Captain Oblivious

Before I say anything else, allow me to say "thank you" to the people who commented on my last blog post.  While I was (and am) serious about not requiring, much less expecting, any sympathy for my ongoing struggle with depression and anxiety, I have to admit that the responses were a very pleasant surprise.  In fact, it astonished me to see that several people lauded my bravery in going public about the details of my disease while simultaneously "outing" themselves as fellow sufferers.  I knew about some of my fellow travelers, but even I was surprised by some of the names I saw.  Please don't misunderstand, but:  What?!?  and you guys think I'M the brave one?!?  You DO know that Teh Googel has all of this recorded on The Tubes forever, right?!? Heh. 

Seriously?  I've blogged about being depressed before, so this isn't a life-altering change for me, though I realize it may have seemed that way; this is just the first time I've posted that level of detail.  In any event, I don't consider myself brave simply for making a blog post, but I freely admit that the situation isn't simple.  I know that there is a stigma associated with mental illness.  I consciously decided to do my part to take that stigma down years ago - and I know my fellow blogger, and good friend, Thomas "Duffbert" Duff, has taken a similar approach (Tom suffers from Dysthymia, and has discussed it quite openly at his blog, and I know - with a rare certainty - that he will be pleased, rather than upset, to be mentioned in this context). 

That stigma is one major reason why this disease is so difficult for people to understand.  If you've never met a depressed person (as far as YOU know - I guarantee you know at least 5), you have limited opportunities to understand the condition.  The more you come across depressed people in your life, the more you will realize that the disease itself does not deserve a stigma at all.  Rather, the stigma belongs to those who prejudge someone.  There is never a good reason to judge someone before you know them (thus the term: prejudice).    Depression does not define me.  Nor does anxiety.  Nor does liberalism.  Nor does Scifi.  Nor does musical ability.  Nor does Geekdom.  Nor does membership in the YellowSphere.  Nor does ANYTHING.  And the same is true for all of us. 

If nothing else, I always hope that people who are surprised to learn about my depression will realize a few things:  depressed people can be very successful; there is no way to tell if a person is depressed by looking at them or talking to them; and being depressed does NOT mean there are predefined restrictions on your life (aka Things You Cannot Do). That, more than anything else, is the reason I don't hide my depression anymore.  Oh, I don't walk around all day yelling, "Hey! Depressed guy over here!"  But I blog it, I will talk to anyone about it, and I refuse to pretend it doesn't exist.  Brave?  No.  Not even remotely.  Bravery is clearing a mine field.  Bravery is talking a panicked kid out of his gun so you can empty the classroom and make sure the teenagers in the room all live to be adults.  Bravery?  Seriously?  Don't embarrass me.  That's out of my league.  Honesty?  Yeah, that is something I can aspire to.

As far as the current state of my mind (snark aside, which you KNOW is difficult for me, so give me some leeway here...), things are looking up.  I haven't reached the Plateau of Normalcy (the WHAT?  Come on, there HAS to be snark about the Plateau of Normalcy - somebody has got to help me out here...), but I have definitely turned the corner.  I'm not apathetic about everything anymore, and the crushing weight on my chest has disappeared.  I am moving towards a state where my life is not ruled by my depression.  That does NOT mean that I'm cured.  There is no such thing.  As with alcoholism, I firmly believe that there IS no cure for depression.  There are various ways to deal with it successfully (and I was remiss in my previous post's failure to recognize the positive effect of exercise and activity, enhanced dramatically by mental discipline, represented most effectively by martial arts and yoga - this absolutely DOES help many people, though not during a given attack, but rather as a preventative measure and a way to stabilize one's life), but unless one's brain chemistry changes for some reason, there is no such thing as a cure.  Depression isn't caused by magic.  It's a disease.  There are physical, bio-chemical causes for it.  We don't understand most of them (at a guess?  20%?), but that's true of most of the brain.  There are plenty of people who suffer from depression for months but not years, years but not decades, and they come out of it and never (so far) revisit it again, but those people are not cured in the sense that the disease is gone:  rather, the disease is in remission.  I'm thrilled for anyone who is in remission, and I hope they stay there for the rest of their lives, but I know better than to believe that my own successes in combating the disease are permanent (OK, I will make a side-track here - it is absolutely possible for the disease to spontaneously disappear, it is possible for people to make life changes that cause the chemical imbalance to disappear [though that doesn't mean it couldn't later reappear], and everything I have ever said about anything at all is always likely to be completely and utterly wrong because I am absolutely and eternally a moron, just in case you were confused on that question...). 

