fyrstormer
Banned
(TL;DR at the end if you want to skip the monologue)
Whether seasonal or chronic, depression is a tricky thing. People who've never experienced it usually misunderstand it as feeling sad and mopey all the time, which is understandable since that's what the colloquial definition of "depressed" is. But in a medical context, "depression" is the opposite of "stimulation", hence why alcohol is classified as a depressant and caffeine is classified as a stimulant. Neurological depression literally means parts of your brain are chronically underactive. The effects of this vary widely from person to person, since two people with depression will probably have different parts of their brains suffering from underactivity, and everyone's brain is wired differently anyway.
A better colloquialism for neurological depression would be "burnout", but that term implies you've done something wrong, whereas your brain might very well be malfunctioning despite your best attempts to prevent it. Some people's brains just don't work right; the brain is an organ, and any organ can malfunction due to biological problems. That's not to say lifestyle isn't a factor at all, though. I'm a software engineer, and writing code is incredibly mentally taxing; after a long day of writing code, it's not uncommon for me to struggle to speak in complete sentences. Imagine designing an extremely complex machine (are you thinking of a car? try again; they aren't complex enough) using only your imagination, then writing down painstaking descriptions of each component and its interactions with other components using words and numbers only -- no pictures allowed. That's my job. It's not the only factor, but it's certainly a big one.
So, the real experience of neurological depression is: Being awake is continuously, unrelentingly painful. (even REM sleep counts as "awake", because your brain is running at full-tilt when you're dreaming.) This is because those underactive parts of your brain are struggling to keep up with the inputs they're getting from the rest of your brain, and asking them to process new sensory input at the same time is more than they can handle. Have you ever had a migraine? You know how lights and sounds make you want to curl into a ball smaller and smaller until you disappear? Neurological depression is like that, minus the pounding sensation (thank goodness), but instead of lasting for a day or two, it lasts for months...or years...or decades if you're really unlucky.
You can experience that underactivity as being sad and mopey all the time, depending on which parts of your brain are underactive, but that's not my experience. For me it feels difficult to focus my eyes (very similar to the two times I actually had migraines -- thank goodness they never became recurring), bright happy sunlight looks strangely dull, it becomes difficult to ignore small unpleasant sounds or anything else mildly irritating, and I start hoping someone will give me an excuse to blow-up at them. Basically it feels like being sleep-deprived no matter how well-rested I am.
There are plenty of stimulants nowadays to jog the underactive parts of your brain, ranging from the ubiquitous caffeine and the perpetually-maligned nicotine, to highly-targeted pharmaceutical-grade antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil, and Ritalin. (yes, ADHD is just another form of neurological depression -- but it impairs your impulse-control and manifests as being unable to sit still and focus, which looks like the opposite of depression. that's why it's treated with stimulants.) Certain carefully-chosen types of sensory input can also be helpful, such as listening to music, looking at pretty scenery, getting a massage, or even just looking at bright lights. Basically, anything that wakes-up the underactive parts of your brain, without over-exciting the parts that were working fine to begin with, is a valid treament option. But most people just binge on snacks so they can taste delicious things over and over again, and/or drink a lot of coffee or soda to stimulate their brains chemically. Unfortunately I'm extremely sensitive to all stimulants, natural or pharmaceutical, so I have to be very careful using them.
To make matters more complicated, it's not always obvious when depression is becoming more of a problem than normal. It almost never hits full-force all at once, but instead it builds-up slowly and progressively as an unidentified source of additional mental strain slowly tires-out the susceptible parts of your brain and the problem becomes self-reinforcing. You carry-on doing your normal work, your normal household chores, your normal leisure activities, but they may be ever-so-slightly too much to handle. The problem builds day-by-day, and you might not notice until you're in so deep that you're yelling at inanimate objects for failing to obey your will. (like this.) After all, your malfunctioning brain thinks your reactions make perfect sense, so it's hard to notice anything's wrong.
When you consider that lots of other people are dealing with the same problem to some extent this time of year, it turns into a huge charlie foxtrot for everyone involved. For at least the past 15 years I've noticed the time between Halloween and Christmas is fraught with people walking around with chips on their shoulders, most of whom are in denial that there's anything different about them when I mention it to them. (see the last sentence of the previous paragraph.)
