[H3rmit]

I see people talking about depression as an illness. It seems very different from what I experience. I can see reasons why I am profoundly sad. It's not just something that comes upon me from nowhere. It has increased over the years.

Back in the '90s, the SSRI trend began and not only GPs but ordinary nonprofessional people would push Prozac and other meds at me. Who the heck are they to diagnose me?!? I hate the effects of meds having tried them, but the point I'm making is that this whole depression thing has permeated a large segment of society so that people are seeing it where it doesn't apply. (Again, not arguing with anyone's view of where they are at. Just wanting respect for where I am at.)

Things have gotten worse to the point where I can relate to not wanting to get out of bed, to being unmotivated, lacking in will to make the effort to create chances for good things to happen. I'm discouraged after many dark years of sorrow and watching the stupid panoply of human life pass before me as I shake my head in wonder at the choices made by the world. I know things don't work well because of so many people with conflicting interests and values, so it's not that I think I have the solution to it all. I just feel despair, because of both my failings and those of others in my life in the past.

[TheOriginalMe]

As depression is just a label for a collection of symptoms (both physical and emotional), I guess it doesn't really matter if the origin of these symptoms is biological or anthropogenic, internal or external, self inflicted or circumstantial. The experience of depression is what matters to the person who is living with it.

I am at a stage now where the symptoms are overpowering me and the medical profession either can't or won't help. Believing that depression is an illness that can be treated and will get better is very far from my experience, yet it is what I've always believed. Right now, my personal view is that depression is my punishment for being such an incompetent and worthless person.

I think I'm saying in a roundabout way, I relate.

Hello H3rmit: Yes, I agree with your assessment regarding depression. I've never really had any psych testing of any consequence & none of the professionals I've worked with have ever offered anything in the way of a diagnosis. They just keep prescribing SNRI's & other things, from time-to-time none of which I end up staying on for very long for a variety of reasons. So I've been on Cymbalta only, for about 2 years now. It's not great. But it's the best med I've tried; & I've given up thinking that there's anything better out there. I don't have a therapist.

Nowadays I think everything gets chalked up to depression. It's easy, there are SSRI's & SNRI's one can take & there's no need for expensive long-term therapy. It's like we're all rolling along on an assembly line. One guy stamps our foreheads with the word: "depression". At the next station, they give us our prescription for whatever SSRI or SNRI they happen to pull out of the prescription box. Then the last guy tosses us out in the street & yells: "Come back in 3 months!" And there we sit on the sidewalk, with our prescriptions in our sweaty little hands & with dazed looks on our faces! And they wonder why we just keep getting worse! Oh well, at one time I guess we'd have been chained to the walls in a crazy house. So I suppose we shouldn't complain too loudly.

[Fuzzybear]