One of the responses to my last post, from Theresa, crystallized the importance of putting this information out on the Internet.  I know you're all going to be crushed, but I didn't write the last post (or this one) for you.  I wrote it for Teh Google.  And for Theresa.  She was browsing Lotusphere information and coincidentally found my last post.  The symptoms sounded sort of like the problems she'd had for decades, so she Googled clinical depression - but she didn't find a good match.  Then she followed my link to a previous post on this topic and found The Wise and Powerful Duffbert's post about Dysthymia.  That sounded like a better fit, but not quite.  Further Google adventures, though, led to atypical depression, which described her affliction very accurately.  Now she has an appointment with her doctor, detailed descriptions to help make her case, and - much more importantly, from my own historical perspective - the absolute, unquestioned PROOF that she is not alone in this.  [Oh, and Theresa - always cool to see a .nsf URL online - check out her URL from the past comments and look at the available URLs, geeks - great work, Theresa!]

And now I have to admit to being absolutely, positively stunned.  The last two comments (as of now, anyway - #s 28 & 29) come from IBM's Brent Peters.  Yeah, that Brent Peters.  You know who he is (or you should).  On the one hand, it's always impressive when an IBM executive at his level gets involved in the online community.  Heaven (and probably their lower counterpart) knows, he has plenty of work to keep him busy.  On the other hand, Brent - in a fashion that shouldn't surprise those who've heard him speak, either at Lotusphere or in smaller groups - didn't waste any time pussy-footing around.  He came right out and acknowledged that he personally had several years of experience in the struggle against depression, and he wasn't too shy to tie his depression to anxiety (for reasons that escape me, there are some  - depressed AND non-depressed - people who insist that anxiety is somehow less 'manly' [which absolutely slays me, as I'll bet you knew] but there are a LOT of these people, and they seem to be pretty loud).  I don't want to embarrass Brent (though I admit to wondering if that's possible - and this is to his credit, for those of you who think like cretins by nature - yes, Mooney, I'm looking at you), but I would like you to all recognize that there has never been that sort of public validation for those of us who live with this disease from someone in his position at IBM before.

Interestingly, there were a lot of comments offering useful and inspirational suggestions, but Brent absolutely nailed it.  There is no ONE answer, there is no magic bullet, and the human condition cannot be simplified down to one simple issue.  There are invariably several aspects to the problem.  Assuming that there is One Ring To Rule Them All dooms you to failure.  Similarly, assuming that you have already thought of everything that might help you?  Idiotic.  So please, please, please:  keep the suggestions coming.  I've already learned a lot from you folks, and I don't see any reason to expect that to stop.

Where does this leave me?  Moving onward and upward.  Grateful that so many of you (since when do I have more than 7 readers, anyway?  Damn you, Yancy Lent , and your evil Planet Lotus Global Domination [*snicker*]) pay attention to things that are not immediately relevant to the YellowSphere.  And feeling an obligation to remind you of one tiny, little factoid:  The Captain is not famous for ignoring controversial topics, so if you were hoping that my indisposition would keep my very loud mouth shut, you're probably SOL.  Brace yourselves for critical attacks on anything that moves (including, maybe especially, IBM), elaborate excuses to exercise profanity (if for no other reason than to Piss You All Off), and - FSM forfend - the religious and political discussions you've come to expect to find here (Good News:  now that we Liberals are in power [relatively speaking], we have much less to be irritated about).

*chuckle*

PS  Stan Rogers:  You rock.  Less initiative than kicking kittens, indeed!  ROTFLMAO!!  You, Sir, made me laugh when I didn't think I could.  If I could buy you a beer, I would (but knowing you, won't).  Instead, name your virtual reward - it's yours.

Posted by rob_mcdonagh At 09:51:01 PM Location Library Annex | Permalink | Comments (7) |      

No, not that kind of Notes...

I've been struggling with my depression lately.  I had to postpone an article for The View and I withdrew as a speaker from The View's Admin/Developer 2009 in Boston.  I haven't blogged much, either about technology or about politics (even though I'm thrilled with President Obama).  I haven't written any cool, new code using the techniques I learned at Lotusphere.  I haven't done a lot of things.  Since this disease (I call it The Black Beast) is preventing me from writing about anything else, I decided to write about it. 

Note:  I've mentioned this before (here), so if you've been reading this blog for long you shouldn't be surprised to hear about it.  You also shouldn't be surprised to hear that I'm not interested in sympathy.  Lots of people have things much tougher than I do.  Everyone who has lost their job deserves your sympathy.  Starving children deserve your sympathy.  People wounded or those who lost family members in war deserve your sympathy.  In the larger scheme of things, I'm not doing badly at all. 

Depression is one of those annoying diseases that behave differently in different people.  Worse, you can't see it and you can't test for it.  So part of the problem for depressed people is explaining what is wrong.  Some of the symptoms tend to be consistent, but the details are not reliably predictable.  Ordinary (read: non-depressed people who are not medical professionals) expect depression to involve sadness.  Sometimes it does.  But often it does not.  I can't describe what it's like for other people, but I'll write down the ways it affects me.  Maybe it will help someone deal with the depressed person in their lives.