The shortening days in late autumn and early winter are a problem for a lot of people -- not so much because short days are an inherently depressing thing, but because modern society demands that we not give-in to our hibernation instincts and instead continue charging forward in our lives as if it were the middle of summer all year long. When one part of your brain desperately wants you to sleep 12 hours a day but the rest of your brain refuses to comply, bad things are bound to happen after a while. For the past 6 years or so, I've had a lot of trouble with seasonal depression, because I burned myself out really badly in 2013 from a "perfect storm" of hard work, problematic "friendships", and a long-distance relationship that suddenly didn't become a short-distance relationship like we'd expected to. But I'm an adult in the modern world, so I had to force myself to keep working full-time and doing all the other stuff that adults are supposed to do, despite sometimes literally wishing for death, and the addition of short cloudy days and long dark nights has been just one more strain on top of everything else. The past couple winters were better because I figured out which medications would be most helpful in my years-long recovery, but a month ago my life got upended.
A month ago my girlfriend had a baby. (pictures here.) I was very happy about this, but childbirth is hell on a woman's body, and I unilaterally decided to stay up nights to take care of the baby so she could sleep 8 hours a night. (I sleep in the mornings after she wakes up.) She doesn't go to sleep easily, so being interrupted even once in the middle of the night to feed/change/entertain the baby would reduce her total sleep-time by at least 33%. That is not a good formula for recovering from surgery. My sleep schedule naturally skews pretty late, so at first glance this didn't look like a huge change for me, but the long-term effect is I've seen about 3 hours of daytime each day for the past month. I've made a point of stepping outside each morning to watch the sun rise, and that helps, but it's obviously not the same as actually being awake for the whole day. I see sunrises, sunsets, and lots and lots of nighttime. Fortunately the baby has been very low-maintenance so far, or I'd be in the mental ward by now.
TL;DR: The reason for the long post is because I'm one of those people who likes knowing how all the pieces fit together. (it's why I'm good enough at my job that I can afford fancy titanium flashlights.) If you are too, great! If not, the point of all of this is to say I've increased my Prozac dose a little bit, being awake is less painful, I feel less like strangling the first person who looks at me funny, and I apologize for my recent misbehavior around here.
Whether seasonal or chronic, depression is a tricky thing. People who've never experienced it usually misunderstand it as feeling sad and mopey all the time, which is understandable since that's what the colloquial definition of "depressed" is. But in a medical context, "depression" is the opposite of "stimulation", hence why alcohol is classified as a depressant and caffeine is classified as a stimulant. Neurological depression literally means parts of your brain are chronically underactive. The effects of this vary widely from person to person, since two people with depression will probably have different parts of their brains suffering from underactivity, and everyone's brain is wired differently anyway.
A better colloquialism for neurological depression would be "burnout", but that term implies you've done something wrong, whereas your brain might very well be malfunctioning despite your best attempts to prevent it. Some people's brains just don't work right; the brain is an organ, and any organ can malfunction due to biological problems. That's not to say lifestyle isn't a factor at all, though. I'm a software engineer, and writing code is incredibly mentally taxing; after a long day of writing code, it's not uncommon for me to struggle to speak in complete sentences. Imagine designing an extremely complex machine (are you thinking of a car? try again; they aren't complex enough) using only your imagination, then writing down painstaking descriptions of each component and its interactions with other components using words and numbers only -- no pictures allowed. That's my job. It's not the only factor, but it's certainly a big one.
So, the real experience of neurological depression is: Being awake is continuously, unrelentingly painful. (even REM sleep counts as "awake", because your brain is running at full-tilt when you're dreaming.) This is because those underactive parts of your brain are struggling to keep up with the inputs they're getting from the rest of your brain, and asking them to process new sensory input at the same time is more than they can handle. Have you ever had a migraine? You know how lights and sounds make you want to curl into a ball smaller and smaller until you disappear? Neurological depression is like that, minus the pounding sensation (thank goodness), but instead of lasting for a day or two, it lasts for months...or years...or decades if you're really unlucky.
You can experience that underactivity as being sad and mopey all the time, depending on which parts of your brain are underactive, but that's not my experience. For me it feels difficult to focus my eyes (very similar to the two times I actually had migraines -- thank goodness they never became recurring), bright happy sunlight looks strangely dull, it becomes difficult to ignore small unpleasant sounds or anything else mildly irritating, and I start hoping someone will give me an excuse to blow-up at them. Basically it feels like being sleep-deprived no matter how well-rested I am.
