Six years ago, give or take, I was diagnosed with Clinical Depression. Having spent years feeling a kind of hopeless dull normal, it was a relief to hear from a medical professional that it wasn’t just me; it wasn’t just that I’m weaker than everyone else, or less capable of taking the unbearable awfulness of my life, as I’d suspected. The chemicals in my brain were imbalanced. This could be fixed.
I think those first few years I must have been a bit weird; assigned a drug with a name that implied it would work (Effexor – now with even more effex!), I found I’d traded one kind of miserable for another, though it was a more bearable misery. I wished for a switch to flip, a miracle, a fixer. I wished (oh, I still do) that they could find my depression and cut it out where it lies. We tried different drugs, different doses, and eventually I found that what really helped was Omega 3-6-9 capsules and exercise, and everything improved dramatically after that.
But lingering at the back of my mind is the fear that I’ll slip, or that the Omega’s effects will wear off and I’ll be back where I started or worse. I’ve read the literature; Clinical Depression is theorized to essentially scar your brain, making it easy to fall back into the chasm you’ve hauled yourself out of. I don’t mind being sad sometimes, but that unvarying sameness of depression isn’t sadness. It’s hard to describe, but it’s not the same as being sad. I look back at it with a horror that motivates me now to ensure I never go back there. Read the rest of this entry »
