Depression – Page 12 – Vraxx

The Foods of Depression

OK this will be a bit of an off the wall post stemming from a few random conversations I saw on reddit/r/depression. For folks who have never experienced clinical depression it might be hard to imagine the severity of motivation loss. Someone raised the question, what foods do you try to cook when you literally don’t even want to crawl out of bed. This got me thinking since cooking is one of the other coping tools I’ve used to try to keep myself active.

So in no particular order here were some of the foods I realized I cooked often when I experienced the most severe episodes of depression.

Pancakes w/fruit — Usually blueberries or bananas. Probably as it’s a comfort food, and easy to make. Go easy on the syrup and other heavy sugars and it’s not terrible to make this while depressed.

Somen/Cold Saimin — Sitting around waiting for something to boil or warm up becomes a chore in itself so I often cooked cold, almost ready to serve dishes. Boil noodles ahead of time, chop your ingredients and lunch/dinner becomes less daunting a task.

Spaghetti — This one is a bit of a mixed bag. The actual process of making it can be involved (semi home made pasta sauce etc) but using a food sealer to create ready to boil servings of pasta and some pre-cooked noodles cuts down on the dinner time waiting and it’s a fun comfort food.

Cucumbers/Carrots/Beets/Lettuce — Always on hand. I’ll be open and admit that when my depression is at its worst I have a really hard time eating veggies and fruits so I’ve always tried to keep vegetables that I can eat raw or throw into a quick salad. Keep one or two good dressings and it gets a little easier to deal with meal time and healthy eating.

Bad things I still wound up eating, things I’d avoid however, heavy sugars, baked goods, things with a lot of sodium. It’s really easy to start drowning yourself in sugary things and canned foods but with my hypertension it’s something I had to really be aware of. A lot of those things gave me headaches or kept me up at night.

Sci-Fi Distractions — Finding Escape

So one of the things that’s helped me here and there is being able to get away from news, getting away from gritty dramas on TV that mostly center around high stress situations. After a while I really became numb watching all the cop dramas and medical shows which almost always involved death on a practically episodic basis.

While still having drama elements, I’ve found that Sci-Fi programming has often provided a better release for me. Maybe because of the fantasy aspect of it, or the possibilities of an unmade future. SyFy channel (I still hate their rebranding) has actually done very well lately with three great shows. Dark Matter (based on graphic novel) and Killjoys. Dark Matter’s tone is a bit more heavy but raises a lot of interesting social questions within its storytelling. Identity, choice, what it means to be human, each of those elements is raised throughout the shows current two seasons (season two airing now). Killjoys on the other hand is a bit like a Firefly universe. A small close knit crew, a broader big-bad story, megacorporations.

Though the new season won’t air until 2017, The Expanse, based on the novel series of the same name is a more hardcore space-opera but done extremely well. I would watch with a bit of caution as it can be a bit more emotionally invested.

All three series were engrossing enough for me to keep locked in and helped as an escape from some of the less pleasant things going on in my life right now.

Thank You Captain Obvious…

http://gizmodo.com/an-algorithm-can-tell-if-youre-depressed-just-by-lookin-1785529915

As a colorblind photographer I had to roll my eyes at this one. While I’m sure there may be a bias towards certain filters I found some of the conclusions to be a little insulting. I’ve shot black and while and used filters that tend towards that both before and during my depression. On the other hand I’ve used brighter,might contrast stuff while in the worst of my depression.

While certainly darker tones and colors are common in subjects that depict depression or sadness I don’t feel like you can identify it through an algorithm.

Routine and Rut

Something that’s occasionally hard to describe about depression is the feeling of life being one big loop. Had Nine Inch Nails’ track Every Day Is Exactly the Same playing in the back of my mind for a while lately. Guess the routine and motivational issues I’ve had this week have been particularly difficult.

Trying to adjust my diet a bit with more fruits and vitamin C as I feel I haven’t gotten much in the way of sunlight and exercise. Even as I start off this 3-day weekend (Yay Admissions Day) I realize even my days off are sort of a basic routine of run errands, clean and try to work on coping tools. Hopefully besides this blog and other side projects I can occasionally change things up more going forward.

Interesting New Medical Approach for Major Depression

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/17/health/ketamine-depression-treatment/index.html

I have to admit this is not a treatment option I would have imagined. My only real knowledge of ketamine is as it relates to helping people suffering from opioid addiction. For what it’s worth I can understand the idea of using it for improve neuroplasticity in patients but I do worry that the sensitivity of users and the impact as relates to opioid resistance is a delicate balance.

The Black Hole of Anhedonia

Anhedonia might be the worst word I’ve had to learn in the last two years. It’s textbook definition is an inability to feel pleasure, though I think it’s more apt to call it joylessness.

Read any forum or group on depression and you’ll see typical patterns. People who express that they no longer feel much of anything. I viewed it as being emotionally flatlined. It wasn’t that I was happy or sad specifically I simply couldn’t feel much of anything positive. You can have so many things in your life, a good job, a wife and family and yet depression and anhedonia can still turn all of that into a joyless series of day to day tasks.

Painful as it sounds, being aware of depression and your own sense of joylessness doesn’t automatically make it go away. Often I worry that the things I do throughout the day are essentially just me going through the motions. Smiling when I need to because that’s what people expect. I do have a few moments of what feel like happiness but it’s been a juggling act.

I know that motion or not, I have to put the effort in to at least try to feel something other than the flat emotionless state that has become too common for me. It isn’t easy and there are certainly days I just feel like giving up. Amid all that though I try to find at least one good thing that happened per day and remind myself that I can still feel things, it just takes a bit more of an active role for me now.

