Relative Something

I have no idea why, at a very young age, I started fantasizing about taking my own life. I think my family labeled me as moody. All I know is that when I got upset, for whatever reason, I would then feel stuck with the angst, burdened with a lack of skill or knowledge about how to return to normal function.

I have a recollection of becoming upset over something as a 10-year-old, when my family was gathered to witness the first man stepping on the moon in July of 1969. I left in a huff to sulk, and couldn’t get myself to return, even for such a momentous occasion, and despite my family’s admonitions to come back and watch history in the making.

For some reason, I discovered early on that one of the things which offered consolation to my troubled mind was, imagining myself being dead. At the time, it wasn’t a conscious choice to have such thoughts in order to feel better, it was more like an involuntary reflex. It just came natural to me to fantasize my demise, and then eventually, I discovered that such thoughts provided comfort. Of course, it was a dysfunctional comfort, but I had no understanding of that at the time.

It is not uncommon for depressed people to seek solace in alcohol. I assume it provides relief similar to what fantasizing did for me; an escape. I would describe myself as becoming something of a ‘fantasylic.’ I functioned for years with a chronic low-level depression that is labeled, “dysthymia,” relying on fantasizing as my drug of choice. I could project an outward appearance of reasonable health, but inside my head, I was honing a dangerous art. I refined this practice from my childhood into my adult life, and in its dysfunctional way, it served me well.

Then I became a father. With that milestone, my suicidal fantasies began to fail me. They no longer provided comfort. In fact, they increased my despair, as I contemplated the potential impact on my kids. It is silly, in hind sight, that the impact on others never seemed to bother me that way. (Depression is a very self-centered affliction.)

I like to think that my children saved my life. It wasn’t easy, and it got worse before it got better, but that change led to my eventual diagnosis and treatment.

When my fantasizing no longer worked for me, my dysthymia progressed to clinical depression. My fantasies morphed to become exercises of actually plotting my suicide.

But for the grace of god, go I.

After years of neglecting to recognize my difficulties as being depression, I finally sought professional help. I learned very quickly about the dysfunction of my fantasies. Imagining my death is now taboo. As a recovering ‘fantasylic,’ I need to work my program with a purpose. The dysfunctional thoughts can come just as easily now as they did the very first time as a kid. It is a reflex reaction, and it became a very ingrained reaction that feels comfortable in its familiarity.

Through practice, it gets ever easier to instantly recognize and dispatch the depressive mental reflex. Over time, the incidence of needing to do so, declines.

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Thinking about suicide is a totally wrong solution for any level of despair.

I have recently been impacted by reading the words of an acquaintance who wrote about suicidal visualizations. It serves as a reminder that I have experience which, difficult though it may be, can potentially be put to good use. I found a phone number and made contact to offer support.

Doing so involves a certain amount of revisiting a place and time when my thinking was dysfunctional. It is a place I spend a fair amount of energy staying away from. I believe there is a delicate balance of staying in touch with my experience in order to serve others who may face similar afflictions, and maintaining a healthy distance from the period when my mental state was in a dangerous, self-defeating loop.

If I don’t make an intentional effort to put my experience to use for some good, I will be inclined to leave it behind me. It is not something that feels like it makes for inviting reading, so I don’t gravitate toward the topic for posts here. But when the subject comes up, I recognize in myself, a strong motivation to offer my perspective.

I have done some writing this past week on the subject, in support of this friend, and in so doing, have discovered the depth of passion I feel toward the subject. I have a strong belief in the ability to overcome depression in our own minds. Our thoughts can, and do influence the chemicals in our bodies.

Just like the way my negative thoughts fed a pattern of a self-defeating loop, my positive thinking feeds an increasingly healthy response in my physiology.

The subject of depression can be a sensitive one, but my experience is something that may prove helpful to others, and it is something that I feel some responsibility to be able to communicate in a worthwhile way. I’m not sure what that way is right now, but I hope I am present in that moment when it comes and able to rise to the occasion.

I realize that depression isn’t one of the more entertaining topics I could choose to write about, but I do so for two reasons. Sharing stories of my experience is a way to reveal an otherwise undefined aspect of who I am. It can serve to diminish the stigma attached to mental health afflictions and it helps me feel I’m doing something constructive with the insight I’ve gained through my suffering.

It also plays a role in managing my own ongoing stability. I do not currently use prescribed medication to treat my depression. My regimen includes consciously disallowing my mind to entertain depressive trains of thought, being prudent about the food and drink I consume, getting regular exercise, and interacting with people who share my interests in approaching life with a positive attitude. One other very important part of my self-treatment involves the things I do to help other people. It very definitely improves my mental state when I am active in helping others who are interested in working their way out of their own dark place. Sometimes that comes in the form of facilitating support groups, hosting an online forum, or sharing reference materials. Sometimes it is simple one-on-one dialog. Writing to offer open-ended insights in hopes of helping whomever is reading can be seen as one of the looser offshoots of my treatment to myself.

