Psycho-Babble Medication | about biological treatments | Framed
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Recovery is complicated

Posted by pseudoname on April 4, 2006, at 12:58:47

Deep brain stimulation sounds so promising to me, I almost (almost!) wish my current med weren't working as modestly well as it is: maybe DBS would work better. Sheece, some people are never satisfied! LOL!

The TRD woman who got remission through DBS had trouble re-adjusting to “normal” life. By my standards, she hadn't been severely depressed for very long (3 or 4 years, I think).

Now that I seem to be *gradually* coming out of my 24-year depression thanks to buprenorphine, I'm having to sort out what was directly due to the biological depression, what's just personal preference, what's just habitual after all these years, what's still untreated depression, etc. I have to “make” myself do things I still don't want to do but am now “able” to do, whatever that means.

For example, I'm recovered enough from the depression that I “can”, say, fix my leaky tub (which has been costing me $10/month for 6 years). But I feel like I still have no *reason* to fix it — a lack of motivation that looks to me a lot like depression. But then I can tell myself (like in CBT or REBT etc), “I don't like feeling amotivational,” and voilá I don't have to have a reason: I can fix the sink even though I don't *feel* like I have a good motivating reason to do so.

Those little cognitive tricks never worked before this med.

Hard to explain.

When you're really depressed, you have to really want something and expect to get a lot out of it in order to drag yourself to do it. Maybe I'm just expecting everything now to have the sort of exceptional motivation or high reward that depressives must have to be able to do anything?

I think I'm still missing a little dopaminergic improvement as far as reward or expectation of reward. Maybe with a little time & effort, that will change on its own? Maybe even if I got DBS, I'd still be in the same boat. ;-)

I'm not depressed, but I only minimally want to do anything. That hasn't changed even as I've gotten out and done things. The CBT gurus predict that doing things makes you more motivated. Hasn't helped me much, but maybe I'm making a centimeter-a-day progress....

Antipsychotics treat amotivational syndrome, don't they? (I've never tried one except a few days on Haldol.)


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Psycho-Babble Medication | Framed

poster:pseudoname thread:628681
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060403/msgs/628681.html