Depression

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ok i just replied to a post and went back and realized that i didn't respond to the original post at all... but the post was so good that i couldn't let it go away into hyperspace. so i am putting it here. sue me on the sue them page if you don't like it.

*whispers* i am gonna get yelled at i just know it. so before someone does that, one of my obsession is the medical profession, and one is fixing things (anything).

*regular voice*
ok .... people get depressed for a reason.... fix the reason.... solve the depression...... the depression is a symptom of a larger problem

putting someone on anti-depressants just makes the feeling part of the brain think it is not depressed, but the reason, the cause is still there... so their problem didn't get solved... just the symptom letting you know about it went away... it's like a virus, just because you get rid of the coughing and sneezing with cold medicine doesn't mean that the virus has gone away, you just feel a little better.

Now, I don't know which type of doctor you are going to. If you are going to a psychiatrist, he is going to want to push meds, he gets paid to push meds. If you are going to a psychologist, most good ones will try anything before pushing meds, unless you specifically ask them for meds. And if they do touch meds first it is a tempory solution to keep a possibly injurous person from harming themselves while in therapy. I would always suggest psychologist first.

Depending on what your son is depressed about there are a multitude of ways to fix that without touching meds.

If there is a specific reason to his depression, therapy with a good doc, or even just a counselor, will work it out.

I've been doing research into cognitive behavior therapy recently. It is a wonderful tool, when used by a competent doctor. It basically teaches someone to think differently. Not like Aspie to NT (though some try) but like sad to happy. It is based on the premise that most of our feelings are based on thoughts that go through our head. So when you are sad, you are thinking sad thoughts, like a dog dying. When you work on changing those thoughts to something you see as happy, like a dog chasing it's tail, it actually changes your mood.

A person suffering from depression, may get suicidal, but if they still care about people in their lives, if they are still being shown that there is hope, that there are people who will miss them, they have a smaller chance of suicide.
A person on anti-depressants no longer cares, it's why the meds work. If there is an actual reason behind the depression, and they no longer care that people love them and will miss them, they have a higher chance of suicide.

There have been times in my life where the only thing that kept me from ending everything was the fact that i still cared enough not to want my mother to cry.

Depression is a slippery fish that runs in my family stronger than alcoholism. Go figure that I have both addictive personalities and depressed ones in my family. One could even pursue the whole ADHD angle for good measure. I see depression as more of a cultural disease like anorexia than I do as a neurological one. I know there are people out there who try to go the serotonin angle but I don't really buy into it. I had my brain waves tested once to see if there was some brain connection between my occasional apathy towards people that could be solved by swallowing a pill.

I think it is pretty sad (no pun intended) that we can't live in a world anymore and be normal unless we are happy all the time like little children. I know I have been described as immature in my life but never childlike, even when I was a child. Seriousness is seen as unjoyful, unjoyful is seen as problematic, problems need to be solved. I was supposed to take Paxil as a young kid for my anxiety. Problem was I never believed I had anxiety, I believed I had mass insecurity like every twelve year girl who went through puberty early. It's ugly but it is the truth. How I was even prescribed a drug is even more ridiculous. I took a multiple choice test like those ones they give you sometimes before they hire you. I thought it was fairly idiotic way to assess my personality let alone the honesty of my answers by making me take a multiple choice test. I had the forbidding feeling that the test was designed so that the most average kid in the world would fail in order for some giant pharmecutical company to be filthy rich. I even explained the logic of this to my mother and she just laughed at me. Talk about being in denial of your child receiving sh***y mental health service. Absolutely disgusting.

I think you can control a person whose drugged up rather easily but I think changing a person's environment would probably do more to help a person than anything else. There is reason why the poor or more insane than the rich. The latter can pay their way out of their own private hells.

Considering that most young people have considered suicide as a way out of their problems; I can see why over protective parents rather drug up their kids to be on the safe side. Although if I was a parent myself I would just start to worry if my melancholy child started acting happy and at peace with themselves. That is the danger zone so to speak. Very hard being young (like Rebecca in the DuMaurier novel) I do feel like I am too old to cry and intensly feel as I did back in my teens. The body gets tired of feeling everything overly deeply perhaps thats why older people with more reasons to off themselves don't and young people are more likely too even if their life is good.

now... i consider it healthy to have a wide range of emotions, this includes anger, sadness, happiness, regret... etc... etc... it creates balance and gives us a full experience of the world

As i define it, depression is when a person gets stuck on the sadness... and can't find their way out.... even when they have happy things going on they are still sad.... this is when something needs to be done to help a person get back to a rotating series of emotions.

i agree that they way you were placed on meds was not a decent way to go about doing things.... the scary part about it is, a lot of psychiatrists are still doing exactly the same thing... many are given money by the number of patients they have on specific drugs.... they are trained to treat everything with drugs, even if referring a patient to a psychologist would be a better treatment... the sad part about it is, many parents trust the first doctor enough that they will follow whatever the doc says to do, without looking at all available options.... they still love and want the best for their children.... but they just don't know enough to know to look further.

now... i'm also not saying that society has no use for psychiatrists, because there are some disorders that the only way to fix the issue is to medicate.

oh, and i had anxiety really bad in high school, i loved my meds, they weren't a daily thing, just a if i needed help thing, they helped me function when i might not have otherwise, but they just kinda fuzzed over things. So if you were able to function without the meds, then i don't see why the parents should have taken you to the doc for anxiety.