Don’t worry, my writing about this topic today doesn’t have anything to do with how dismal the Twins played last night.

Often times, for me, there is a moment at the break of a depressive episode when I feel a tangible sense of relief. It is like a vise releasing its grip, and not only is there a sense of relief, but it feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s a cold drink of water when you are hot and thirsty.

Is that where the ‘happy-ever-after’ appears? I wish. It is a time when hope returns a bit, and with it, energy enough to begin reclaiming a healthy normal. But it isn’t all-inclusive.

A close friend recently shared an insight with me about the disease of alcoholism that I felt applied just as well to depression. It is labeled as being cunning, baffling, and powerful. It is also patient. No doubt about it. Both afflictions will lay low, mysteriously present, but deviously invisible. They are both tenacious at remaining ready to insidiously become active should preventive efforts ever be allowed to wane. Ever. These diseases are incredibly powerful and patient.

Sometimes, it doesn’t take very long at all. After a day or two of relief passes, I can suddenly find the thoughts pop back into my head, totally out of context and entirely uninvited. Surprise! Many times I find these depressive thought patterns or suicidal images so out of context that they make me laugh. They are like a flashback. They are a delayed reaction, or some sort of post traumatic stress response. These are times when I can make a specific point of recognizing the return of the depressive thinking, which then allows me to make a conscious choice of disallowing that train to continue. I can say, “No.” I can reset my focus entirely.

What is most significant to note about all this is that the first little respite out of a depressive episode is not the final solution. In a way, the work is just beginning. It sets the stage for the real work to come. Luckily, the real work comes with the benefit of that bit of hope returning. If a person is aware that depressive thoughts might quickly pop back in for a visit, it isn’t such a devastating incident when it happens. It can be recognized for what it is, and dealt with in a healthy way. It becomes a chance to make a constructive step down a more healthy path toward a more ‘happy-ever-after.”

There can’t be anything more intense than the intensity of absolutely everything this world presents, packed into one microscopic morsel of a moment that presses smack-dab up against another moment which is chock-full to the brim with more of absolutely everything this world presents –overstuffed, really– and then finding that that moment is also wedged against even more moments which all seem to be lined up and approaching, one after another, with no discernible end in sight. At the very same time that all this intensity is radiating over and through us, there occurs some mysterious phenomenon which allows us to simultaneously sense absolutely nothing at all. We take in nothing but a monochrome blur, absent of image or sound, and in reflection, project a hollow stare devoid of any detectable emotion. Everything is there, and nothing is there, all at the same time.

My depressed mind would seem to amplify every possible thing I could think of and then compress it all into an overwhelming tangled concern to be dealt with all at once. It may be that there was a cause and effect relationship, but it was doubly difficult to manage all the issues my dysfunctional mind collected because at the same time there was a gray fog enveloping all the mental processing I was trying to accomplish.

Unraveling it all is no easy task, but it is relatively simple. Even small progress in the direction of healthy thinking will provide changes that tend to pave the way to further improvement. All you need to do is choose to go down that road. And it really helps if you go so far down that road that when you look back, you can no longer see the dysfunctional thinking that you’ve left behind.

I am wondering about something. And part of me is considering the possibility there is no answer to what is on my mind.

Is there a moment when someone experiencing mental health challenges will make a definitive decision to seek a solution? I expect it is not so clear-cut as to be one specific moment. In my case, I tend to refer to the morning I lived up to a promise I made to myself to call for help if I ever experienced another shutdown from depression. I can’t really identify what brought me to even make that promise. I think it is funny that I didn’t feel it worthy of making a call right then and there, at the time I deduced I might have a problem deserving professional intervention, but that it could wait for some future incident of difficulty.

As I continue to come upon the difficult stories posted in depression forums by suffering people, I am moved to come up with something to say that might inspire a seed of initiative for them to choose to change. It is sad to witness the pain people endure while they avoid facing the reality of their situations. The pain of depression is familiar to sufferers, and, in a dysfunctional way, more comfortable than the unknowns of healthy thought process. We unconsciously harbor fears which our minds then put a lot of creative energy into defending, even when those fears are unfounded.

What is it that finally causes a person to decide they have had enough of the old struggles? What rouses us to choose to take a step in the direction of optimal health and seek help from mental health professionals? If there were a single answer, we could bottle it and send it out to all the hurting people of the world.

Instead, there are a lot of people suffering, figuratively banging their heads against the same problems over and over. I wonder if it is possible to help them find that moment in which they discover an inspiration to take action toward better mental health.