bloody miserable

you

Well-known member
First and most importantly, don't take up weed again. Maybe other herbal supplements as have been talked about here, but def not cannabis.

Second find a decent GP. You're in London , right? I've generally found GP advice in London excellent in several different areas, but I know of course it's a lottery too... Then ask their advice about medication, after having researched it thoroughly beforehand (never assume they know you well, or have specialist knowledge of mental health

Nah I'm outside of London....I have seen some GPs, I think I am going to look into St Johns Wort.... I've had the therapy they refer you to, I've often just felt like it's pointless and argue ( not aggressively, just uberlogically ).....

Third, no job is perfect but a bad atmosphere can obv contribute to depression/general lowness. Any chance of moving out of it, even if this involves a (small) pay cut? If you don't think you'll find anything fulfilling, I've often found the charity sector to be more likely to contain 'nice' people ie be a bit more human, even if the jobs themselves aren't always fulfilling.

i think you're def doing the right things with lots of exercise.

Edit: I think one of the key antidotes to depression is minimising the extent top which you feel you're under the thumb of people you don't respect (eg living with people you like, and, as far as possible, with independence; working among people you like and, p[erhaps more importantly, respect etc etc). It can be a huge depressant, or so I 've found, to not be able to speak your mind to people you don't respect.

In many ways my job is OK, the company director respects me and does try to make me comfortable ( loads of different projects, role changes etc ), but I just get bored very easily and have very little patience, often feels like everyone around me is just dragging their heels. I just don't have the patience to wait for others to catch on and learn - it's not a particularly skilled sector so I don't feel like I'm being unreasonable - I'm a project administrator not a surgeon.

I don't have much respect for anyone I work with, I never show this and always try to be very professional and friendly. It doesn't help in that I don't get on with anyone in my work place on a personal level... I don't think this is a personal problem, I just have diddlysquat in common, and I'm not going to start watching the bloody apprentice just so I can join in with conversations!
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Wish I could advise you on the job front, T, but as someone who's currently dole scum and doesn't really have a clue what to do next, I'm probably not the best person to ask. As far as herbal thingumies go, kratom is pretty pleasant (and legal), although it's opioid-like in effect and people have been known to get dependant on it. Really though, I'm not sure chemical crutches are the best way to combat the kind of ennui you're talking about, whether it's chamomile tea or heroin.

Edit: that said, a wee something to unwind with that's not booze is great now and then, be it weed, one of the milder opiates or whatever. Kava is meant to be nice, not tried it myself though.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Try some of the supplements I was bigging up upthread. I feel they've helped balance my emotional state, but it doesn't feel unnatural or invasive like I've heard SSRIs do from various people (incl. family).

Yeah, SSRIs really don't work for some people, indeed. But the flip side is that they've been amazing for me.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Nah I'm outside of London....I have seen some GPs, I think I am going to look into St Johns Wort.... I've had the therapy they refer you to, I've often just felt like it's pointless and argue ( not aggressively, just uberlogically ).....

In many ways my job is OK, the company director respects me and does try to make me comfortable ( loads of different projects, role changes etc ), but I just get bored very easily and have very little patience, often feels like everyone around me is just dragging their heels. I just don't have the patience to wait for others to catch on and learn - it's not a particularly skilled sector so I don't feel like I'm being unreasonable - I'm a project administrator not a surgeon.

I don't have much respect for anyone I work with, I never show this and always try to be very professional and friendly. It doesn't help in that I don't get on with anyone in my work place on a personal level... I don't think this is a personal problem, I just have diddlysquat in common, and I'm not going to start watching the bloody apprentice just so I can join in with conversations!

Ah sorry, was making an unmerited assumption based on the number of Londoners on the forum. What therapy did they send you to, btw - CBT?

hm, at least you have a decent boss, very important. Otherwise, I think it's incredibly hard to find, and you need a big slice of luck, but an environment where one respects the people around is so good for self-esteem/the soul that it can't be overrated. I guess why a lot of people go freelance, cos so many workplaces do impel you to stop calling bullshit on bullshit.

Edit: I watched the Apprentice for two seasons, and it slowly sucked the joy and optimism from my being. Then I stopped.
 

