CHRONIC DEPRESSION

Recently I watched a couple of Youtube videos on the subject of Depression. Holy Mackerel! I realised that I know next to nothing about the subject. How many of us do?

Apparently the sexy subject these days is Manic Depression. Plain old run-of-the-mill Depression now appears so...yesterday. Maybe that's because the treatment for Depression is so standard now: anti-depressant pills plus maybe two years of therapy. The therapy is just to make sure you get in the habit of taking the pills. If you have Manic Depression add lithium to the list.

Anyway, through the videos I discovered that I'm in danger of getting some sort of depressive disorder.

 I'm moving to a part of the country where I'll likely have no cartoonist friends and where I'll probably have drastically reduced face-to-face contact. Recent studies show that this will put me in a high risk category for Depression.

Geez, I better enjoy Los Angeles while I still can.

People say that Skype is the remedy for isolation, but is it?  It's a futuristic technology and I love the idea, but it hasn't worked well for me in the past. I always run out of things to say, something that seldom happens when I'm face to face.

You could argue that the kind of depression you get from isolation is really just plain old everyday sadness. If my sad-inducing circumstances improved then my illness would vanish and with it my claim to a serious problem. That's a comforting thought if true, but the behaviorist in me can't help but wonder if the negative habits acquired in isolation can be shed so easily. I don't think they can.

Manic depression certainly is a lot more fun to think about. At least the manic people have times when they think they can do anything and are positively euphoric. The problem is that, according to one video, for some people it doesn't lead to anything positive at all. The ideas they get look silly the next day. They're just spinning their wheels. And besides, the depressive episodes of the disease last longer, and are more severe, than the manic ones.

That's all I have to say about this subject. I really don't know much about it. If I made a mistake I hope someone who knows better will correct it.

BTW: I noticed something called Borderline Personality Disorder on the sidebars of depression sites. BPDs are said to be impulsive, prone to mood swings, and lack empathy and a clear identity. Yikes! I've read that there's 140 kinds of personality disorder. That means an awful lot of us probably have a screw loose somewhere. It's scary!

MAD PRIDE

Mental illness is a fascinating subject, all the more because so little is known about it. You get the feeling that there must be hundreds of kinds of mental illness, yet books on the subject usually list only a dozen. The mind seems to break down in fairly predictable ways, meaning I guess that we're prone to certain kinds of disorders a lot more than others.

One disorder has to do with hearing voices that aren't there. From a little reading on the net I got the feeling that the treatment of this illness is changing. Gone are the days when the patient is told the voices are a figment of his imagination. Nowadays the doctor might accept the reality of the voices and simply try to teach the patient to cope with them, to have constructive conversations with them. 

Here's (above and below) some excerpts from a pamphlet for people who hear voices. It's not very judgemental. The idea is assure the patient that what they're going through isn't as scary as it seems, and that they have some control over it.





My hunch is that a lot of people with this problem get only a pamphlet and some drugs. I don't know enough about the subject to know if this constitutes woeful neglect or simply a recognition that the cause of this problem is mysterious and treatment reasonably has to be restricted to the little bit that we know actually works.

Mental patients are forming Mad Pride groups, mostly to resist compulsory electroshocks, and to get more free benefits from the government, but also to persuade the public that mental disorders don't always prevent people from doing good work on the job.  

The most articulate mad person I've encountered is Spikol (above). She accepts questions from YouTubers and I have to resist the urge to deluge her with them.  What cures actually work? What should parents do? What did she think of the book, "Franny and Zooey?", and the movie "Royal Tannenbaums? Should the state sterilize? Does she agree with coercive institutionalization? Can mad people cope with their problem without curing it, like Russell Crowe did in "Beautiful Mind?" How many crazy people are there? What does she think of the therapy attempted by the author of  "The Criminal Mind?" Does madness stimulate creativity? Are mad people attracted to other mad people? Why do some mad people become violent? Are all violent people mad? Does therapy help? Do previously mad people make the best therapists?  Why is depression so common? Is it curable? What are the most helpful books? Does madness often just go away with time? What's the relationship between habbit and madness? 

Here (above) she talks about the downside of electroshock therapy. Elsewhere she admits that it does seem to work for some people.