Depression

If you can separate yourself from the ego you will recognize that you are not "depressed". Your ego is just telling you that, because people are drawn unconsciously to feeling pain, to feeling the blues. Your ego needs identification and if it can identify with feeling the blues or being depressed it will. The key for you is to become aware of it. Recognize it is your ego, and not who you are-your Being, that is making you feel like you do and asking the questions you are asking.

Help comes from within, seeking professional help is just seeking someone who guides you to finding help within, because it can not come from anywhere else. No amount of money or love may cause your ego to dissipate, in fact, it will only strengthen it, and soon enough you will find yourself in the "blues" again. Lottery winners are an example of this.

Find the reasons why you are feeling shitty, and ask yourself if they are somehow tied into your past, the story of you (or me my and I), or linked to your future. Because if they are, you will never let yourself Be, to exist in this moment, because this moment is all you really have. It is life.

You are not a congregation of mostly false memories from your past, and the emotional reactions your ego has tied to those experiences. When people bring that story with them into the present, they are not truly present. You are acting out a story and this belief made up by your ego on how you are supposed to be, but you are not truly present or conscious in the situation of now. Whatever that has happened in "your past" is not who you are. It is gone. Memory is faulty, and emotions are egoic mind reactions that are often way off base. Anger, frustration, jealousy, depression; they serve no benefit to you and your body and your spirit and your Being, your existence. They cause your immune system to become weak. They make you sick. They are just identifications for your mind to identify with. Defensiveness, or people who react emotionally to anything are carrying with them their story of me.

By the way, it is very easy to recognize your ego, especially in times of "depression". Do you hear that voice in your head when you are in bed at night and can't sleep? That voice that is "thinking" for you? That is your ego. Recognize how when you are thinking those thoughts that your body is reacting to it.

See how your body and emotions are affected by that voice in your head. What is the voice complaining about? Bills? Someone owes you money? Wish you could have that missed touchdown pass back in the high school state championship game that you lost? SO what. None of those things bear any resemblance of who you are. In fact, words can't describe who you are, because they are just simply words. Your heart begins to beat faster, you may perspire a bit, and then that further feeds your ego and it becomes a vicious cycle between your hungry ego and your emotional reactions to it, and you get no sleep.

Fear not, for most of the world is unconscious. Your job is to become conscious. You become enlightened by first becoming aware. Any time you feel yourself reacting negatively to something, or feeling like shit, recognize that it is not you. You may say, "there is unhappiness within me", but YOU are not unhappy, YOU are not depressed. YOU are life, YOU are living, and nothing more and nothing less. Be at peace with there being unhappiness within you, because you will see that you are better off being at peace with unhappiness within you rather than fighting it constantly and letting your ego feed on you. Don't sit there and try to find happiness. Just be at peace with however your ego is making you feel. Once you are at peace with there being some unhappiness inside of you, there is space created around that unhappiness, and that unhappiness becomes you no more. That space is awareness. That space is separation from the ego.

Words of truth. I have applied this to my own life and it is the difference between day and night.

Good job Skull Mason.

Skull, that's all great and I think it's a good philosophy to live by, but profound clinical depression (not the blues, not stress-induced, anxiety, not grief, etc.) is a completely different animal. Clinical depression robs you of the ability to feel, function, and have anything resembling a rational mind. People ask depressed people all the time why they are depressed. A truly depressed person will look at you in complete bewilderment because clinical depression exists by and of itself.

I've written a lot about depression and mental illness on this site, and though I don't
wish to reprise it here because I don't have much time or brain power, it's something that even professionals, specifically general practitioners, don't really understand. Even psychiatrists and therapists have only limited tools in their arsenal. Most people confuse depression with a normal reaction to a negative event-- you're going to feel devastated after you break up with a significant other. However, if, two months later, you're unable to get out of bed or stop crying and you see no reason to live, it's probably progressed further than just normal grief and sadness.

