I have been feeling pretty good the past couple of weeks. I don't have the morning depression so bad anymore. It seems that I am back to my chronic mild depression/anxiety. I'm not complaining. I will take dysthymia any day over the heavy cloud of major depression. I have been feeling so great I almost forgot about the reason I was so depressed in the first place (financial probs & debt, ugh). But this morning at work some negative random thought popped in my head and I just had that crushing feeling all of a sudden. It just came out of nowhere. I honestly can't even remember the specific thought that I had. I had to take some deep breaths and talk myself out of getting even more agitated.
I feel fine now, but it just goes to show how the depression/anxiety is always under the surface. Luckily after 10 yrs I find I am managing it so much better. Usually I have a severe episode up to 2 months after I have a major anxiety attack. It has been about a month since I had my anxiety attack and I am already feeling better. I have been able to maintain my normal daily routine and I am slowly getting back into maintaining a healthy diet and exercise routine.
Today's "freak out", let's call it, just showed me the importance of being vigilant about controlling my depression and anxiety.
This is always a good signs when things that would have set you back months before...now are much more manageable. Can you tell us what things you are doing differently this time around? What are the things that work for dealing with your depression?
Keep writing...you have so much to offer others who are going through this.
I guess the main thing is I am not allowing myself to wallow in self-pity. It seems hard not to do this, I know, when you are in the depths of depression. But it can be done.
Mostly, I just made myself stick to my normal routine. Normally, I would just lay in bed and watch TV, sleep and cry. I find if I do the things I normally would do, even while still feeling bad, it is better than just laying there. I was always in denial about my feelings. Now I feel it is better to just face them. My recent depression was caused by extreme financial stress, but I am doing what I can to minimize that instead of ignoring the problem until it gets even worse.
The thing that helps me the most is just knowing that it will pass. It always has for me in the past. No matter how bad I got, it would get better eventually. Even though I would normally never give this advice to a depressed person, it does help to "think positive". You just have to do it for yourself.
The result of this is I have had a relatively short period of bad depression (only a few weeks) as opposed to months. I really don't know what made me change the way I deal with it. I think it has to do with the fact I went so long (3 years) with only mild dysthymia and no major anxiety or depressive episodes. I guess when it was happening again I no longer was willing to just accept it as a part of my life. I think that is the first step, just to choose to fight it.
I'm impressed that you were able to keep your routine instead of wallowing in self-pity. I know that that can be very difficult to do. Do you mind explaining dysthmia? I don't think I'm familiar with that type of depression.
Dysthymia is technically a mild, chronic form of depression. A person suffering dysthymia just feels unhappy for no reason, and may experience a full range of depression symptoms (albeit milder), but can function normally. So, it is just depression but not that crippling, consuming depression that is typical of major depressive episodes.
For me, it means that I often cannot feel happy, even when doing things that have made me happy in the past. I can't sleep well sometimes, and I often wake up with that empty, panicky feeling in my chest for no reason. It goes up and down, depending on lots of factors like the weather, hormones, stress, etc. However, it does not hinder me in living a normal, functional life. Also, I will still suffer anxiety attacks if confronted with more stress than normal. The attacks often trigger a more severe depression. That is what happened to me recently. I had only dealt with mild symptoms for almost three years. Then, in the face of severe financial problems, I suffered an anxiety attack and started down to a more severe depression. It was making me unable to deal with my problem effectively. As my original post said, somehow I pulled myself out before it got too bad.
Luckily, with experience and with some medication I can control it and live a good life. Go to http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/chronic-depression-dysthymia for more.
I can't quite understand the difference than mine, as I get all those feelings too. I think my clinical depression just came about due constant stress due to financial and emotional relationship problems.
I do suffer from S.A.D. as well, so sunshine really helps me. I've always been on an anti-depressant since it showed up. I would try not to take them but just doesn't work. I do switch to different ones, but my mainstay is Wellbutrin, or (bupropion)
generic brand. Temazepam has helped with my first bouts of anxiety and depression when I was a young mother with two children and operating Shelter Homes for the Mentally Ill and then the Mentally Handicapped. After leaving the Mentally Ill shelter home, we moved to the one with mentally Handicapped, whatever that means, as the proper term would be Mentally Retarded. Some clients with Down's Syndrome.
My mother was an RN and worked later as a school nurse and that is the term that is used by the medical experts.
Anyway, that is when I first had depression enough to see a Dr about it and he gave me some antidepressants that they were so strong that I didn't make much sense when I talked and I was so tired. Now I couldn't have that taking care of 8 clients and my children were 3 1/2 and 1 1/2 years old.
I was too shy to let the Dr know they weren't working well for me. When he visited with me again he told me I should have called him and he would have changed them.
Then another Dr gave me Restoril (temazepam), told me to buy the book Charlie's Monument, walk an hour a day, and journal. This was about 30 years ago.
Also, at that time the owner's of this Shelter Home only paid me $100.00 a month, vs $500.00 a month, free phone, utilities paid, and the clients were picked up 3x a week from a mental health institution that kept them all day, fed them, took care of any medical needs, and had some recreation.
That gave me 3 days a week that I was free, there were only 5 clients. The one with 8 clients I had only one day free, if I were lucky and I didn't have a vehicle to take them with me on errands. Just when I took over for our friends who had to sell it,
they had 3 of the clients work a night shift, while the others were picked up everyday to work somewhere. The 3 night workers were an experiment, so that meant I was fixing 4 meals a day at different times.
The new owner lived across the street and was into it as a real estate deal. The house was in a nice neighborhood, where my Dr lived and a state Senator was our next door neighbor, lawyers lived there as well. So the owner felt that because we lived in this nice big house that $100.00 a month was enough. We had our food paid for and utilities and phone.
But no relief and increase work load and less pay. That is when a bout of depression set in. As I was doing this work to pay off the banks for a "Dead Horse". Actually my husband bought a auto shop, when we were first married and still living with his parents. The business was going under when we bought it, which I wasn't in agreement. So we didn't go bankrupt, but we still had banks to pay and the first shelter home came my way after a prayer of the exact money that I needed to pay the bank back and raised my children at home.
So $100.00 and having more stress with 8 clients that were on different time schedules did not help my emotional and physical well-being. I wrote the owner this long letter and told him we were going to leave in December if we don't get paid for what we are worth.
He found an older couple to take our place. So we moved into DH's parents home again and then DH went to another city to get some work and I finally met up with him on a shoestring budget two months later. We did pay the banks back, but still our credit wasn't any good. So life was not easy and my husband wasn't a college grad and just wanted to have his own business. He took what he could and I baby sat. It really was a nightmare so while our peer group was doing okay, we were making payments to the bank for nothing and no work to get the money to pay them.
It took my husband 12 years to get his own business working to give us a living. We added 3 more children in the meantime and I went back to college and got my B.S. degree and ended up working in a Psychiatric Hospital as a Rec. Therapist. Because I had worked those two shelter homes, that helped my resume' to get hired.
So we trudged along and now we are doing okay, but the wear and tear of these stressful times and my parents involvement in our lives took a great toll on my life.
So I can really understand what you are going through and I commend you on being able to do what is best for you.
You go girl!
P.S. I've been told by my psychiatrist that every time I go off meds and have an episode of deep depression where nothing interests me that I love and I physically cannot get out of bed, it will get worse.
This last episode, I did get 11 counseling sessions that really helped, my husband included on the last ones.
How is your anxiety expressed?