Damien

Well-known member
I've just walked about Shankhill in Belfast, that made me feel better about my own 'troubles'
sam3710.jpg
 
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you

Well-known member
cheers for all the opinions guys, I've started a st johns wort course 425mg per tablet IIRC.... I'll see if the next months goes smoothly.

I am exercising a bit, last week I had 9 squash games ( won 7-8 ) and a 2 hour mountain bike ride - so lethargy isn't too much of an issue - just being ruddy grumpy....
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
lethargy isn't too much of an issue - just being ruddy grumpy....

But you're exactly the kind of person who can harness this in the form of badass radical misanthropic militant dysphoria, aren't you? Team up with Dom Fox and Mark Fisher to take over the world as a triumvirate of invincible, glowering Übergrumpen! :D
 

you

Well-known member
There is, unfortunately, an essential demonic entity activated within, or rather at the core of, my endologix ( centrus-demonix, or perhaps daemonumbilicus?? ). For whilst intrinsic negativism is a component of many lucrative and engaging militant dysphoria within academic realms my particular woe(s) supersedes engagement, academic interests and oblique tangents of influence. Whilst many vectors of catalism, coagulation and conflux can thrive a la sub-dysphoria habitats my specific ontology expends massive energies upon auto-querious avenues as opposed to pro-exterior, extroverted modes of psycho-mechanisations.... This auto-phagic formatting of interior questioning is essentially preceding, or substituting all further thoughts and exo-contextual analysis.:confused:

EDIT - simultaneously there is an endogenically propelled exo-pursuit to discover xeno-medicinal properties within texts. A voracious chasing of an undiscovered cure.... So whilst cerebral experience is undiminished and perhaps, questionably, growing - the belief, the ontological foundation, (sub-ontologix psychosphere) is still co-existing beneath the noumenon of auto-phagic inontologies.....
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Sooooooooooooo I think I'm getting on some antidepressants this week. Nothing major, just a modest dose of Citalopram (at least this is what my shrink thinks would be best, haven't seen the GP yet). Wondering if anybody here has ever been prescribed this? I'm not too sure I'm in favour of antidepressants, I wonder if I'm attracted to the idea of doing it in the same way I'm attracted to, say, MDMA (a 'fix' for my mental problems, basically). But my therapist hasn't pushed them on me, it's been well over a year before this has come up as a suggestion. I suppose I must have been saying some slightly worrying stuff for her to suggest it.

I'm doing a lot better nowadays, I think partly due to therapy - I've got a job, I go to the gym regularly, I relatively rarely feel like killing myself etc. But it is very difficult to overcome, and will probably never really be overcome. I've come to understand how depression has evolved to become an unfortunate part of my personality, my way of seeing the world, as something to fall back on, a sort of barbed-wire safety net.

Hopefully everyone else in this thread who was having problems is feeling better now too.
 

e/y

Well-known member
But it is very difficult to overcome, and will probably never really be overcome. I've come to understand how depression has evolved to become an unfortunate part of my personality, my way of seeing the world

Same. At first (wow, it's been 5 years now) I thought it would be gone after a few months or a year, but instead it's a regular thing, almost cyclical, and like you say - a part of my personality.

re. Citalopram - I took it for about a year In my last year of high school, in combination with therapy. I think it's fairly mild, and also I didn't the usual side-effects. It worked pretty well for me - the feelings/effects of depression weren't so prominent anymore, more or less in the background.

One thing though (I'm sure it's a very obvious one and I was told about this but ignored it because...idk) is that stopping it abruptly is really bad idea. At the time I had moved to Canada from the US for university, and my I only had enough Citalopram for a few months. To get a new prescription I needed to start seeing a psychiatrist at the university, and I was very reluctant to do this - combination of feeling better and just embarrassment I guess (I was like that before I started therapy back home, too). Running out of pills coincided with a bunch of stresses (school, personal stuff) and it was really awful, physically and emotionally debilitating.

This year I slowly lowered the dosage after talking to my doctor and haven't been taking it for a few months.


Good luck with everything Corpsey.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Thanks, mate. I think I'm past the worst of depression now (or should that be FOR now?) but it's still an impediment in my life, I'd just like to be able to get rid of it more permanently. Perhaps this is impossible.