I'm bipolar and I've experienced depression, mania, sadness, and loss. The first two make me feel like my soul has been hijacked. I lose my sense of self, my rational thinking, and my ability to enjoy anything when I'm depressed. When I'm manic it's worse-- I get so agitated that thinking is nearly impossible because the noise in my head is so lound. The second two suck, but they get better with some coping skills and working to get out of a rut.

I think the term depression is overused, even by professionals and pharmaceutical companies hoping to extend their market base. A lot of people get stuck in a rut of one sort or another, and just need to learn coping skills (similar to what Skull wrote) and patience. People seem to forget that sadness and grief are a part of the human condition. There are times in your life when feeling like shit is completely normal. If you're not where you want to be in life and you don't have any sense of purpose, you should feel like shit. Seeing a therapist might help you find the tools to get up and get out. However, when you're so disabled that the therapy can't work because you can't think, can't get out of bed, can barely hold a conversation, and have no idea who you are anymore, that's probably depression.

Depression is profound and disabling. Medication doesn't fix it-- but it does help restore a sort of affective normalcy so that you can function and hopefully use that to get better. The idea of depression has been cheapened and overused by our society, to the detriment of people suffering from both normal emotional sadness and grief and to people with profound mental illness.

This is all nice and good and stuff. But basically it's the stuff that Eckhart Tolle outlines in "The Power of Now." It's a book that really should have been about 10 pages because it says the same thing over and over and over again... The mind is a powerful tool. You are not your mind. You are no-mind. So get "mind" out of the way and stop listening to it. Instead tell your "mind" what you want it to do and you will find peace...

All of that is fine and good unless you are clinically depressed! People who are mearly "blue" and "sad" and plainly just being "neurotic" can follow that practice and find their way out.

If you are clinically depressed you have much more to deal with. If you've never been clinically depressed yourself you will not understand completely what people who suffer from clinical depression experience.

I strongly disagree with Eckhart Tolle about our basic nature because I'm Holistic. I believe that we are body, mind, soul, and spirit all at the same time. We are embodied beings.

When you are clinically depressed, it's in your body, mind, soul, and spirit. You must treat the whole person in order to become well again. Eckhart Tolle uses a couple hundred pages to explain something very simple that does work for one part of the person, your mind. You must attend to the mind. You must come to a realization that the mind is a powerful tool to be used to help yourself climb out of the pit you are in. You must silence the "committee" that chatters negativity in the recesses of your mind. That is a "must do."

And, you must treat the body. Depression actually shrinks parts of the brain. It attacks your immune system. It affects all parts of the body. You must find a way to treat the body. Drugs (prescriptions or other drugs or herbs like St. John's Wart) are one way of treating the body. There are other ways including exercise, electro-convulsive therapy, accupuncture, accupressure, massage, etc... For many people who suffer true clinical depression exercising and the other "alternative" methods of treating the body aren't enough. So they need psychoactive drugs to restore balance to the neurotransmitters in the body.

And you must treat your spirit. Spirit is the part of you that allows you to connect with other beings, whether they are other embodied beings like other people or non-embodied beings like "God" or other energies. There are many ways to treat the Spirit. All of them include practices that help you to connect with others. Even going out to lunch with a friend can be a Spiritual Practice. It helps you to establish a connection to another person. Prayer works for some. Meditation works for others. Hypnotherapy can be useful here too. Psychotherapy is good at healing the spirit because it is a healthy connection made with another human being who can guide you.

Also you must treat your Soul. The Soul is that permanent part of your Self that lives on when you are no longer embodied. Your Soul is damaged when you are depressed. Usually depressed people believe that they are fundamentally flawed and they suffer from low self-esteem. Some of these are "beliefs" that reside in the mind. Some of these are actual damage that depression has done to the Soul. Meditation is a good way of repairing the Soul. Hypnotherapy can help here too. Writing in a journal can help. Anything that helps you to raise your awareness of who you really are helps you to repair and heal your Soul. Psychotherapy is good at helping you to heal your Soul because a good psychotherapist can guide you back to reconnect with your true Self.


