[ fcuk ]

[winterlive]

guys, i just wanna say this: we as a society gotta get off our asses and do something about clinical depression.

so many people have the idea that you can hit it with talk therapy, and that is bullcrap. talk therapy is great and a super important tool in helping people deal with a disease that makes it impossible for you to trust your own emotions, but it is, at best, half the battle.

most sufferers of clinical depression (in my own experience, and those of the many many people i've known who have it or got it, ymmv) are perfectly normal people who would just go on and do their normal people thing, if only they could get out of fucking bed. i recognize some people are going to be insane no matter if their brain chemistry is jacked or not, but most of those who suffer this disease are just like you and me. you know, if you and me were asked to endure constant misery.

i don't know why there aren't clinics for it, like with physio and chiropractic services. you'd go there and they'd run you through the incredibly simple checklist to see if your brain was borked, and if it was they would say, "okay, so, your brain is borked. that is our medical diagnosis. but we are going to give you meds and fix this goddamn problem, so it's okay. take this beeper, we're going to program it to remind you to do really basic things so you don't die. then we'll book you in with the doc and the therapy and the person who's going to come by daily and make sure you listened to the beeper. don't be scared, tons of people go through this and i mean tons. you're gonna be okay. it's a real fucking thing."

because it IS. once you know more than, say, three people who have this problem, you start getting mad. like, hey, my friend is always depressed and sleeping weird hours and tired all the time and never eats except when they order six cartons of chinese they can't afford and keeps insisting they're fine. wait, i know this song. why don't the people who deal with fucking illness know this song too? where are the incredibly basic supports this guy needs? why does the fucking ER insist that my friend has to be almost literally in the process of killing himself before they'll admit him? why is my friend waiting for weeks to see his doctor when he is already on the fucking pills, obviously needs an adjustment and the disease is fucking life threatening?

one time i broke my leg, right, and i mean BUSTED that fucker. it was bad. now, i live in canada, so everybody knew just what to do. they took me through the ER, set it, brought in a specialist surgeon to pin it, and then gave me a cool removable cast. they sent me to a rehab hospital while they weaned me off the pain meds, and the nice physio and occupational rehab guys taught me how to get around without putting weight on it, how to get in and out of chairs and bed and stuff so that even if i fell i wouldn't knock it, that kind of thing. they made sure i had crutches and stuff from the central organization that lends out equipment to people that break themselves, and then set me up with a nurse to come to my house every day to make sure i was doing okay. they scheduled follow-up with my surgeon and my GP, they sent me to a rehab clinic set up with everything i could possibly need, and this entire massive organization was just business as usual, taking care of folks who needed taking care of because it needed doing - and people had recognized that, and demanded that their government put everything in place.

part of the stigma of mental illness in our culture is denial. people are either outright told there's nothing wrong with them (just snap out of it, cheer up) or it's implied by a health system that won't fucking help them without being strongarmed into it, and even then the help they're offering is a pitiful shadow of what it should be. i'm grateful for the help i got when it was worst for me, but i'm also keenly aware that, without a lot of support from my friends and family, i'd be proper fucked right now - and there are people who don't have ready access to those supports. and there is no earthly reason they shouldn't.

IT'S JUST AGGRAVATING OKAY.

long story short: it should be easier to survive this thing. people should be safe and i hope we get better at getting them there. rrr.

Comments

[yeats.livejournal.com]

i think i've found a purchase with the ability to cure my depression:


penguin hats.

[cathalin.livejournal.com]

Wow basically this made me tear up, because of something we've been going through with a family member.

So much word, I can't even. As an amazing psychiatrist said to me with passion and yearning, if we could only have a tiny FRACTION of the money spent on other, more 'popular' conditions... He's fucking embarrassed about the state of mental health services. In our whole area there's basically... nothing to follow a person. As my husband said, either you're locked up or you're on your own.

:((((

[veronamay.livejournal.com]

"okay, so, your brain is borked. that is our medical diagnosis. but we are going to give you meds and fix this goddamn problem, so it's okay. take this beeper, we're going to program it to remind you to do really basic things so you don't die. then we'll book you in with the doc and the therapy and the person who's going to come by daily and make sure you listened to the beeper. don't be scared, tons of people go through this and i mean tons. you're gonna be okay. it's a real fucking thing."

This is fucking brilliant. WHY doesn't it exist? I am basically the opposite of a sympathetic hand-holding people person, but if this sort of support system existed I would drop my current job/career path to be the person who goes around to people's houses every day to check that they listened to the beeper. In a heartbeat. I would be excellent at that.

