Posted by linkadge on January 23, 2005, at 21:44:33
In reply to Re: Linkadge, posted by mike13 on January 23, 2005, at 13:08:08
"It wasn't that my body didn't have enough serotonin, it was that the receptors had been damaged by the 'medications' so excess serotonin only left my brain flummoxed as to what to do with it."
This is a completely unprovable statement. Unless you have had a post-mortem study of your neural tissue, you don't know that your receptors have been dammaged or not.Depression causes pessimism. Chronic unremitted depression causes more pessimism. It seems to me that if your depression was currently under control you would have no need to be seeking out pages like this.
Aristotle noticed that when people in the past were depressed they often rolled around on the ground crying confessing this sin or that, wondering which God they may have offended. When my uncle was depressed, he thought he had committed the "unforgivable sin" and was destined to an eternal hell.
Our brain cannot sit around and accept such an excrutiating physical pain. It needs a reason.
It needs something to blame that horrable darkness on.In your case, you have blamed something different entirely.
I've been off medications for long periods of time. I wait, and wait and cry out and cry out louder, begging God for my mood to improve, for the stalemate to break, and the anger to go. But it doesn't. It simply "does not" and "will not" improve on its own.
I agree that the meds are not the entire answer. I agree that they to not make my life a rosey dance. But they do make it bearable.
How many more times do I have to learn my lesson? How many more times do I need to go to the hospital in an ambulance ??
We do know that depression itself causes hippocampal shrinkage and atrophy. The longer somebody is depressed the more atophy there is. Somtimes up to 20% of the hippocampus is lost to depression and anxiety.
Some of the largest and most unbiased studies done to lead to the conclusion that these medications (while not making us all eternally happy), can delay relapse, prevent recuurances, and more importantly protect the brain.
I am not perfect, and I'd like to improve, but I have been a lot worse.
Depression itself is neurodegenerative.
I can take my meds and maybe loose a few brain cells, or not take anything and go back to sitting in the courner for "days at a time",
waiting for death.Remission is unlikely, but for me an improvement is evident with medication. I'm not the type of person that you think I am.
Please, I don't mean to offend, but I've heard from hundreds who propose to have the answer to depression, but few ideas have really added up.
If you have something I have not considered, then please spill the beans!
Linkadge
poster:linkadge
thread:445348
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050119/msgs/446526.html