Marquis De Sade said:
If you're diagnosed with clinical depression, is there really nothing you can do to feel better on your own other than medication?
Some will doubtless disagree with me, but I'm personally not wild about meds. I was on zoloft for 5 years, and it never did much for me. I was actually on it during a period when I was in the worst depression I ever experienced, so I'm inclined to say they don't really work for me. When an episode's hit me, there's nothing I could do to make it stop. Eventually, they just run their course. In the episodes I've had, pretty much the only thing that's made me feel better (at least temporarily) is watching movies. It's about the only thing I have the energy to do, although when it's really bad I don't have the energy to do anything at all, I just stay in bed.
I eventually just stopped taking my meds cold turkey. This was probably not the smartest move, as it left me light headed and nauseous for about a week, but I don't regret going off of it. I did it that way just because I was being stubborn and didn't feel like going to my psychiatrist and asking for her to help wean me off of it, I think I figured she'd have tried to talk me out of it (later on, I spoke to her and she told me she would have assisted me without trying to convince me otherwise).
And, what exactly, are you depressed about?
It's not going to be the same for any two individuals, so I can only speak for myself. It's never been about specific events with me as it is about specific events get me down, and this sense of being down then mutates into something much bigger and much more insidious.
The worst depression I ever had was when I was 18, a few months after I graduated high school. There were several things working against me, the biggest being that come August, all my friends started going off to college and here I was, still in the Valley, working a dead-end job, with utterly no clue what I wanted to do with myself. I had tried to avoid the knowledge for most of the summer that this was inevitably going to happen, but there it was smacking me in the face. That July, my grandfather passed on, and he had been my father-figure for most of my life (my dad left when I was 7, and our relationship is tense, to put it mildly). I wasn't dealing particularly well with that, but I didn't show it as the rest of my immediate family was really coming apart over it, and I figured one of us had to hold it together. This had the side-effect of my family thinking I may not have needed as much support getting through things as they did, so most of the attention from my mom and her sister in those months was devoted to keeping my grandmother from falling apart; I sort of got lost in the shuffle. I was also doing a lot of drugs, which couldn't have been helpful to my emotional state, and all of it basically combined to make a perfect storm.
So, I just gave up. I looked at the despair that had been lurking around me for a couple months, and basically said 'if you want me, take me'. And it did. And it then it became something no longer about specific issues, it became a general sense of hopelessness. I was in my own pocket universe, and pretty much nothing got through it. In the rare times I went outside (either the market or Blockbuster were the only places I went) I was conscious of the fact that there were people around me, but I felt like I was on a slightly different frequency than anyone else, just a bit out of step, and they weren't really there. I felt like there'd been a global nuclear war and I just sort of wandered around this wasteland as the last person on earth.
If you have any additional questions, feel free to ask me. Something like this, it can be helpful to get multiple perspectives, because everyone experiences it differently.
