I no longer use antidepressants.
I very much doubt I ever will again.
Wrestling with my dark feelings made them worse. I have come to the conclusion that, for me, I do not suffer from depression but benefit from seriousness. I do not have a sick mind, but a mind that wishes to take things seriously.
I have benefitted enormously from allowing myself to accept emotional pain, sometimes long term, and let it sink into me and alter my personality, rather than wrangle with it in the hope that I can maintain a youthful outlook. I no longer want a youthful outlook. I want MY outlook, and I no longer believe that sadness is an illness, not even if it lasts for years.
In 2012 I learned to accept that the world around me can be dark and terrible but that does not mean that it is off-kilter, upset or out of balance at all and in fact is functioning perfectly normally.
The result of all this is that for the first time in years, particularly over the past few months, I have been able to accept an increasingly giving world, have stopped taking the love of my friends for granted and have been rewarded with acts of forgiveness and kindness (that in fact were always there but I had been ignoring them through a strong desire to influence them and bring them about myself), acts I had long since stopped paying any attention to because I had fallen into the habit of believing that feelings were inherently suspect.
I have thrown away the desire for happiness, and finally it has reappeared.
So, in a slightly counter-intuitive sense, the Mayans were right.
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It's taken me a loooong time...
bless you. 
I just wish I'd got to grips with the ideas you express earlier in life...
Thank you for sharing 
Being sad is not a medical condition; nor is being frightened or worried. These are normal and natural aspects of living fully in the world. If your sadness or worry interferes unduly with your activities of daily life, or is in some way debilitating for a long period, then you probably need to see a doctor.
There is so much wisdom in the acceptance of what comes.
I read a theory or opinion one time that people who tend toward darker simply thoughts see 'reality' better than most of us.
Still, they shouldn't turn in towards the self to the point of self destruction, right?
for speaking for many.
that's beautiful.
It's a silly New Age etc. belief that everything, including anger and fear (and gravity), is fundamentally based on love. And that through journeys of fear and anger and getting there lost for a while, we just find new aspects of love. Love as being and experiencing all aspects of being, even the most horrible and terrifying ones. And no, I didn't invent it, just going with the flow...
I have to say I think you have suffered a tragedy vastly more profound and apalling than anything that's ever happened to me... I can't imagine what it must have been like at all. Your way of dealing with it seems like it comes from the kind of naturally energetic and positive person that I always hoped to be but in the end had to be satisfied with not being...
Bless you and all the best for 2013...
Thank you.
I haven't had any face to face psyche help in a few years now. I didn't find it hugely beneficial even at the time, to be honest. It was nice to have someone to talk to, at least, but these days my boyfriend is just as good ( he used to be useless...
). It's primarily because most of the problems I was facing at that were things I could probably have just changed if I wanted to, but I didn't...
"Whatever gets you through the night... It's alright..... It's alright...."
I have a "triad" approach to when depression presents itself, so this is not advice. However, I have also had it confirmed, so believe that entering that "dark night" and learning from it (with or without assisted anti-depressant therapy) is always joined by the more important two things, talking to someone who is willing to witness and tell you things about the process (okay if it's a therapist, so long as it reaches some end point) and exercise, which can be done in many ways.
These things cause for deep self-analysis, which, by the way, is not always easy, but gets easier.
And, if you believe that we move through the universe, which seeks its own answers, the Mayans probably were right.
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Many thanks for your thought provoking response. I'd like to take some time and respond to it properly as I think it's very well thought out and it touches quite deeply on the core of what I'm talking about. I'm going to have a think and come back to you if that's OK. I can't do it just now, I'm catching a boat to Arran of the West coast of Scotland today, but I'll be back before long...
Have a good New Year and talk soon
Some time has passed since I said I would respond to you properly. I wanted to go away and see if I could distill my feelings about the idea of the world being "off-kilter" into something a little more literal and useful than "it isn't".
I'm finding it quite difficult.
I've decided to just dump what I've come up with into this thread and hope for the best.
You have mentioned environmental destruction, global warming and a system that has distorting effects on the natural human persona. I think one of the reasons I regard these as kind of more normal than we would like to think is because of how I view the current (and no probably ending) "era" of expansion and prosperity.
