Help with depression... advice anyone?
Q.Some of you know me and know that I have SAD.. I have talked with a number of AFPers about it in the past. Well that time of year has come and I thought I would ask for the wisdom of AFP... any advice chums? I've started taking my meds.. but life has just ground to a halt in Lizzie-land. I'm not impressed with this illness... I want to know if any of you have any advice or strategies on how to get out of the black pit that is yawning beneath my feet. I know this isn't perhaps the ideal place to ask.. I'm on a couple of depression mailing lists as well. But I also know that a number of AFPers have suffered from this bloody illness in one way or another, and I have had much support in the past with this. If you prefer to take it to e-mail then please do. But it made me feel better just knowing I wasn't alone with this when we've discussed it in the past. I hope I'm not the only one...
A.I have no particular experience with SAD, so this is more to do with depression generally. You don't say what, if anything, you've tried before, but the advice I'd give from both professional and personal experience is: Cognitive therapy. This teaches you ways of making your thought patterns positive rather than negative, and challenging negative assumptions that will make you feel more depressed. If anyone's interested I can try to explain in a bit more detail, but I'm sure there are helpful sites on the web. It's been proven to be helpful as both a treatment and a preventative for depression. Personally, I found it extremely useful, and in retrospect it played the biggest part in getting me through my own depression. [1] Exercise. Regular exercise helps release endorphins, and has also been proven to be helpful for depression. Go for a brisk walk every day, or, if the weather's not up to it, find forms of exercise you can do indoors (swimming, the gym, aerobics, whatever takes your fancy). Doing things you'd normally enjoy - trying to get out with friends, read books you like (and, yes, this is an _excellent_ time for a Pterry reread ;-) ) and do anything else you'd normally have fun doing. You need to be aware of the limitations of this - you _won't_ enjoy these things in the way you normally would, and the contrast between how you feel now and how you would normally feel during these activities can make you feel worse. However, doing them for short periods at a time can often help lift a depressive person's mood overall. (My personal experience with this was that although it didn't particularly lift my mood, it did lift the stifling sense of hopelessness that's one of the worst things about depression. Trying to do something other than just sitting and thinking about how awful I felt gave me the vague hope that maybe, just maybe, I was wrong in my firm belief that I'd never feel better again.) Go easy on yourself. Avoid at all costs the trap of telling yourself you're being feeble and should snap out of it. It's an _illness_, not a weakness. There is an end to it, and you will feel better again. Keep reminding yourself of that. (This is the one thing I wish I had done. Despite having absolutely classic symptoms, I managed not to realise until it was all over and just a horrible memory that, in fact, I'd been suffering from depression. And, no, I don't have any brilliant explanation for this total lack of insight, I only know that the illness deprived me of normal perspective.)
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