Depression is a serious illness. It is deadly. People die from it. Suicide is the most common way to die of depression. Also, since depression also involves the body, it can kill the body through allowing infections to spread and cancer to spread.

If you are depressed, it is true that you may not know it or you may be in denial. It is important to be seen by a competent mental health professional whether that person is a medical doctor, psychotherapist, counselor, etc. who has dealt with depression and can properly assess your mental health. If you have friends who have suffered from depression, it might be useful to ask them if you seem depressed. People who have suffered from depression can usually recognize it in others. Also they can be wonderful support in your healing process.

It is disasterous to listen to people who will tell you that, "It's all in your mind" or "Just get over it." The truth is, if you are clinically depressed, you cannot simply "get over it" on your own.

There is such a thing as spontaneous remission of depression. There is also a theory that depression is part of our natural cycle as human beings, that somehow it's linked to survival. Some people do find their own way out of depression. These people usually have situational depression and have a reason for being depressed (reasons such as loss, death, illness, chronic pain that remits, etc.). This is a different kind of depression than endogenous depression. Endogenous depression is clinical depression that just seems to come out of nowhere. That is the kind of depression where most people need help in order to get well.

If you have never experienced depression before in your life and you have a few days where you are "blue" you may not have clinical depression. If you are concerned that you might, you may know yourself very well and you may be correct. Get evaluated if you suspect you are clinically depressed. If you are evaluated and found not to be clinically depressed, that might help you to get out of whatever funk you are in at the moment because you won't be worried about being depressed...

Clinical depression is a legitimate thing. As someone who has suffered many years from it, and endured many physical problems from the side effects the meds that were rx'd for me...

I have found some truth in what Skull Mason mentioned. I am just an individual case and not everyone is the same. It is not always so easy finding the answers or meds that are able to even do a good enough job to get you through your day to day life. Having said that....

I took from the OP that his person's issue with depression were not as severe as say mine were. What SM was offering seemed like to me a logical and med free solution from information contained there.

I am off the meds completely. I now manage it with meditation, exercise and nutrition. (In addition to what I read in Tolle's books, I approached my situation by treating the whole body. Not just the mind.)
Count me as being fortunate and don't I know it. I wish the same for everyone living with this illness.

Anyone who wonders if he/she is suffering from depression owes it to themselves to seek proper professional medical attention. This discussion is good for bringing different opinions and philosophies into the open, but it does nothing in terms of diagnosis and treatment.

We will have truly evolved as a society when mental illness is considered on a par with physical illness. Until then, stigma will make many who would benefit from treatment wary or hostile of approaching it. And that's a very bad thing.

This is very true.

I have a real gripe with the people who tell people to "just get over it" when they're depressed, or even kick them when they're down, making them even MORE depressed!

I'm not sure I have either situational or clinical depression, but something in between those two - long-term situational, you could say. I've had a very low self esteem since I was a child, and I also have a lot of social anxiety that has resulted from negative reactions from other people. The thing is, what happens is that sometimes I'll do something like agree to meet with or help out a friend, then something happens before that that triggers my social anxiety (doesn't have to be people insulting me or anything, simply going to a place to meet people, and them saying something to me like "You're so quiet!" or "You need to smile more!" will set it off, then I will go into hiding for a few days, will not show up to meet said friend I'd agreed to meet before, friend will be angry with me and say something like "It's a wonder you have any friends at all!" which will further trigger my social anxiety and make me go into even deeper hiding, because now I'm afraid that if I am around others at all, they will be angry with me or hate me, so then I withdraw from the entire world. And the cycle of loneliness and low self esteem gets worse and worse.

