depression

WHY I AM A WRITER

/ Ken Finton / 3 Comments

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Try though we might, we cannot stop change from taking place. It is a natural process. Nature changes as part of life’s process because of the essential nature of change. Change is renewal and growth. It is people that pervert and oppose change for self-centered reasons.

Albert Einstein said, “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

This is not a new revelation. La Tzu recognized that institutions and societies must change thousand of years ago. He said, “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

So you wake up in the morning in a bad mood, somewhat depressed. It is easy to be depressed. Even your dreams can depress you. You can be feeling triumphant one minute and wake up the next morning in a most sombre, unsatisfied state of mind.

Trying to control your emotions and your mind and your thoughts are often extremely useless endeavors. Thoughts pop in and out of our minds all the time.  They change the chemicals in our bodies that regulate our emotions and our feelings of well being for the better and for the worse.

Thoughts Are Not Real

Do you think your thoughts and ideas are real? They are not. They are no more real than the dreams that come into your mind and the nightmares that frightfully awaken you in the night.

There is no reason to allow negative thoughts to have power over you. Recognize that they are unreal and do not give them any value. A thought can be made real through action, but in its inception it is as wispy as a fantasy.

We might not be able to control our thoughts, but we CAN evaluate them. We can learn to recognize the judgmental thoughts that make us miserable.

Thoughts are neither right not wrong. They simply are. We are the ones that assign the value to them.  Some thoughts are going to be positive and some are going to be negative. Anyone who tells you to always think positively does not know much about thinking.

It is simply a fact that you are going to have thoughts that are negative. The real trick is to catch these thoughts before they depress you, recognize that they are not real and do not let them distress you. In time and with rest, they will pass.

There are times when we are thinking about things we need to evaluate. We think about our choices and our course of action. These are the times when we need to moderate our thoughts and evaluations and make certain that they are capable of leading us to a place we wish to go.

They very act of evaluating your thoughts is a kind of mediation. It will stop the chemical changes that lead to emotional distress. It does take some practice, I suppose. It is not something I am good at.

That is why I am a writer. I write my thoughts down and evaluate them later, throwing out those expressions that do not lead me to a clear place in which I prefer to dwell. That is what is great about being a writer. You are able to learn from yourself, your research, and your evaluations. It is cathartic in nature and always makes you feel that you have accomplished something worthwhile, produced something from nothing that has value.

DEPRESSION

/ Ken Finton / 2 Comments

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Depression is a chemical change that originates in the brain. When depression arrives, a certain heaviness is felt in the head, almost like an invasion from a foreign substance. It is palpable, like the clouds flowing across the sun. The light is replaced with a much heavier shadow that blocks the warm rays of the sunlight.

I am not a chronic depressive, yet like most of us, the cloud comes over me when I feel exceptionally neglected or misunderstood. Most mild depressions are a simple case of getting the blues.

It helps to remember that we only feel emotionally good because we know about feeling emotionally bad.

Severe or mild, depression is caused by brain chemistry. When our chemical neurotransmitters are out of balance, we fall into depressive symptoms. Hormones, disease, inherited traits and life events all play a part in depression.

Some claim that women are more susceptible to depression than men, but that could be because women seek treatment for depression more than men do.

Severe depression often requires medical treatment. Because the causes are chemical changes, chemicals are often used for treatment. Some can have very serious consequences. Many people do not believe in chemical treatments, or feel the primary purpose of these treatments is to enrich pharmaceutical companies.

See http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/basics/treatment/con-20032977

Medications

Many types of antidepressant medications are available to treat depression, including those below. Discuss possible major side effects with your doctor or pharmacist.

  • Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Doctors often start by prescribing an SSRI. These medications are safer and generally cause fewer bothersome side effects than do other types of antidepressants. SSRIs include fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil), sertraline (Zoloft), citalopram (Celexa) and escitalopram (Lexapro).
  • Serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs). Examples of SNRI medications include duloxetine (Cymbalta), venlafaxine (Effexor XR) and desvenlafaxine (Pristiq).
  • Norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitors (NDRIs). Bupropion (Wellbutrin) falls into this category. It’s one of the few antidepressants not frequently associated with sexual side effects.
  • Atypical antidepressants. These medications don’t fit neatly into any of the other antidepressant categories. They include trazodone and mirtazapine (Remeron). Both are sedating and usually taken in the evening. A newer medication called vilazodone (Viibryd) is thought to have a low risk of sexual side effects.
  • Tricyclic antidepressants. Tricyclic antidepressants — such as imipramine (Tofranil) and nortriptyline (Pamelor) — tend to cause more severe side effects than do newer antidepressants. So tricyclics generally aren’t prescribed unless you’ve tried an SSRI first without improvement.
  • Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs). MAOIs — such as tranylcypromine (Parnate) and phenelzine (Nardil) — may be prescribed, typically when other medications haven’t worked, because they can have serious side effects. Using MAOIs requires a strict diet because of dangerous (or even deadly) interactions with foods ― such as certain cheeses, pickles and wines ― and some medications including birth control pills, decongestants and certain herbal supplements. Selegiline (Emsam), a newer MAOI that you stick on your skin as a patch, may cause fewer side effects than other MAOIs do. These medications can’t be combined with SSRIs.
  • Other medications. Other medications may be added to an antidepressant to enhance antidepressant effects. Your doctor may recommend combining two antidepressants or medications such as mood stabilizers or antipsychotics. Anti-anxiety and stimulant medications might also be added for short-term use.

St. John’s wort is a popular means of treating depression in Europe, though it is not approved in the United States. This herbal remedy can interfere with quite a few medications, so a doctor’s advice is recommended to make certain that there is no interaction with other prescriptions.

Another European drug not approved in the US is called SAMe (pronounced ‘sam-E’) is the synthetic version of a naturally occurring chemical that the body manufactures.

Some people believe that diets high on Omega-3 fatty acids – found in cold water fish, walnuts, and flaxseed and oil – also helps to relieve mild depressions.

My depressions, I find, are most often caused by taking myself too seriously. I can often cure them by doing something else and not thinking about myself so much. Enlarging one’s self identification is always a good idea when the blues pay us a visit.

Helping others often rewards us as well. It is another method of bringing us out of ourselves and into a practical world where people can care about one another.

Taking our consciousness away from our limited definitions of ourselves and is a step toward expanding mental pictures of ourselves to include the rest of nature and humanity. For this we rely on many things, from mediation to music, exercise to entertainment.

Depression is a curse that falls on all of us. Looking from the top of the hill, we can see the valleys below, but from the valley itself, the mountain often looks insurmountable.