So lamictal then I assume. Yeah, that isn't too effective taken by itself. Made my brain feel fuzzy. Those of us with long-term clinical depression and the resulting soul-crushing apathy (..and depersonalization and disconnectedness and everything that comes with it) need a cocktail of different medications it seems.

I only ever felt true, lasting motivation when I was on a super high dose of Wellbutrin and Adderall AND Seroquel (to cancel out the wellbutrin-induced mania + panic attacks). But antipsychotics are extremely expensive, and psychiatrists are expensive, and it takes so much time and so much tinkering over the course of many months or years to find something that makes your broken brain click back into place-- I can understand why most of us just don't want to bother. Especially if you don't even have health insurance. It is so difficult to find or do anything that can even make a dent in severe depression. I don't think non-sufferers will ever understand it. It's like being encased within several layers of fog and mud. And it literally changes your brain physically over time, too, so it's not as if we're all just being over-dramatic and not trying hard enough to bulldoze through 583,544 layers of apathy and depression with forced cheerfulness.

(The most crushing thing, I think, are those occasional moments of sudden, searing lucidity where you have a string of epiphanies and the barest spark of.. something, I guess, while knowing it will not last, and that you will forget by morning and repeat the cycle endlessly.)

And antidepressants usually don't affect anxiety, so, there's that too. And doctors assume you're a drug addict and refuse if you ask for an anti anxiety that actually WORKS without side effects or grogginess like Klonopin. Ugh.

Very true. Standing on the ledge of a building is not nearly as easy as it seems in your head. The second you see the ground and all the cars and lights your brain and body start screaming at you to get down, nearly overriding your desire to die. I can understand why carbon monoxide suicide (using camping stoves or whatever) methods are more popular.. You can just go to sleep. But yes, any method involves quite a bit of preparation.
I really wish assisted suicide were legal in more states.

Depersonalization is the woooooorst. Like you're just an automaton. There is seemingly nothing that helps it either. No pill or anything. And meditation (and other things that normal, well-meaning but misguided people might suggest) makes it worse. It feels especially awful when it happens in a very large and crowded public place. There is this almost sinister, overwhelming feeling of wrongness during, too that's just undulating beneath everything and spreading under your skin. Impossible to explain to anyone either.


Edit-- I may be lucky in that my depression has lessened over the past few years; my main problems now are the OCD and body dysmorphia thing and the paralyzing, delusional anxiety that comes with those things. Also does anyone else find that they feel much worse during certain months? I'm not talking about seasonal depression necessarily. Like with me for instance I feel the worst in November, February and July. Every single year. Makes no sense.

Body dysmorphia? You're attractive.

Thanks Troll buddy. My first vacation in 11 years, and you'd think the friggin world was gonna end. The owner even called a meeting to go over everything I need to get done before I leave this afternoon.

lol

Yeah, I'll get right on all that.

For some reason most complaints by companies we produce stuff for come in on Friday afternoon. Thank God I don't have a supervisor or something so I just say '**** them', still go home early and deal with it next week.
I love my job.

Well, thanks, but the dysmorphia thing tends to have nothing to do with objective reality. (Uh, not that I honestly have any clue what I look like to others IRL objectively) It's likely just another manifestation of my ocd/depression seeing as it started at around the same time.

Lamotrigine, yeah, and I think I was on Klonopin for a while (didn't do much as far as I could tell). I was on Ritalin as well, which helped some with my horrendous memory and concentration, but then I just kinda... stopped taking it when it ran out after the first few refills. Don't know if it was still having any real effect by the end, but it certainly wasn't making all that noticeable a difference in the first place.

I don't think I have it going on like that, or at least not to that extent. It's more like I have my tiny little, private, bubble world in my head that doesn't have much space for others or issues from "real life", so I keep them at a distance to the point that it's highly difficult to build connections to people or understand/feel/grok how important are things like having a job, maintaining my health, or... property taxes. Nor do I even want to deal with the perceived trauma of embracing them and altering my world view (assuming it's even possible).

But that **** is constantly invading my little bubble to the point that I can either have a nervous breakdown or start repressing the emotions and forgetting reality as best I can. It basically trains me to do anything to disconnect, be it turn on music, play a video game, or whatever. Over the years I've developed the "skill" to repress automatically though. Sometimes those feelings I repress will be strong enough that I'll almost feel something like that rising feeling of impending doom, and without even thinking about it it'll just die all by itself. Like my subconscious has become so proficient at suffocating reality that it's almost sentient in its ability to operate without my own input. When that happens I can almost feel an alien mental process going on in my head that I don't really understand. (Kinda scary tbh, since I honestly don't know what emotions are digging around in my subconscious, just waiting to take the bottom out of my mind.)

So I end up feeling a constant numbness and disconnection from pretty much everything. Why concern myself with garnished wages or having almost no real human connections when it all just feels like the TV is talking to me? And I don't mean that in a literal sense, but for all the impression much of the world leaves on me I might as well just be watching television. I guess that's depersonalization? I don't know.

For what it's worth I'd hit it till it came out your back. Just sayin'.

Do you mind saying how old you are, Bats?

Just turned 31. You?

Oh I see. Ritalin was just okay for me, but I only had a low-dose short-release version, so maybe that's why. I would have hoped that in 2017 there would be a wider array of options. But we can't have nice things here on earth.

I relate to the bolded quite a bit; it's actually probably fortunate that the brain can so easily disassociate and compartmentalize/repress any and every arising emotion if the alternative is overwhelming suicidal misery or some other equally distressing equivalent that we have no way of dealing with. Obviously it's not healthy to do so 24/7, but.. it is a coping mechanism I suppose, like any other. A lot of what you described does sound like depersonalization btw; I just described it really weirdly in my other post because of course I did.

And I'm sure there are in fact plenty of horrifying things milling around in your subconscious but that likely applies to most of us. (Especially if you're David Lynch. Clearly the solution here is to become a filmmaker or avant-garde performance artist. I'm not ''wasting my life away'' or ''eating stale cookies on the floor while crying'', I'm merely embodying society's collective disillusionment!) I do wonder if those of us who have quite a bit of things repressed will eventually inevitably break open in a spectacularly embarassing, awful way-- I mean, you hear stories sometimes of totally normal, successful, well-adjusted adults who just abruptly have a meltdown one day and wind up committed, after all.