It's difficult with analysing your own psychology because its difficult to know how much of it is real and how much of it arises from, or is sustained by, the analysis itself! But then, I think my shrink would say that the endless need to self-analyse is ITSELF a symptom of depression.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Glad to hear you're feeling better than you were Corpsey, sounds like a massive amount of progress you've made tbh. Going to therapy before antidepressants is unusual and a really good sign, I think - most often people go to drugs first, which I think is the wrong approach, though it's one that I and lots of others people have taken.

As far as depression being a part of your personality and being impossible to shift permanently - I used to think that about myself, but don't any more, cos I've shifted the way I see depression. Being very analytical, self-aware etc, all those things might well be part of your personality, but depression, I believe from my own experience and what I've read, is just a coping mechanism. The reason it's so difficult to shift is it's something you might have learned very young (for any number of reasons) - psychotherapists often say that it's one of the most difficult things to treat, as it's often so embedded as just 'what you do' when presented with certain situations. Like I said, I think I suffered from that for ages, but I've got better, so I think anyone can leave depression behind, or at least radically reduce it by finding new coping mechanisms.

i think the best thing would be to raise that with your therapist, see whether he/she has noticed you sort of 'clicking' into a pre-ordained pattern when you get depressed, ask him/her how she experiences that.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Therapy has been very interesting and fitfully helpful. From talking to my therapist, for example, I have come to see that the examples of depression in my own family aren't insignificant to explaining how I have developed - e.g. my dad had severe depression when I was in my early-teenage years, an uncle of mine killed himself, and more examples along those lines. I think an interesting thing here is that it never really occurred to me that this stuff would have effected me, and I think that's partly because - as you say - depression feels like something 'natural' to me, just 'the way I am' and always was destined to be. Furthermore, of course, you come to feel dependent upon depression in an odd way (a sort of psychological Stockholm Syndrome!) - you end up believing it is the reason you are capable of the good things you are capable of. There might even be some truth in this, but I must bear in mind that it isn't depression that makes me capable of writing critical pieces on music, for example: on the contrary, depression will make me sink into inaction and feel like writing about music is completely and utterly meaningless.

You know what Baboon I never read that 'Pillars of Self-Esteem' book you recommended, even though I did buy it. I have a sort of morbid fear of self-help books, in that I worry that if I read stuff like that I'm giving the 'problem' I have more credibility in my head, more substance, somehow. But perhaps I should go back to it?

Thanks for the kind words.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Pillars of Self-Esteem - I'm not sure I would recommend it now, as it's written by Nathaniel Branden (I think? If it's the same book I'm remembering), who had a crazy affair with Ayn Rand... Otoh, I do remember it being good for a self-help book, CBT type of stuff, lots of pretty good advice. But I'll PM you with some books I think are better tomorrow, once I find the names - definitely worth reading until you find someone who talks about exactly what you feel - can be an incredibly liberating and sane-making feeling to realise it's all been thought about before.

Shit man, I'm sorry to hear about your uncle and your family history in general. I had similar stuff in my family. Without wanting to judge without knowing your history, I can't see how it's possible that that stuff wouldn't have affected you. You learn patterns off your parents, and, as in my case, it's kinda obvious where they came from when you look at it objectively (which, as you say, can be incredibly difficult to do). And yeah, don't mix up depression with your artistic potential, they're not connected as you rightly say.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
'They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad...'

btw, reading Philip Larkin is all at once tremendously enjoyable, moving, depressing and painful for me. There are few writers/poets I've read who so accutely pin-point/prick the way depression feels for me. Some of his poems I find nearly unreadable for that reason. He's great, though, a source of solace as much as anxiety.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
never read him tbh. Must rectify that. Disagree with his conclusion in that particular poem though (the only one I'm familiar with)! Needn't be that way anyway..

Do you like Black Box Recorder (the band)? I have a feeling you would... Luke Haines is pretty Larkin-influenced, I'd guess from that poem.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I think the conclusion has some truth to it, but it is only a half truth (man hands on joy to man too). Mind you, I think there is a self-awareness to that poem, even a tongue-in-cheek quality. Just the brusqueness of it, it's like deadpan comedy. Some of his stuff hasn't got that, it hasn't got any humour to it or even irony its just full of flat despair.
 
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