[bookishwench.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I hear this. I really hear this. I've seen it with too many people too, and once women are "of a certain age" so many doctors automatically write it off as hormone fluctuations. It really is a huge problem, and there is this weird shame thing attached to it, and it shouldn't be any more shameful than that broken leg you mention. And it's certainly not contagious or imaginary, which is what a lot of people treat it as being.

My mom's former boss from years ago, who was a wonderful guy, had depression, and while they put him on meds, the doctors didn't bother to check with him to see if they were working. He did not survive it, and it gets me mad.

[i-amthecosmos.livejournal.com]

Thanks for writing this. And yes, mental illness could be treated in such a more humane, logical manner. Reading that was almost heartbreaking, because instead the societal shame makes things a dozen times worse than it should be.

[altyronsmaker.livejournal.com]

"okay, so, your brain is borked. that is our medical diagnosis. but we are going to give you meds and fix this goddamn problem, so it's okay. take this beeper, we're going to program it to remind you to do really basic things so you don't die. then we'll book you in with the doc and the therapy and the person who's going to come by daily and make sure you listened to the beeper. don't be scared, tons of people go through this and i mean tons. you're gonna be okay. it's a real fucking thing."

This is so goddamned sensible. Like, epiphany of all mental health profession epiphanies.

[robanybody.livejournal.com]

This is exactly what my family thought when my brother was first diagnosed as depressed when he was 16. And even then, it literally took his suicide attempt before they could do anything to help. It should never have to go that far to get people the help they need.

[tabaqui]

What you said.
*hugs*

[linden-jay.livejournal.com]

I am so tired of the stigma and the lack of help. SO TIRED. And I'm Canadian too, so it's supposed to be better, but it isn't. When I lived in Ontario, it was impossible to get a GP. I was there for three years, and I never had one. So when my depression came back and kicked me way down the well, I was screwed, because there was no way that I could do the meds dance through a walk in clinic. I needed consistency of care to get healthy again, and I couldn't get it, because I wasn't bad enough to be admitted. I couldn't get out of bed, I was sleeping 20 hours of the day even though I was subsiding on nothing but Pepsi and grilled cheese sandwiches, but because I wasn't suicidal, there was no help for me.

On one notable occasion, I asked one of the umpteen walk in docs what I could do to get myself a GP so that I could help. I was desperate (as desperate as one can be when they can barely lift their head up), and she looked thoughtful and told me 'well, you could get pregnant. Then someone would have to take you on.'

...

I think I blinked at her for a solid minute because WTF. The solution to me not having a doctor who can treat me for my depression... was to get knocked up. I do not even. I didn't end up being able to get help until we moved back to BC again.

[jamesinboots.livejournal.com]

amen, dannerface. I want the way modern medicine handled depression to be better, too. So, so much. Too often, help is too little too late because nobody in the medical field thinks of preventative depression treatment or effective early treatment or whatnot. Gah.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you, thank you for this. Way back just knowing that I`m not alone, that it`s not laziness, or I`m not just sad, it`s not just hysterics (you really should get a grip) would have helped so much. I started my life from scratch so many times, and I slip back again and again, and one of the reasons is that I don`t have a safety net. My friends and family don`t understand why I can`t snap out of it when it`s needed, why I`m wasting my and their time. (And I don`t think it`s their fault, they just haven`t been told the Earth is not quite the shape they believe it is yet.) The doctor had 15 minutes for me to write up some pills (still have the recipes, they expired) , I just wanted a conversation with someone who would believe me, and more importantly have some instructions, a DIY to sunshine and getting out of bed so you can pee: draw stick figures of at least one thing that made you happy that day at 20.00, write a list for xxxx every day, eat reward cookies when yyy. I don`t even know.
Tl;dr I would have given half a liver and a kidney for someone who would come around every second day to check my mail and the status of carrots in the fridge, I think the social worker is a good idea.

[harborshore.livejournal.com]

This was basically my therapist. She's the most sensible, step 1-3 person ever. And she excels in giving me small goals--and she also didn't assume that because I was doing my job/not dropping out of school, that it wasn't bad. She just listened to me outline what had happened and said "I'd be more concerned if you weren't reacting; that's a lot of shit to have dropped on you." And then we went through areas of my life and she gave me tiny goals between every session. For a while one of them was eating three meals a day at reasonable intervals (because in addition to the anxiety, I have a medical thing no one can diagnose that causes my digestive system to go out of whack if I don't eat healthy food three times per day). That sort of thing. And I wrote a little list with check boxes and got to check it off when I was done. Etc.

But everyone doesn't have her. The system should so look like this, I can't even. The fact that it's so incredibly difficult and time-consuming to get help for a disease that makes even the tiniest thing exhaust you--ugh.