Metablog

Life is really fucking hard sometimes. Really goddamn hard. My life has been nothing but pain for quite awhile now. There are moments where it’s enjoyable, I suppose. But every time I finish an activity, when my mind has a chance to recenter for a second—even during lulls in otherwise happy conversations—it’s right back to that hopelessness, that apathy, that feeling of being paralyzed and overwhelmed and sometimes even anxious, even panicky. It’s the feeling I live with.

I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist for six months now, and we’ve tried several different medications, and none of them have really worked, except maybe for one, Lamictal, that we had to stop because of some side effects. (There are still a few options to try, though.)

I have what they call treatment-resistant depression. It’s a formidable adversary. I’m in the 15-20% of people with major depression who aren’t helped by the first few medications they try. I have a few bipolar II-type symptoms that complicate treatment decisions. I have many ADHD-like symptoms, (though a clear diagnosis doesn’t seem to be possible in my case). I have delayed sleep phase disorder. (The prevalence is around 0.15%, lucky me, though it’s much higher in the teens and tends to get better over the years, usually. I’m pretty young yet, so it could improve on its own.) DSPD is both very hard to treat and very disruptive to normal lifestyles. In fact, in the cases where it doesn’t respond to treatment, where symptoms are moderate to severe, it’s starting to be regarded as an occupational disability.

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I took a methylphenadate pill this evening. I feel like I’ve been un-zombified. Night and day difference. I’ve been on Concerta in the past (that’s why I still had some) but it didn’t really seem to work for me. I wonder why it’s working now. Could be a combination of medications, or it could be I’m observing myself differently and so I see the difference now where before I was just blind to it. Or it could be something else. That’s the problem with these damn medications.

Well, it’s still not an ideal option, because of sleep and heart rate issues. But now that I know it makes such a huge difference, maybe I’ll see about getting something else that’ll work better, and maybe I’ll actually start blogging again.

I fixed the arrow keys and made some other minor improvements to my Tetris game. I’m not bothering with release notes. Bleah.

Welcome to part two of this three part series on depression. (Index to other parts.) This would be part of part 1 except that Wordpress decided it wanted to cut off my post after it was halfway through.

Solomon, of course, faces severe apathy at the worst of his depression. I think the extent of this is best illustrated by a quote from the book:

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This is part one of a three part series on depression. (Index to other parts.)

I’ve not been very active recently on this blog. I’m not entirely sure why. I’ve had the same problem with my other interests and chores, too. They’ve mostly been remaining undone.

I have had a low level of energy, true. I’ve had trouble focusing. But those are just symptoms, too. What is the cause? How can I make sense of this state? Is it ADHD? Is it depression?

For a long time, I thought it was ADHD. So many of the symptoms fit. But the remedies don’t seem to, and the accounts of people with ADHD didn’t really strike a chord with me at all. So after a while, I began to suspect that depression would more accurately describe my problem. (Especially after I was diagnosed with depression by a psychiatrist.)

So, a few days ago, I had a truly marvelous and unprecented idea. Why not read about depression? After all, I realized, I really didn’t know that much about it. Despite having lived with it since I was a teenager, I had somehow never actually read any book about it. So I strolled over to Barnes and Noble to take a look.

I picked up a book called The Noonday Demon, by Andrew Solomon. I read a couple dozen pages, and found it compelling enough to buy. (At $17 for ~550 pages, it’s not a bad value, either.) Solomon writes quite poetically, and though I found his anecdotes tended to draw on a bit excessively, they did a good job of illustrating what it feels like to go through depression. His factual writing is elegant and interesting, and taught me quite a bit about depression that I’m very glad to know.

(If you’re interested in the book, you might like to know that it covers, primarily, unipolar major depression, with many mentions and a few discussions of bipolar disorder. It doesn’t really cover atypical depression or dysthymia.)

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It’s been two months since my last post. The post before that was a few days earlier, and the post before that two months earlier. I kept a diary for maybe three or four years before I switched to this blog, and I noticed that I tended to have four or so months of pretty consistent posting followed by a few months with almost nothing. Cyclical. Well, I guess we’ll see if the cycle has reached its bloggy springtime again, or if I won’t feel up to posting for another long time.

Here’s what I’ve been up to: Continue reading »

I discuss linguistics in an Unfogged comment thread, where I am graciously tolerated for my foolish, blinkered, and obtuse comments. You, on the other hand, might find them a bit more palatable. I start off trying to establish the inefficiency of linguistic diversity, but then much of the thread is me making the case that the relationship between phonemes and meaning, and phonemes and affect, is arbitrary. Sapir-Whorf is mentioned.

Somnolent depression. Also called “retarded depression”. I’ve never heard of these terms before. I wonder if they’re in clinical use, or if some pop psychology snuck into the article.

So, I’ve been thinking lately about apathy. I’ve been thinking that it’s probably not really just ADHD. It’s mainly depression. ADHD just helps reinforce it. ADHD is the short term, “I’m looking at a problem and can’t make myself focus on it” and depression is the longer-term “I’ve failed at making any progress on problems recently and I feel bad about it” that keeps me from trying again or shifting focus to a meta-problem. So I need to find some medication to help me with the larger aspect of it. Maybe Zoloft?

So, I’ve been doing pretty bad with the ADHD recently. I’ve recently started recording how much work I get done, which is a pretty good proxy for how bad my ADHD is acting up, and really easy to measure objectively, to boot. And just yesterday I started on a new sleep schedule. I now go to bed when I feel like it and get up when I feel like it. I have delayed sleep phase syndrome, so my sleep hours will rotate throughout the day over a period of about two weeks, I’m guessing. I don’t actually know exactly how much my circadian rhythm is elongated, but I guess I’m going to find out. I went to bed at 22:30 yesterday, and will probably go to bed at about 0:30 or 1:00 today. But it’ll take a while before I catch up on all my sleep and then before I see what my schedule settles out to being. (It’s great that my employers are OK with this arrangement. I’ll just come into the office during normal hours as much as possible, and work the rest of the time during off-hours.) So I’ll be tracking how much regular sleep helps my symptoms. (And we’ll see if I start blogging more regularly.)

Incidentally, I know that light therapy helps with my symptoms, but I don’t know exactly how much. Now that I’m able to follow my natural sleep phase, I’ll be able to measure it.