Add to that the fact that I have tried several anti-depressants, and they make me so sleepy that I am unable to work or look for work, which could be financially disastrous, so I cannot take anti-depressants. I have to work around extreme social anxiety just enough to work or look for work, so that I can have an income. Also, I cannot have any social life at all (even less than normal!) if I'm on anti-depressants, because I cannot drive or leave the house. I am too sleepy to drive (unsafe) and too sleepy to leave the house or meet with anyone. I literally sleep 20 hours a day, and am even a walking zombie for the other 4. Now I know that supposedly not all anti-depressants have that side effect, but I can't afford to take chances with going through a bunch that do, before I find one that works for me, because I have to support myself economically - which means I either have to work when I have a job, or look for work when I'm unemployed, so I can be eligible for unemployment benefits AND of course so I can find a new job!

I am glad that you got your masturbatory prowess back.

Paxil was the worst for me. It took me hours to orgasm. It was so frustrating that I totally gave up sex with others, and eventually masturbation. Zoloft wasn't so bad, but it worsened my anxiety. Celexa did the same. Basically, I haven't had much luck with SSRI's. My doctor is thinking of putting me back on the tricyclic anti-depressants that I took as a teen.

For me, depression is a lifestyle. It never fully goes away, but it's good enough now that I can function without medication. I am getting work done, exercising, etc., but I am not motivated enough to do much else. I am not sleeping or eating well.

SSRI's reduce panic, obsession, anxiety and depression, so they seem ideal for me. Unfortunately the side-effects are not tolerable. I have been waiting for over 15 years for a single drug that can help me. Until then I just have psychotherapy and anxiolitics (Prince Valium).

Very Zen of you Skull Mason. Thanks for the words of wisdom.

Sentient beings are numberless I vow to save them.

I am so glad that a number of people who suffer from forms of depression are speaking up about it here. Depression has as many different manifestations as there are sufferers. Some people have the strength of personality to plow forward even while suffering from clinical depression of a profound nature. They are usually that curmudgeon who is mean as a snake, many of our best satirists William Styron, Art Buckwald, and Samuel Clemmons suffered profoundly. But it is real and telling someone to snap out of it is like telling someone they struck out at bat. They KNOW.

WOB brought up something I was going to mention. I was going to say that the difference between depressed and disappointed is when you break up with a beau does it take you 12 months or 12 years to get over it? Can you remember how to spell cat on your bad days and do you feel like being UNDER the bed instead of just in it at its worst?

For anyone who wants to see 4 different faces of depression watch "The Hours". It shows depression in all of its glory.

Yes, the term Depression has been over used but the real thing is a total body experience. It can truly depress one's immune system, cause the body to ache, the GI system to go haywire, and the list goes on from there.

Chemical imbalances in the body can lead to severe depression. Because of my out of control immune system, my body destroys the seratonin in the brain. It lead to depression, fibromyalgia, and sleeplessness. None of the prescription drugs worked for me. A Doc put me on 5-Hydroxy-L-Tryptophan, and in two weeks I was so much better. It is a nutritional suppliment that causes the body to make more seratonin. I am so glad I didn't listen to peeps who weren't professionally trained.

you mean all the people here on LPSg arnt doctors!? but are still recommending medications and treatments? gota love the internet, theres always someone who thinks they know everything.

Wow, I have the same issues. Perhaps I need to talk to my doctor about what you are taking. That sounds great! Because anti depressants do not react well to my body. There are a number of friends here on board who are suffering from the same issues.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I went through a severe depression. A fomer honors student, my grades plummeted to C's, D's, and even a couple of F's. Looking back on it, I believe I was clinically depressed, but I was never diagnosed as such because I did not seek treatment. I was in a state of complete and utter despair; the world seemed like a terrible place, life seemed hopeless, and I was in several psychological and emotional pain. I wanted to die. No, I take that back. That's not quite true. I didn't want to die, I just wanted the pain to STOP. Death seemed like the only way.


Somehow--I can't explain how or why--the depression gradually lifted. My healing began with summer vacation, away from the Hell that is high school. Slowly, gradually, I began to see that in spite of all the pain and horror, there was still beauty in the world, and I decided that it was worth living for. I began my junior year in high school newly energized, and I excelled at school.


