American Depression

19 million — Number of American adults who will experience depression this year.

27.2 — Average number of workdays missed annually by Americans with major depression.

Source: Health Magazine, July/August 2007

Wow, on one hand you want to ask, what’s going on in this country that so many of us are so depressed?  On the other hand, you want to say, no wonder there’s so many of those annoying commercials with those bouncing bubble people who are frowny or smiley.  Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t happy because we’ve been told to expect to be happier and have more.  I wonder what the statistics are for other countries.

The Gratitude Challenge

gratitude

a feeling of thankfulness and appreciation

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.

Apparently, studies show that grateful people tend to be happier people, or so I’ve been reading. Actually, someone in my Living Well class mentioned it too, but I’m always skeptical so I’ve been checking it out online. O.K. I’ve been checking out Gratitude Journals online and that’s how I found out there had been actual studies that suggest that grateful people are happier people.

‘’With gratitude, there is virtually no down side,’’ said McCullough, who has been working on the Research Project on Gratitude and Thankfulness: Dimensions and Perspectives of Gratitude.

And there’s a major upside: “Most grateful people have low rates of depression and negative moods — but high self-esteem.’’ ["Routine of Gratitude" -- MySelfDevelopment]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about about the whole “power of positive thinking” thing, especially after Buttercup went through her “post one positive thing a day” phase and then I discovered Meredith’s blog with her daily graditudes. At first, while admiring their ability to be happy and positive, I was a bit resentful and pretty certain that I could never and should never approach such a project. I am after all kind of a Wednesday Adams in my own mind.

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The Power Of Positive Thinking

A lot of us make up our mind whether we’re going to like or dislike something before we ever experience whatever it is.

Be honest with yourself for a minute. As a kid, you made a lot of judgement calls about various foods based on their names or what they looked like or whether or not someone else like them. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like rhubarb because it has such a funny name and all the cartoon characters such didn’t think liver or Brussels sprouts were a good idea. Spinach looked a lot like seaweed to me. I didn’t dare try sour cream until college.

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Big Butts & Accomplishments

I guess you could tell I’ve been a little out of sorts for the last week. I’ve actually been mulling over some grumpiness since my last therapy visit on the 4th. I went to my session feeling kind of proud of myself for everything I’d accomplished since the last session about a month before when I’d basically decided that I wasn’t going to let my depression “define” me. I had come to the conclusion around that time that my depression was reinforcing itself and I wanted to put a stop to that.

And I feel as if I’ve come a long way…or at least a way. I’ve been making a constant effort to clean my house, something that never seems to be done and never seems to be close to done and seems to be more like one step forward two steps back. (I still can’t figure out how my living room got so messy since I was only awake in it for about 2 hours yesterday and don’t recall doing anything in those 2 hours. It was clean on Sunday. And how does one person make so many dirty dishes and so much dirty clothes?)

And I had signed up for a couple of classes/lectures — one on Seasonal Affective Disorder and a six-week thing for people with chronic illnesses. I was very excited about the prospect of getting Pugly into the next training class and eventually agility training.

Really, except for my frustration with the fibro pain and my problems with communication with my GP and the Rheumatologist, I was in a fairly good mood overall as far as the direction I was heading. I thought I was making good progress and I was ready for my pat on the back and some support and sympathy for the communication issues.

Clearly, that’s not what happened.

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Sucking It Up With Help…Finally

The appointment with my GP yesterday afternoon went better than the one in the morning. I always feel better when I actually see her and not just her staff or a nurse practitioner. I’m just going to have to be more insistent about that in the future; I don’t care how busy she is. She was far more open-minded and understanding than the Rheumatologist, especially when I told her that I didn’t feel like I was getting the kind of care I felt I needed from him. I told her that I felt that his basic message to me was “Suck it up.”

Oh, yes, I get what he was saying about how we need to treat the depression and the sleep disorder and that will help the pain overall. I’m not stupid. I do understand the connection all of these things have to each other and how it’s easy to get caught in some sort of whirlpool drowning effect where the pain makes me more depressed which affects my sleep which causes more pain which makes me more depressed and so on… I got it and I told her all of that. However, I also said that I can’t foresee “sucking it up” if things continue as they are because things are only getting worse and not changing anything isn’t going to help matters as I see them. Certainly, I don’t see my depression getting better or my sleep improving if nothing is changed.

