Monday, August 6, 2012

The second part

I may have mentioned this before, but people who don't suffer from depression don't --- can't really understand it.

Right now I'm in a relatively sweet situation, all things considered. Yet, I still get moments where I feel that, that nothing matters and it would be better to just sleep 'til death.

I'm on medication, so it's just moments and not days, and I'm moderately quick to take a hammer to such thoughts - knowing I have depression helps in recognizing these thought patterns which are outside my agenda.

It's a little bit like if, say, your arm was broken.
And you were ashamed of the fact you had a broken arm.
And people told you to just get over it, to get a grip.
And you wanted to get better and do well,
And the pain wasn't so bad anyway,
But you still couldn't get a grip and things kept slipping from your fingers.

It's kind of like that.

2 comments:

Ben Oliver said...

So, something is broken and it will never be fixed. Like if you have a broken arm that didn't heal or healed wrong, the pain never really goes away but it can be managed with medicine.

...

My wife is learning psychology and something she occasionally tells me is that while some conditions can be managed through schedule, routine and discipline, some things are so extreme that they really do have to be medicated. (Though medication is good in some lighter cases for limited periods of time to help a condition sufferer establish a routine at first.)

Esa Karjalainen said...

Yup yup. The thing about depression, it's very anti-discipline. Simple things like diet and exercise can actually help too - it's brain chemistry based, so if you tweak your system you can improve, well, everything. The (annoying) thing is, though, it's easy to gain downward momentum with depression. Seriously, I'm getting a hang of managing it, though.