Late February Monte Report

Once again I can say that I'm doing marginally better than I was ten days ago. Maybe this high dose of Seroquel is really helping. This past weekend I made good use of the rainy days: rather than stay cooped up in my house all day moping, I spent time with others. Brunch and a movie with friends, and then later another movie with another friend on Saturday. On Sunday it was church in the morning and lunch with my Dad and brother in the afternoon. Filling in my free time like that seems to do me a lot of good, even though what I often want to do is just crawl under the covers and hide in my bed. So it takes effort to engage with other people, but in the end it's worth it.

From the book "Coping With Depression" there is some information on the connection between anxiety and depression:

"Anxiety and depression often feed into each other, and sometimes it's hard to tell them apart. . . . Anxiety fuels depression because it wears you out and saps your energy, not to mention also robbing you of pleasure and enjoyment. Depression also contributes to anxiety; for example, you may become more anxious when you must face a social obligation or work situation that you feel you cannot handle because you're so depressed."

and

"Depression and anxiety present a double-whammy: both promote disengagement from the environment in general and from other people in particular. Being depressed, you have little incentive to be with other people, because the pleasure is not there."

and

"Controlling depression and anxiety is quite a balancing act. If you can get yourself absorbed and engaged in relaxing activities, you might be able to accomplish both at the same time."

I have definitely noticed that my anxiety is triggered repeatedly throughout the day at work, which feeds into my depression. I take Xanax to help control it, with some success. Understanding this connection between anxiety and depression helps me to better see what's happening when I'm falling into despair, which helps me to control the extent to which I fall down, and which helps me better my chances of quickly getting back on my feet again.

Mid-February Monte Report

Well, it's time for another edition of The Monte Report, and I guess I'm doing marginally better than I was at the time of my last posting. After seeing how poorly I was doing my doctor increased the dosage of my Seroquel by a factor of seven. That seems to have been a somewhat helpful move, although the drug makes me very drowsy and so it's even harder to get up in the morning than it used to be.

Yesterday I saw the movie that I mentioned earlier, the one I'd been looking forward to for about a year. I didn't really like it. (The movie is called "Jumper" and it is very loosely based on one of my favorite books.) So now I'm in the market for something new to look forward to. (I'm open to suggestions.)

I've picked up a book on depression (called "Coping With Depression -- From Catch-22 to Hope", by Jon G. Allen) that I started a couple years ago and never finished, in the hopes that it will do what the title promises and instill some sense of hope. In the past I've quoted some passages here, and I may start doing that again. In fact, here are some snippets from the introduction to the book:

"Understanding why it can be so hard to recover from depression may make the recovery process less painful. . . . When you understand the challenges of the recovery process, you will be able to adopt a more compassionate attitude toward yourself."

and

"If you are having a hard time climbing out of depression, you might have been given some or all of this advice: Be active. Have fun. Think positively. Don't isolate yourself from other people. . . . Here's the rub: all the things you need to do to recover from depresssion are made difficult by the symptoms of depression."

and

"The fundamental catch-22: to recover from depression you must have hope, but depression spawns hopelessness."

This all points to the notion that depression is difficult, though not impossible, to recover from. The degree of difficulty is what seems insurmountable to me. I know that it's plausible that I can recover, but I don't know if I have what it takes to recover. And I feel like I'm well down that slippery slope that ends in suicide. The task at hand is to find something to grasp onto that gives me the promise of hope.

Early February Monte Report

The past couple weeks have turned out to be extremely difficult. The new thyroid medication is not the miracle drug I was hoping it would be. There's a movie coming out next week that I want to see, but otherwise I feel as though there's nothing to look forward to in life. I try to look forward to things like spending time with friends; new books to read; the coming Spring and Summer when I can once again spend quality time out in the woods; that next bowl of ice cream; and my fantasy of one day moving back into my old apartment that overlooked the river -- but it doesn't really work. If I was in a better state of mind I'm sure I could find things to look forward to other than a silly movie. It seems imperative though that I find something else to really look forward to.

I saw my psychiatrist yesterday, and he theorized that something traumatic may have happened to me in my early childhood that left me so vulnerable to feeling abandoned. Feelings of abandonment are a key component of my depression, especially where figures of authority or respect are concerned. I can crash if my boss (who I really look up to) leaves work early, for example. (Sometimes my mood crashes when he simply goes to lunch). I know it's irrational, but a part of me ends up feeling as though it's my fault he's leaving, that I've done something wrong to drive him away. It's intriguing to think it may be connected to a traumatic abandonment of some sort when I was a toddler.

One key to coping with my depression, according to my psychiatrist, is learning to "detach" myself from the feelings -- to be able to step back and observe them from a more neutral perspective. It's actually not a new suggestion, but I'm newly reconsidering it, and how I might accomplish it. I've got a zillion self-help books -- you'd think it would be easy to turn my depression into a study exercise. With just a single lousy movie to look forward to, maybe I'll somehow manage to quickly learn to step back from the negative and become a neutral observer of myself, just to have something to keep me going beyond next week.