Mental Health The Clinical Depression thread

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I’m amazed none of y’all have posted on this already, so I’m starting a WikiPost on the subject.

Eventually, this WikiPost should feature peer-reviewed research references and citations, general paths for treatment, and distinguishing clinical depression from other symptoms.

I don’t have the energy for starting on that by myself just yet.

The thread, of course, can be just like the others in the Health & Well-being section.
 

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I’m amazed none of y’all have posted on this already, so I’m starting a WikiPost on the subject.

Eventually, this WikiPost should feature peer-reviewed research references and citations, general paths for treatment, and distinguishing clinical depression from other symptoms.

I don’t have the energy for starting on that by myself just yet.

The thread, of course, can be just like the others in the Health & Well-being section.

I’ll start.

I live with clinical depression. I was first diagnosed at age 10.

I began having detectable symptoms by the age of 9 (the actual symptoms probably began a bit earlier, like around 6 or 7). After years of resisting the need for them*, I began to voluntarily take anti-depressants when I was 31, and I’ve stayed on anti-depressants ever since (even as the regimen has been adjusted and levelled up several times during the time since). I also know clinical depression will be a likely factor in my death. I accept this, because I know there is no known “cure” for depression — only methods of treatment to prevent it from worsening.

Like the slogan of the long-gone swill known as Steelhead Beer, “It is what it is.”

* stemming from when I was institutionalized at 13 for being trans and made to undergo clinical conversion therapy which involved psychoactive drugs favoured by psychiatrists at the time for “““treating””” trans & gender-variant kids
 

Alli

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I think that instead of fluoride, we should be putting anti-depressants in the water. I started taking them about half-way through my radiation treatments. I’d already been through months of chemo and a double mastectomy, and radiation was nothing. But one day I arrived for my appointment and it was pouring. By the time I got my walker off the carrier on the back of the car and into the building I was frustrated, angry, and crying harder than the rain. When I got in to see the radiation oncologist he said “If you want I can give you something,” and I said yes. That was 8 years ago. I’m a much better person now because of it.
 
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* stemming from when I was institutionalized at 13 for being trans and made to undergo clinical conversion therapy which involved psychoactive drugs favoured by psychiatrists at the time for “““treating””” trans & gender-variant kids
:mad::mad::mad:
(no words)
 

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I think that instead of fluoride, we should be putting anti-depressants in the water. I started taking them about half-way through my radiation treatments.

What we know about flouride, sodium fluoride (to be precise), is it’s a simple molecule and its benefit to tooth and bone development during childhood is indisputable. I’m also saying this as someone who was raised where fluoridation was already in place before I was born and, to this day, I haven’t been dinged with a cavity (which is only impressive once one considers how there was a 19-year stretch when I didn’t have access to a dentist, and once I did, they were impressed with my teeth and in the shape they were).

The thing about anti-depressants is not only are they complex molecules, but they all work slightly differently — even anti-depressants within the same class, such as SSRIs or SNRIs — and their impact on human neurology can be as specific as an individual neurological response to those molecules.

Put another way: some people’s neurology responds well to an SSRI — and possibly one specific SSRI — whilst for others, a selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor isn’t doing to put a dent in their depression, because the particular neurochemical component(s) needing adjustment might be to their norepinephrine, dopamine, monoamine oxidase, and so on. And for people without depression, consuming anti-depressants, such as would be the case in water supply, may have pretty adverse, negative impacts on their neurochemistry.

Speaking on my own neurochemistry, I know definitively that SSRIs (like escitalopram or fluoxetine) not only don’t work for me, but they also have a negative impact. Escitalopram, for example, robbed me of what little energy I had. I spent years on an oddball anti-depressant buproprion, which worked pretty well for over a decade — until it didn’t. And what I’m on now is actually two anti-depressants of different classes, working in synergy with one another.

I’d already been through months of chemo and a double mastectomy, and radiation was nothing. But one day I arrived for my appointment and it was pouring. By the time I got my walker off the carrier on the back of the car and into the building I was frustrated, angry, and crying harder than the rain. When I got in to see the radiation oncologist he said “If you want I can give you something,” and I said yes. That was 8 years ago. I’m a much better person now because of it.