I think if you look back at human history and compare the it to the 20th century it's very difficult to avoid the conclusion that the 20th century was in fact an aberrant process. All that cheap energy and personal development, all those material and spiritual improvements, really they aren't very normal for the human species, which most trundles on for century after century being much the same as it was. I think a lot of the advances we have made are lucky rather than driven by innate qualities or some slightly indefinable "destiny" of the human species. I also think a great deal of the improvements on 19th (and pre) century living that we now take for granted are descended from the effects of cheap energy, and I think that a lot of the changes in social attitudes that we want to maintain as we go forward into our future are strongly linked to that in occulted ways.
I look at portraits in galleries from ages past quite a lot as I am interested in art, and have a preference for art from earlier times. The people are beautifully painted, with astonishing care, and the thing that strikes me about them is that this beauty doesn't come from happiness but seriousness.
I think people used to take the world and themselves far more seriously. I think that stemmed from the necessity to treat things as if they mattered, as if they had a profound and meaningful connection to the world around them and, almost unconsciously, expected their experiences of it to change them and make them into different people. The idea of "changing the world" is relatively modern, and the more I think about it, the stranger the idea is. I think it stems from a fairly basic misunderstanding of what the world *is*.
It's my feeling that cheap gasoline has led us down a spiritual dead-end. We want, want, want and get, get, get. How can it last forever? It can't. We have been slowly tricked into thinking that the world is a kind of enormous theme park. Everyone can be happy! Happy is the new normal. Sad is BAD. We DESERVE it. We're WORTH it. What do these things even mean?
Movies are stuffed with positivity and winning and the good guy getting the girl. Even when movies try to deal with the concept of sadness it's wildly off-base, they wring every last shining tear out of their actors, striking grotesque attitudes and poses to try and wring emotional reactions out of the audience. Sadness is never simple or normal in the world of modern fiction. It's always elaborately established and gutwrenching. It's as overblown as the success-against-all-the-odds stories that form the basis of most modern heroic adventures.
Many highly intelligent people have manged to discover things about the world that we had no idea about until the last century or so, through science. I think this has led to a monolithic concept "the world must be made to fit human expectations" and I think that's just *impossible*. I think this idea has filtered into us, overtly or by suggestion and we are bombarded internally by our own inability to make our dreams come true.
Dreams are wonderful things and it is wrong to turn away from them, but I think it's silly to think that the world is some kind of enormous activity set that we can poke and prod and it will just make happiness for us. When you look into the past and try to understand yourself as part of an ancient process, a process of human living, there have been many, many disastrous consequences for foolish ideas, dreadful wars that make no sense at all, ideological plagues that could have been avoided if they were understood as emotional reactions rather than divine inspiration, insane policies that ruin entire landscapes (Dust Bowl) and so on. Many of the most awful things that humanity has done to itself have resulted from people *following their dreams*. Hitler was a dreamer. He followed his dream, powered the process with his will, which was staggering, and bent the world into nightmarish shapes as a result, because he couldn't disentangle the positive aspects of his dream, which was to lift German society off its knees, from the poisonous imbalance in his soul that couldn't forgive or accept failure. A slightly hyperbolic example, perhaps.
I think the idea that the world is off-kilter doesn't really come from a clear picture of what it would look like if it *wasn't* off-kilter, because, in one way or another, it seems that it always *has* been off-kilter. The obliteration of Native Americans. Easter Island. The Inquisition. The Holocaust. Hiroshima. The Romans used to enslave the *entire populations* of nations.
It's fashionable these days to assume that we are over all these things, that we have changed, I would argue strongly against that. I think the capacity for human beings to screw all this stuff up is entirely innate and not removable, I don't think we can "immunise" ourselves against ourselves. If you read your history and listen to the voices of the dead, they had the same feelings about themselves and the world that we did, their emotions and reactions to the world were *identical* in structure to ours. They wept at the death of comrades in battle, were overwhelmed with joy at the birth of their children, sat by the sick and needy and comforted them, pondered matters of national security and prosperity with deep care, cheated, lied, loved and died in great numbers, and, largely, accepted that this was their lot. I don't think we're any different from them. I think a lot of the problem with modern society stems from the fact that on some level we DO think we're different from them, we think that all this stuff should be fixable somehow. Well, how? Are we, as individuals, simply setting ourselves goals that are simply going to make us miserable?
