I'm not managing to recover. This has gone on too long. I appreciate all the suggestions that I give myself permission to take it easy. Sometimes that's what you need to do. At this point, me taking it easy on the couch in front of the TV is only bringing me further down in the depressive spiral. My place is such a mess. No dishes washed in days. Seeing the mess around me makes me more depressed. If I got going and made my apartment look nice, I'ld feel better.

All I did today was take a shower. It was hard to get through that. I barely had the strength to do that. I get so short of breath.

I'm not asking for more ideas of healthy things I could be doing. You've all made good suggestions. I'm going to hire someone to help me with straightening up my place. Believe me, I get by on a small income. It's not easy to manipulate my finances, so I can hire help.

Three and a half years ago, after my sig. other passed away, I got very depressed and had a huge mess on my hands. I had to empty out my boyfriend's apartment, which meant piles and piles of stuff from his place brought to my house. I was in a mess. I hired a home cleaner to attack the bathroom and kitchen, which greatly helped, but still there were mountains of stuff to sort through. I decided to hire a professional organizer. The results were amazing. They don't come cheap. In my area, they charge $60 per hour. A professional organizer comes for a 3 hour "session." I find 2 days, with a 3 hr session each day, radically transforms the environment I'm living in. With my environment made orderly, my state of mind greatly improves. I get unstuck.

I have also been thinking about asking my PCP to refer me to psych services. I feel I'm in a slow rolling crisis. I think often about suicide. I'm not in any danger of self-harm tonight, or tomorrow, or next week. But I will find a way out of this state of mind, one way or another. Fortunately, I feel I have things to try first before giving in to despair.

I'm pinning most of my hope on hiring the organizer to whip my apartment into shape. It's a nice, cozy, comfortable place, when things are in order. That might be all I need. At times in the past, I've been helped by getting professional psych help. Maybe I would benefit from that again. Just to have someone recognize what I'm going through.

Everyone has felt depressed at one time or another. That leads people to think they know about serious depression. Chronically recurring depression is not like what most people know about. Clinical depression is not like what most people have experienced. So, please, if you have not ever been diagnosed with clinical depression, please don't judge me. If you have never had to cope with depression, while being totally alone, please don't judge. I believe there are others, here at MSF, who do know what this is like. I'm sure there are members of MSF who've been thru worse, even much worse than what I'm going thru. I don't deserve a pity party. But I do deserve some mental health care.

That brings me to a longstanding problem I've had. I clean up good. I "present" well. At first glance, mental health professionals tend to think there is nothing much wrong with me. I don't get taken seriously. My PCP prescribes my antidepressant. That means she has an obligation and a responsibility to assess how I'm doing. She never, ever asks me how I'm doing with managing my chronically recurring depression. Once a year, an M.A. reads off questions from a depression assessment. She types in my answers, while looking at the computer monitor. The questions come with multiple choice options for answers. It is the most perfunctory approach imaginable. My PCP obviously does not take seriously how much I struggle. I need someone to believe me. Even if they can't do a dang thing to speed up my recovery, it would help me just to be believed.

So I keep thinking that, if I ask for psychiatric help, it will backfire on me. I fear that my PCP might cancel my prescription for Vicodin. Every month I pick up my refill of 60 tablets. That's probably enough to be lethal, if taken all at once. So I'm afraid to speak candidly with my PCP. She's a physician's assistant. She told me in the past that she would not increase my psych med (amitriptyline) by more than a slight amount. She said that any major change could only be made by a psychiatrist.

I would never take an overdose of drugs. That is too unreliable with an unpredictable outcome. A person doing that could wake up - still alive, but with major organ damage. Years ago, I researched methods. There really isn't any ideal way. Even physician-assisted euthanasia can have a horrifying result, with some patients taking 48 hours to succumb to barbituate overdose. (Seconal is what is usually ordered in USA.)
That's why, in Holland, they have mostly switched to using an I/V barbituate, which is the only truly humane way to terminate a human life. As a nurse, I've care for failed suicide victims. Some of the failed attempts produced horrendous outcomes, where the individuals survived, but with severe brain damage. So I'm in no hurry to do something drastic. I know how badly that can go.

I feel there are still things I can do to make life seem more worthwhile. We discussed some of those things above. I don't seem to be making any progress. That's what has me considering asking for a psych referral. Just some contact with someone who understands depression would possibly help me. Often professionals don't understand, especially with someone who comes across as functioning pretty well. I don't seem to be dangerously depressed. Maybe I'm not. Maybe I just feel too sorry for myself.