Since then, I have gone through many "phases" of severe depression that last for days or weeks. It's all doom and gloom, depth of despair, life is hopeless and pointless, I'll never be happy, etc, etc. It's hard to get out of bed in the morning. It's even harder to go to bed at night, because I know that morning is going to come, and the thought of facing another day is unbearable. There have been times when I felt like I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and the only thing stopping it from happening is that I don't have the courage to lose control and let myself go mad. But in those moments the thing I want more than anything is to scream, yell, cry, freak out, and disintegrate into a babbling idiot so those nice men in their clean white coats will come take me away for a nice long rest. Every time I feel myself going to that place, I think "Here we go again." Honestly, it's happened so many times now that I know what to expect. I know that I'm going to be miserable for a while, and I accept that. I know that it will pass eventually, so I ride it out.


But even when I'm not so severely depressed, I'm never really happy, either. I'm very negative, critical, cynical, and pessimistic. I see the down side of things. I don't enjoy life very much. I don't like people very much. A few years ago I considered the possibility that there was something wrong with me, with the way I think, the way I perceive things. I finally decided to try psychotherapy to see if I could figure it out, perhaps chance my perspective. I'm not really quite sure what I expected or hoped to achieve, I just couldn't think of anything else to do. Although I won't say that psychotherapy was entirely useless (I haven't had a bout of severe depression since then), I also didn't find myself making much progress. I eventually came to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with me or the way that I think. I decided that I'm unhappy because my life sucks, and that the only way I'm going to be happy is by changing my life.


I no longer entirely agree with that conclusion. Clearly I have a bad attitude and need to change the way I look at things. At the same time, I have some very real problems other than my attitude (e.g., a horrible job that pays poorly) that need to be addressed.


Going back to the OP's original question, is this depression, or something else? I'm not sure.


Almost two years ago I lost my libido. I have written about this in a few other threads. At first I thought it was "just" stress. After several months I mentioned it to my doctor, who tested me for low testosterone. Although my results were in the normal range, they were at the low end of normal. After several months of no libido, I began to get depressed, but a different kind of depression than I had previously experienced. It's more a general sense of apathy, boredom, disinterest in anything and everything, and a general inability to enjoy much of anything or to experience any kind of pleasure, not just sexual pleasure. I believe that my current depression, which I would describe as chronic and low-grade (for lack of a more precise clinical term) is directly related to my lack of libido.


I was also suffering "heart problems" similar to what Mr. Hardcock described, but all the tests came back negative. My doctor eventually suggested that maybe both problems were caused by depression. I wasn't convinced. I pointed out that although I was depressed, the depression began several months after the libido problems. I also pointed out that I had tried anti-depressants twice in the past, without results. Nevertheless, I agreed to humor him and agreed to try another anti-depressant. Well, the medication made me sick and did nothing to help me, just like the other anti-depressants I had previously tried.


I do believe that some people need to treat their depression with medication. I don't think that I'm one of them.


Mr. Hardcock, I also have terrible sleep patterns, although with me it's mostly just a bad habit. The evenings seem to go by so quickly, I'm reluctant to give them up, so I stay up late trying to squeeze as much out of the day as I can. (Also, for some reason I'm much more mentally energized late in the evening. It's the one time of day I actually feel interested and engaged in what I'm doing, even if it's just hanging out here on lpsg.) For a while I managed to get onto a normal, regular sleep schedule, and I felt much better physically and emotionally. My heart rate and rhythm seemed more normal, and my libido even returned a little bit. Since then, however, I have returned to my bad habits. I won't go so far as to say that my problems are solely the result of inadequate sleep, but lack of sleep can make these problems much worse. As you say, it's a vicious cycle and, as x704 says, it's a huge downwards spiral.


I have more to say in response to some things other people wrote, but this post is so long I'll stop here and put them in another post.

I take one each morning, one at bedtime. They are made by Progressive Labs in Irving Texas.