A great deal has been acheived. Disease is no longer even close to being the demon it used to be, women are now understood to be individuals in their own right rather than slightly-to-one-side versions of men, gay people are now, at last, being welcomed as natural and completely ordinary members of the human race and bigotry is, if not removed entirely, at the very least widely understood to be deeply contraversial and mostly a target for mockery, at least in western liberal democracies. Technology has changed the way we work and live and made everything everywhere a good deal easier and more comfortable for very large numbers of people. The grinding misery of existence no longer grinds as fine and long as it did.
But there's a side effect to that. We are no longer hewn into shapes that fit the world. We want to believe in fairies and dragons and superheroes rather than ourselves and each other. We think the world is enormous labyrinth and if we take the right steps along the way, always carefully choose the appropriate path, then the path will lead us to a golden destination and the more I live the more ridiculous that idea seems, that isn't how it works at all! Again and again we find ourselves banging against the walls of the labyrinth and curse fate when really we should have looked at ourselves and seen that the wall was coming and that the pain of banging into it was either because we weren't looking where we were going or it isn't a wall at all but our own silly preconceptions.
I do not see humanity as separate from the world but as a part of it. Species go extinct, change, renew and burst into existence all the time. Why would we be any different, we who are motivated by the same forces of hunger, love, fear and contentment that characterise the lives of the simplest organisms?
We are driven by what we feel, and we only have a finite gallery of tools in our heart, so it is natural for us to want the world to be amenable to the work of these tools. But these tools are not there to change the world, they are only there to change *us* or the bits of the world that already make sense to us. We hack away at all levels, personal, social, political, spiritual at one big conundrum after another and sometimes it works, sometimes really well, but it's seems very wrong to me now to think that the world is going to provide us with solutions to everything that faces us. It's not on our side and never has been. We're good at solving puzzles so we want the world to be a giant puzzle, but that's not because it *is* one, it's because behaving as if it is makes us feel good about ourselves. The world isn't a game or a trick or an illusion or a mystery waiting to be solved or a test. It's a place. So it's a little bit odd to think of it as being off-kilter... All the things that upset us about the way it goes about its business are things that have always been happening. It's perfectly sensible to want to change the bits of it that we don't like (particularly the bits we have the most control over, i.e. ourselves) and celebrate when we win, but that doesn't mean that it exists *for us to solve*. It doesn't. It just exists.
There. That's a lot of very pre-digested, extremely repetitive, vaguely interconnected stuff that I haven't analysed at all. I'm sure you can think of plenty of things wrong with it!
Feel free to take it to pieces. I'd love to be able to think of the world as a nice big nth-dimensional sudoku that's eventually going to get completed because usually I'm quite clever and that would make me feel good. 
Yes. The whole thing did have a very mythological feel to it! I started having the strangest daydreams... almost like hallucinating, sometimes. But, once I understood what they meant, they went away, having done their job.
I don't think I'd necessarily recommend what I chose to everyone. I was fortunate enough to have a stable home life, a stable job (I wouldn't call it a "career"...
) a loving boyfriend and a wonderful family. I'm very lucky.
It did get a bit rocky. I probably shouldn't say too much more.
I so respect and admire what you said. Why should we run away from our feelings instead af facing them head on? We are given a whole range of emotions so embrace them, which is what you have done! Good on ya mate 
The heart of what you wrote is a part of a lot of the therapeutic work in CBT systems like Accept & Commitment Therapy.
A wise teacher of mine shared with me once that most of our 'mental illnesses' were simply the minds inability or desire to accept reality as it is. And if it is bad or painful, then it is not only normal but very healthy to feel sadness, hurt, anger, and fear. Emotions are truly temporary even if moods sustain for a longer period of time because of how we are 'thinking' about our experiences both internal and external. Realigning our cognitive minds with the reality of those emotions and accepting ourselves as we are, is a huge step towards healing.
That took courage and deep insight. Congratulations.
... and please do not think that I would dream of suggesting that you abandon anything that genuinely helps you. I am more fortunate than many of the depressives I have met. I've known some people who literally couldn't move from their chairs they were so down and turned inside. My recent experiences would be of no use to them at all.