Blame Game and Self-Reflection

One of the most difficult things with depression and especially depression and a divorce is I found myself reflecting a lot about all the things that went wrong and my inability to change them.

I don’t ever contend that I was blameless in the failure of my marriage. Not understanding the scale and scope of my depression was a huge part of it. My own abrasive personality not withstanding. It took a lot of sessions for me to really gradually get out of the blame game loop and start looking backwards at things I couldn’t change.

The thing is there’s still positives to be had by self reflection if taken in the right framework. It isn’t that you should dwell on self-blame and the past. Everything that was amiss I now try to look at as things I should work on to change going forward. Accepting that has been a struggle but it’s one I continue to work at every day. I try not to internalize my frustrations and seek outlets, not holding in when I disagree with things as much. Some days it feels like too-little-too-late but I remind myself that as long as I’m still here, as long as I am still trying there is no such thing as too late to improve myself.

Guns and Depression (Serious Topic)

This post is going to be a bit serious and possibly rub folks the wrong way so if this topic bothers you please opt out from reading this particular post. I will state for the record that I am a registered gun owner and have been a hunter. I don’t believe in trophy hunting I’ve only ever hunted game I intended to eat. Mostly that meant wild boar.

Depression and guns are often in the news in the worst possible ways because folks only ever connect the two when someone has committed suicide, or gone on a gun rampage. It’s a very serious topic and I don’t take gun ownership lightly in the least. I was taught about guns at an early age and more importantly I was drilled in gun safety from the get go. I don’t think guns are a status symbol and I was never into the fad of AR15 frames and the modification levels you could get into.

When I hit my major depressive episode stemming from the divorce my close friend who is also a hunter agreed that we would coordinate for my weapons to be housed elsewhere. For me that was simple I didn’t have a large collection and things could be packed up pretty easily. For others with large collections should could be problematic but there are ways of doing it. Things that I genuinely wish people who are facing depression, particularly if there is even a hint of suicidal thoughts, considering a safety-person. They don’t have to store ALL your guns if you have a large collection but consider things like getting rid of your ammo, firing pings, bolts to your weapons so that you can’t become a threat to yourself or others.

It is humbling and a lot to ask of any friend but if you ask me it’s one of the most helpful things you can do while you try to sort out your situation and get help for depression/suicidal thoughts.

Depression and the 365 Photo Projects (Self Reflection)

It’s not often that I think back about too many of the unfinished projects I’ve had but one stuck out with me. Like a lot of folks, the idea of a 365 photo a day project was interesting but it wasn’t until I started taking a few that I realized my life was pretty isolated. It wasn’t that there weren’t people in my life. There was my now ex-wife, family, our dog. No, it was more a self imposed isolation, or perhaps isolation of heart would be a more apt description.

Hadn’t really thought about how ever day, every shot started to remind me that my days were a loop. When Monday, and Saturday all look and feel the same you start to question what’s the point to the things you do. Depression creeps into your life in strange and painful ways and unfortunately that project, left incomplete by likely 200 days was a subtle peek at my depression that I recognized too late. Hindsight is 20-20 though and here I am now looking back on that project and seeing not my former artistic eye but a painful trail of things not so positive.

I doubt I’ll ever get into projects like that again, ones drive by popularity and trends. I used the phrase “my heart’s just not in it” a lot towards the end of my marriage. Here on out I need to try to find those things that my heart is in. Even if the projects are painful, long and never get seen.

Stigma and the “What to do now problem”

Saying you’re going through a divorce is already hard for most people (especially folks who haven’t gone through it) to process let alone deal with. You compound that with saying that you’ve been fighting clinical depression and the deer in headlights things becomes self evident. It’s a one-two punch to the face that for most folks how to give empathy in that situation is alien.

I won’t try to pussy foot around it, when everything first happen to me I felt like a powder keg. I know I pushed away friends, partly because I never felt like I could just say what was on my mind, partly out of fear that the most negative sides of my personality were just going to nuke any friendships I had left. There’s an even worse side that people interacting with someone with depression don’t really quite make the connection to though. Outward stigmatism towards depression starts to show up in small phrases and reactions. The usual platitudes and the ‘I’m so sorry’ are typical but for a lot of folks, I’d get a “Don’t be sad” and they’ll proceed to veer off the conversation.

For me it wasn’t until therapy and mental health groups that I realized the only real thing someone with depression wants to hear is that someone understands you’re in pain. Depression isn’t rational, so the usual platitudes while well meaning often just fall flat. For me the topical shifts were simply a reminder that no one wanted to talk about the elephant in the room, no one felt they could say anything. In some ways I realize looking back that’s not fair to them, they weren’t involved in the process of the divorce, they can’t perceive my depression.

The paradox about seeking out your friends during depression is that you almost have to pre-train your friends to understand how to react to you when you are in a depressive episode. If there was one thing I could get folks to understand it’s that there’s a distinction between being sad, being depressed and clinical depression. Being sad, we all go through those moments. Being depressed is a normal response to loss/grief etc. Clinical depression is a span of time in which your emotions are almost always negative (I won’t delve into bi polar in this case). If you’ve read through this post as someone who knows someone suffering from depression, please understand that your friend or loved one may be experiencing a sense of joylessness that isn’t just recently triggered, it may have been going on for the last year or more. They’ll have heard all the usual “be happy” advice and it hasn’t worked them. 90% of the time they just want you to be ok with hearing them out.