1.  First, yes, it IS difficult to get out of bed in the morning.  No, I'm NOT being lazy and just sleeping in.  First, I'm probably tired.  When I'm depressed, I tend to be tired more often than not.  Paradoxically, I also have a lot of trouble sleeping.  You may have noticed that this can easily become an infinite loop.  But the trouble getting out of bed is about more than exhaustion, because it applies even when I'm well rested.  Why is it hard to get out of bed?  Because everything I can think of that might happen once I do is either meaningless or negative.  Which leads me to point number two:

2.  When I'm depressed, it's impossible to summon enthusiasm for anything.  I become extremely apathetic.  Oddly, this doesn't apply to problems, glitches, and issues that come up.  Rather than not caring about those, I overreact to them enormously.  The most minor issue becomes and absolute road block.  Any difficulty I can imagine becomes an irrefutable reason to avoid doing something. 

Aside:  How apathetic do I get?  Sometimes I stop reading books because I can't get interested in any of them.  Usually when that happens, I go back to a book I've enjoyed in the past and use the memories to brighten my day a bit.  Sometimes that doesn't work, though, and I just avoid starting any books. Now, I LOVE reading.  So allow me to point out one little fallacy in public perceptions of depressed people, which is that we manage to do the things we really like while avoiding the things we don't like.  The fact is, we avoid everything we possibly can.

3.  I get angry too easily when I'm struggling with this.  Over the years, I've learned to recognize this, and I can usually keep other people from noticing.  I don't actually get into huge fights with people, but it's emotionally draining to walk around full of anger. 

4.  I can't initiate anything.  Or create anything.  I can't write.  I can't program.  I can't be creative.  I can hear the question now, so let me answer it.  This isn't writing.  This is therapy.  I can write an email.  I can write a paragraph.  I can't write a whole article.  I can't create a presentation.  I can't make myself do anything that useful.

5.  I can respond.  I can troubleshoot.  I can answer questions.  I can solve problems.  I can comment on other blogs.  I can read Skype chats, but I'm unlikely to say anything.  Same goes for Twitter or Facebook or ... 

6.  There are some physical sensations associated with this, at least for me.  I feel a heavy weight on my chest (no, it's not a heart attack...).  My head feels thick and stuffy.  Mentally, I feel slow. 

7.  I'm not suicidal.  I have been in the past (once), so I'm not immune, but I've been depressed several dozen times over 20 years without it happening.  Nobody understands why people kill themselves, so let me try to explain it.  It's not supposed to make sense.  It's not rational, because the person in question has lost their ability to reason coherently.  I can tell you that, in my one instance, suicidal feelings stemmed from a perception of being trapped, that there was no way out of the misery I was feeling.  I can also tell you that I was, of course, not trapped in any way.  It's not reasonable, rational, or logical in any way.  Don't expect to understand it unless you're in the midst of it.  But know that there isn't something these people just don't understand about the importance of life.  They understand, but they don't care.  But my real point is that plenty of people who are NOT suicidal are depressed.  Being depressed does not automatically mean you are a danger to yourself (or others).  Every person is unique, no?

8.  Is anything exempt from my depression?  So far, my daughter is.  She essentially acts like depression kryptonite.  She doesn't cure the depression miraculously, but her presence pushes it into the background somehow.  Maybe she's so important that she doesn't need to go through the 'is this important' filter that the rest of the universe goes through?  Dunno, but I'm extremely happy that it works that way.  No kid should have to worry about their parents' issues - that's why we're the grownups. 

9.  What can I do to make it better?  Sometimes, reading old favorites helps.  It definitely helps to find small tasks that I can still accomplish.  Getting something done helps quite a bit.  Conversely, having a bunch of things you're supposed to do and making absolutely no progress on them makes things much worse.  Music can help.  Paradoxically, both being left alone AND getting out of the house can help, though in different ways.  Chocolate and caffeine help.  Sunshine helps a bit, but depressed people aren't likely to go looking for it. 

10.  What can YOU do to make it better?  Not much, I'm afraid.  Which annoys The Doctor quite a bit.  It would be nice if more people understood what depression really is, so that you could tell someone you're clinically depressed and not have them ask why you're sad.  Admittedly, it's a REALLY stupid name for the disorder. 

11.  I know I don't LOOK depressed.  I also don't LOOK anxious, even though I also have anxiety and I'm terrified by speaking in public.  I told you, you can't see it. 

That last one was mostly added so that this list could "go to eleven."  I trust my geeky readers (all 7 of you) got the reference?

Posted by rob_mcdonagh At 03:37:29 PM Location Library Annex | Permalink | Comments (31) |