Quit Your Day Job Blog Go on. I dare you.

SSRI Update

So after nearly 2 weeks of SSRI's, how is it going? Better. I'm not out of the woods yet, but better. To begin with it was a little like being hit over the head with a frying pan. Like I was knocked out, I kind of shut down. I started sleeping a lot. I've had a couple of good days when the lights suddenly switched on again, but mostly it's still darkness. Time has warped, leaving me feeling tired, hollow and lifeless. That's how it goes, though. I was expecting it, and as the drugs start to work, it's time to start the next step. To change how I'm thinking. The drugs treat an aspect of the illness, but they're not enough on their own.

How does the black dog affect your thinking? Well, imagine something good in your life. Maybe your job, your family. Perhaps your blog. Now allow yourself to start feeling negatively about it, allow doubts to come in and take over. Suddenly you think you're rubbish at your job, and you can't even see the point of it. Suddenly you think you're a bad father, mother, daughter, son. Suddenly your writing seems childish and painfully angst-ridden. Feeling a bit depressed? Of course you are, so you cast around for something different to think about. Something that will make you feel better. But you have no control of your thinking. You can't stop the doubts and the negativity and slowly but surely you destroy everything in your life. Everything you care about; relationships, friends, career, sport all of it gets tainted and you can't imagine feeling any different. This is when you start casting around again for new things. Untainted things. This is where you start coming up with the hair-brained schemes. Then you start knocking those down too. This goes on and on, putting you in a tailspin with no end until you treat the illness or it goes away of it's own accord.

Sounds nasty doesn't it. Anti Depressants slow the process, and allow you more control your thoughts, but you're stuck in a habit now. So part of the process has to be breaking the habit of depressive thinking. It's very difficult to do, but with practice you can start to notice patterns in your own trains of thought. Once the train is in motion it's difficult to stop, so the trick is to notice it happening as quickly as possible and head it off. Derail the train. Of course it will come back again and again, and you have to derail it again and again, but you begin to create a new habit which breaks the cycle and releases you from the black dog.

This process is part of a therapy called CBT. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Some people naturally develop more control of their thinking as they grow up than others. These people tend not to allow free-wheeling thinking as much as others and are less susceptible to depression. That freewheeling, un-constrained thinking has often been linked to creative personality traits and it has been suggested as a reason creative personality types seem to be more likely to suffer from depression and bi-polar disorders.

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