in his sixties and shared a room at the VA with a diabetic who asked him, "Do you think I'm weak because I need to take insulin every day?"
Powerful Post
What a beautifully thoughtful reflection on your journey through depression. I read this as I am out on mental health leave, struggling with Bipolar. For some time my mind has been fuzzy and numb. Reading this helped me feel a sort of bittersweet connection.
Thanks.
Thank you
Thank you for telling your truth about your journey with depression in such a powerful way. I am so grateful for your writing. There have been many times when I have found myself saying me too over the last few years. I am grateful for you.
Writing emotions into existence
- That really spoke to me; sometimes it is the toehold we keep on life through something creative that holds us here. You found this unconsciously and kept going; in the meantime, it has blessed all who come here to read. I know this is not an easy path - the mental illness AND the insurance insanity that accompanies it. We struggle with it too - me with depression and now a daughter who is bipolar and has been suicidal - twice last year, and once a few years ago. We're just trying to weather the storm, and thankfully, for now, things are better. But not w/o a lot of therapy and a lot of medication. And I feel terrrible to think that your family (who I almost feel I know after reading this blog for several years) is not only dealing with illness itself and the worry that accompanies it, but with the additional burden of "How do we pay for this? How do we afford care and not go under?" Sometimes I wish we could all band together as our own group and buy a plan, so no one here reading this blog would have to worry. Because access to care - and meds - is a BIG one.
I know, despite what you wrote, that a part of you (the part w/o meds) remains very much engaged with life, even if you don't feel it, because you did feel so called to write. Keep answering that call, preacher, because that's what will save you until the meds kick in. Or any other time the need becomes so great.
And thanks as always, for your honesty. It demystifies mental illness, and even in the 21 st century we have a long way to go on that count.
Bless you & your family!
Depression
Depression is a listed mental disorder which includes altered mood; it may occur daily associated with diminished interest or pleasure in most or all of the activities. Depression is considered to be a disorder.
Hey Preacher Man, Havn't
Hey Preacher Man,
Havn't been around your writing for a while. Went off the Wellbutrin almost a year ago and just today realized that I am in the pit of depression again. Back to the insomnia that kept me up and searching for your identity back in the days when you were anonymous. :) I thought to myself today that I would see how you are doing with your depression and, lo', find this great entry. The Lord, he does move in mysterious ways, don't he? I am going to run, not walk, to my doctor and get myself back to the regimine. Thanks Preacher Man.
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