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26 Million Minutes

Over the weekend I read a well-written article in Health magazine by a woman suffering from an autoimmune disease. What I particularly liked was her thoughts on the inner-frustration, the fact that unlike other patients of well-known illnesses like cancer, you don’t have something growing inside of you to be angry about, to blame, to focus on; the thing attacking your body is you. It’s your own body that’s harming you and hurting you and slowly killing you in some form or the other and for the most part no one knows why or how to stop it. You have no one to blame but yourself and you don’t even get a ribbon or a badge or a parade or a march. In fact, most of the time, you’ll struggle to find a doctor who’ll give you the right diagnosis, if you find one that believes you at all — like a flashback to the days when PMS was all in our “pretty little heads” and the doctor would pat us on the head and smile patronizingly.

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State of Mind

Yesterday I met with the psychiatrist for a med check. This is the first time I’ve done so since 2003, which if anyone is paying attention, means is the first time since I moved to Maine. My GP increased my anti-depressant to the max dose in early 2005 when I complained that it wasn’t working any more and that boost helped for a little bit but I don’t think that they’ve been working well for the last 6 to 9 months again so she had me referred to a psychiatrist since my regular shrink is just a nurse practitioner and can’t prescribe meds.

I already like this guy better than the mild mannered Mr. Bean-look-a-like I saw once every 6 months for 15 minutes in New Orleans. He certainly asked me a lot more questions than Mr. Bean ever did about my childhood, which is when the depression started. He asked me questions about my behaviors then and now about how I think, about why I think the way I do, about my family, about my physical health, etc. Plus, because his office is associated with my GP’s office, he had access through the computer system to all of my medical records since 2004 and all the ones I’d brought from New Orleans and they’d uploaded so he could reference it all and ask me questions.

He had me fill out another one of those questionnaires about how the depression has been affecting my life the last two weeks. You know, how’s my sleep, do I want to hurt myself, do I have interest in my hobbies and interests, is it affecting my work, etc., etc. Apparently, I’ve improved just a tad from a month ago — it’s probably the clean house and light therapy, though I didn’t mention either. (We did discuss that I will need to use the light therapy consistently from September through April though.)

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Feeling Accomplished

When I left work on Thursday, knowing that I had to take a vacation day on Friday to wait for the cable repair guy (who by the way didn’t show up until Saturday), I made a deal with myself. I made an intensive to-do list and told myself that I wasn’t getting a slouch day just because I wasn’t going to work; plus I promised myself that if I got everything on the list done this weekend, I would buy myself a brand new 30G iPod — something I’ve been wanting but couldn’t justify buying myself.

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Lobbing Lemons

Someone once told me that when life sends you lemons, lob them right back.

It’s been an incredibly frustrating and stressful week.

Sunday for about 3 hours or so, my cable and thus internet was out. Because I am on-call for my job, I require the use of the internet at a moment’s notice to be able to dial into the computers at my workplace so I can fix the problem. It actually is an emergency when such a thing occurs and it affects people’s lives. I take it quite seriously. When I talked to their support people then, they said that it was an area thing or rather that someone else in my area was having a problem too and that they were sending someone out to fix it. It was fixed that afternoon.

Monday morning when I woke up, there was no cable or internet. I called again. They said they’d send someone out. I have no idea if they did because there was a huge electrical storm across the state that afternoon and that’s when all kinds of weirdness started at work. When I got home, there was not cable or internet and the message on the support line said that my town was experiencing outages.

Tuesday morning when I woke up, there was no cable or internet, but there was no more message on the support line, so I talked to the support people again and they said they’d send someone out.

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Feeling Down

I have been feeling more and more generally depressed lately, just a general overall sadness not attached to anything in particular. Nothing I can blame or focus on, though if I wanted to, there are lots of things I could let myself dwell on. I try not to dwell on things I can’t do anything about or I don’t know how to fix. Mostly, it’s just this sense of hopelessness that seems to be hanging about me like a cloak and even though I can manage to smile and joke with my co-workers or the puppy daycare folks, I always feel like I’m one or two seconds away from bursting out in tears for no real reason at all.

During my last visit to the general practitioner, I mentioned that I didn’t think my antidepressants were working anymore. Since I’m maxed out on the dosage, it’s been decided that I need to see a psychiatrist to change the med on top of my regular therapist, a nurse practitioner. Of course, I can’t get in to see the shrink until August 20th.

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