There are plenty of stimulants nowadays to jog the underactive parts of your brain, ranging from the ubiquitous caffeine and the perpetually-maligned nicotine, to highly-targeted pharmaceutical-grade antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil, and Ritalin. (yes, ADHD is just another form of neurological depression -- but it impairs your impulse-control and manifests as being unable to sit still and focus, which looks like the opposite of depression. that's why it's treated with stimulants.) Certain carefully-chosen types of sensory input can also be helpful, such as listening to music, looking at pretty scenery, getting a massage, or even just looking at bright lights. Basically, anything that wakes-up the underactive parts of your brain, without over-exciting the parts that were working fine to begin with, is a valid treament option. But most people just binge on snacks so they can taste delicious things over and over again, and/or drink a lot of coffee or soda to stimulate their brains chemically. Unfortunately I'm extremely sensitive to all stimulants, natural or pharmaceutical, so I have to be very careful using them.
To make matters more complicated, it's not always obvious when depression is becoming more of a problem than normal. It almost never hits full-force all at once, but instead it builds-up slowly and progressively as an unidentified source of additional mental strain slowly tires-out the susceptible parts of your brain and the problem becomes self-reinforcing. You carry-on doing your normal work, your normal household chores, your normal leisure activities, but they may be ever-so-slightly too much to handle. The problem builds day-by-day, and you might not notice until you're in so deep that you're yelling at inanimate objects for failing to obey your will. (like this.) After all, your malfunctioning brain thinks your reactions make perfect sense, so it's hard to notice anything's wrong.
When you consider that lots of other people are dealing with the same problem to some extent this time of year, it turns into a huge charlie foxtrot for everyone involved. For at least the past 15 years I've noticed the time between Halloween and Christmas is fraught with people walking around with chips on their shoulders, most of whom are in denial that there's anything different about them when I mention it to them. (see the last sentence of the previous paragraph.)
The shortening days in late autumn and early winter are a problem for a lot of people -- not so much because short days are an inherently depressing thing, but because modern society demands that we not give-in to our hibernation instincts and instead continue charging forward in our lives as if it were the middle of summer all year long. When one part of your brain desperately wants you to sleep 12 hours a day but the rest of your brain refuses to comply, bad things are bound to happen after a while. For the past 6 years or so, I've had a lot of trouble with seasonal depression, because I burned myself out really badly in 2013 from a "perfect storm" of hard work, problematic "friendships", and a long-distance relationship that suddenly didn't become a short-distance relationship like we'd expected to. But I'm an adult in the modern world, so I had to force myself to keep working full-time and doing all the other stuff that adults are supposed to do, despite sometimes literally wishing for death, and the addition of short cloudy days and long dark nights has been just one more strain on top of everything else. The past couple winters were better because I figured out which medications would be most helpful in my years-long recovery, but a month ago my life got upended.
A month ago my girlfriend had a baby. (pictures here.) I was very happy about this, but childbirth is hell on a woman's body, and I unilaterally decided to stay up nights to take care of the baby so she could sleep 8 hours a night. (I sleep in the mornings after she wakes up.) She doesn't go to sleep easily, so being interrupted even once in the middle of the night to feed/change/entertain the baby would reduce her total sleep-time by at least 33%. That is not a good formula for recovering from surgery. My sleep schedule naturally skews pretty late, so at first glance this didn't look like a huge change for me, but the long-term effect is I've seen about 3 hours of daytime each day for the past month. I've made a point of stepping outside each morning to watch the sun rise, and that helps, but it's obviously not the same as actually being awake for the whole day. I see sunrises, sunsets, and lots and lots of nighttime. Fortunately the baby has been very low-maintenance so far, or I'd be in the mental ward by now.
TL;DR: The reason for the long post is because I'm one of those people who likes knowing how all the pieces fit together. (it's why I'm good enough at my job that I can afford fancy titanium flashlights.) If you are too, great! If not, the point of all of this is to say I've increased my Prozac dose a little bit, being awake is less painful, I feel less like strangling the first person who looks at me funny, and I apologize for my recent misbehavior around here.
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