About severe anxiety and depression and knowing how it feels

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Anxiety and depression are common, so many of you reading this may struggle with them—especially in this forum. However, more severe versions of them, as in having negative thoughts 24/7 and sometimes never being able to think of a single positive thing, or being triggered by words on the page of a fiction book, that kind of thing, are not.

I’ve had people with good intentions try to sympathize with me because they are anxious or depressed. They may have known what it was like to be severe, but judging by how well they functioned they probably didn’t. Knowing what mild anxiety and depression are like doesn’t mean you know what the severe versions are like, FYI. But if you have tried to comfort someone by sympathizing, kudos to you for trying!

Most anxiety and depression symptoms are treatable.
I have had anxiety and depression all my life, and over the past 25 years, i have tried various medications to combat both the anxiety and the depression.

As i also have autism spectrum disorder of the asperger syndrome variety, with sensory impairment, that makes me hypersensitive to various sensory information and in particular audible sensory information,
some of the anxiety i suffer can not be treated with medication.

Also from what i understand about some of the differences between the brains in people with autism and people who are neural typical, people with autism will also have life long problems that affect their behaviour that also can not be treated with medication, for example, people with Autism Spectrum Disorder usually have bigger frontal lobes, which apparently causes us problems with processing emotion, and this is part of the reason why we can suffer from meltdowns (emotional dysregulation, problems regulating emotional responses).

Also, due to the differences in biological make up of our brains, some of the medications that doctors prescribe
for anxiety and depression are not only not effective but in some cases can really aggravate a person with ASD's condition.

For example, if you are one of the people with ASD who is hypersensitive to sensory information and
your doctor has given you medication that increases and maintains optimum levels of norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline) such as popular modern antidepressants such as venlafaxine, duloxetine and vortioxetine.

These modern antidepressants may actually be causing some of the anxiety that you suffer from,
as people with ASD and sensory hypersensitivity problems likely have higher natural norepinephrine, so do not need their norepinephrine boosted, as if it does, it can make a person hyper vigilant and anxious! rather than the opposite.

Personally i recommend that people with ASD and hypersensitivity problems should consider taking one of the older tricyclic antidepressants such as clomipramine, which works mostly on seratonin and in fact regulates norepineprhine.

All i know, that i feel a great deal better than when i was on the other antidepressants
the only down side is that if i drink heavily (which i rarely do) the antidepressants stop working and i feel super depressed.

Hope this information helps, if unsure, please print this info off and ask your doctor to consider what i have written.
Hope that helps
cheers