Anti-depressants, especially when they’re the right one for a particular neurology, are a life-saver.

I wouldn’t be alive without them. And anti-depressant security is constantly on my mind, because when that security gets jeopardized, so does my ability to function and, likewise, live. The last time I ran out and was unable to afford a refill, the floor beneath me fell out and I landed back into the hole of non-function, non-communication, non-energy, and [self-harm warning] planning how to die in a way which would be the least traumatic for the person(s) to find my body.

With depression, there is no sadness. There is only a severe anhedonia.


:mad::mad::mad:
(no words)

Those medications and that “treatment” were professionally acceptable praxis in 1986, just as the trans-orbital lobotomy was prior to that.
 
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Those medications and that “treatment” were professionally acceptable praxis in 1986, just as the trans-orbital lobotomy was prior to that.
I like to use SNRIs for neuropathic pain a lot, and used to study cancer-promoting metabolic pathways that hijack the serotonergic system, so you can call me an organic depression sort of guy (which is fine, I'm not a psychiatrist and don't play one on the internetz).

AFAIK homosexuality was purged from DSM in the 70s so I expected ""conversion"" therapy to have had a similar fate by the 80s. Just so you know why I'm double pissed about stuff like this. Psychiatry had too long been a major vesicle of cis white maledom. Interestingly, most Black physician friends I have are psychiatrists (never thought about it before), so times are changing.
 

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I like to use SNRIs for neuropathic pain a lot, and used to study cancer-promoting metabolic pathways that hijack the serotonergic system, so you can call me an organic depression sort of guy (which is fine, I'm not a psychiatrist and don't play one on the internetz).

I’m most familiar with pregabalin and gabapentin being used for neuropathic pain, so hearing you mention how SNRIs can help is intriguing. I’ve used gabapentin for both restless leg syndrome (not exactly neuropathic pain) and also after recovering from shingles (very much neuropathic pain).

AFAIK homosexuality was purged from DSM in the 70s so I expected ""conversion"" therapy to have had a similar fate by the 80s.

Homosexuality was de-pathologized in 1973. Trans people weren’t de-pathologized until 2012. I am also aware how in a very specific part of the U.S., trans-orbital lobotomies continued being done to gender-variant children after 1973 and into the ’80s.

Just so you know why I'm double pissed about stuff like this. Psychiatry had too long been a major vesicle of cis white maledom. Interestingly, most Black physician friends I have are psychiatrists (never thought about it before), so times are changing.

When I was in the adolescent psychiatric unit, all of the psychiatrists (who didn’t actually have offices there, but came in from wherever for each of their child patients) and all of the case managers were white, whilst most of the non-professionalized care staff who worked 24/7 on site, in the all-glass office station (you gotta have a panopticon, right?), were Black. The care staff were sincerely good people — tough and also kind, having to look after a bunch of fucked up kids (fucked up almost always by parents). The professionalized white people treated them like, well, “the help”. I can’t speak the same for the case manager assigned to me (white dude with a beard), the psychiatrist overseeing me (grey haired, blue-eyed white dude with a young face), or the child psychologist who worked with the psychiatrist to put me there (another white dude).

I wasn’t the only queer kid there, either. There was a boy a couple of years older than me who was there for being openly bisexual and dealing with depression. They only said he was there for his depression, but he knew, just as I did, that there was another reason behind the formal reason. The thing about that grey time of the ’80s is although the psychiatric profession had officially de-pathologized homosexuality, there were still queer kids who were being pathologized, as I’m sure there were probably vulnerable, poorly informed adults who were still being pathologized indirectly like this well after 1973 (indirectly, as in: intake under an official, recognized diagnosis, but said diagnosis being used as a front).

There were other kids there, all between ages 13 and 18. In all, throughout the time I was there, there were probably 15 in all. Of those, maybe only three or four were there for reasons which might still be credulously diagnosed today (like schizophrenia).
 
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