There are few people who can truly understand the deep changes that can be wrought in your "basement" by being kept perpetually off-balance emotionally as a child. I can only guess at your experiences and the effect on you, if your childhood was anything like mine I could imagine that you will at times feel astonishingly isolated in the world, as if wandering through a dream where everyone understands the "rules" intuitively except you, who had to learn them. We learn to stay off-balance, I think.
Take care and here's hoping that 2013 is good to you.
If you want a glimps in to what I grew up with take a look at this if you dare
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021996704
I'm lucky (or unlucky) enough to suffer OCD too so the last flickering remnant of my logical(?) mind always realizes I can't do all the FUCKING useless CRAP I NEED to do if I'm dead and decides being dead would be intolerable.
Unmedicated I suffer the worst possible nightmares, bordering on waking hallucinations. And then I don't sleep at all and everything gets much, much worse. I stop eating , get sick, lose crazy amounts of weight and turn into skeleton man haunting the library.
There's no way I can make lemonaide out of that shit, and I've tried.
I think with meds I can achieve sibelian's sort of existence, living in a dark world with some sort of functional sanity. But without meds I'm useless.
In past years I've quit meds and therapy against medical advice with all sorts of bad consequences and don't recommend it even though I'm doing that now (in a small way) because I didn't like a few side effects of my last trip on the pharmaceutical merry-go-round.
My New Year's resolution is to seek a place that's better than the one I'm currently existing in. I've been in such a place before, but never without meds...
I sympathise with you deeply, I have had periods where nightmares disturbed me for weeks and it's a hideous, hideous feeling. I felt utterly betrayed... "Stupid brain! Fucking work, damn you!" But there's nothing more fruitless than losing your temper with your subconscious... I never got to the stage where I could depend on suffering nightmares off medication, I have to say, which seems like it would be really frightening.
It sounds to me, however, like you at least have a handle on your condition and circumstances, although it doesn't sound at all comfortable. Even just understanding it is better than nothing. I hope things get better for you, hunter. 
Perhaps one day things will change...
Bless you and here's hoping 2013 is good to you.
Congratulations.
I'm about to catch a boat...
I will be back Jan 2ndWell, I had a think.
Several things can contribute to prolonged situational depression. Stressful jobs, stressful personal circumstances, all sorts of things.
Very often prolonged situation depression can manifest by stealth. If one's life contains few opportunities for happiness then the difficulties life throws at you aren't "balanced out", so to speak. A long time of unpleasant, grinding, psychologically challenging circumstances can be just as damaging as the short, sharp shock of the loss of someone close to you. One of the worst things about it is that everything seems normal, or at least one tends to pay attention to those close to you that would like you t think it's normal for their own reasons. If there's nothing concrete and material to lift your mood, like seeing friends or having something that you want to do that rewards you emotionally, well, it's as if you run out of something. There's a level of emotional resilience required to deal with ordinary events that seems to become... thin. And if it goes on and on and on.... well, your thoughts can end up becoming quite distorted.
We are told to have our own opinions about the world around us - we don't often do this. Actually we allow the world to mould us without knowing it. If we end up in personal circumstances that are detrimental to our emotional well-being without realising it, I'd say depression is very likely, perhaps inevitable. It's the not really knowing that you're cooperating with emotional structures that are slowly damaging you that causes the problem. If you lack faith in your own judgement of relationships with people, you could be in big trouble quickly.
We are told to face our challenges in life and the result of this is that we tend to treat bad feelings as though they are hurdles to overcome. One of the things that freed me from the impossibility of this was realising that I didn't need to overcome challenges I needed to *feel good*. That took a while to sink in...
It's particularly awkward trying to find your way through the labyrinth of other people's ideas about you (which can become a VERY important factor in depression) if you have screwy ideas about yourself in the first place. Looking back on my own life I have to say I have been told an absolutely enormous number of things by other people, with great earnestness, about what kind of guy I am. I'm a slightly unusual person, so I've attracted a lot of attention. Many of the observations directly contradict each other!
These are just some observations...
coming back to further expound on my question. Your thoughts are very helpful in helping me to better understand and for that I am very appreciative. Much love to you and my best wishes always.
There is a lot of information in that video and a lot of the information relates to other things that might have little to do with depression. Thanks again though, because there is lot of understanding there and it's worth watching again or maybe even a few times
