No change

I took off from work early today to go see my psychiatrist. And I told him I am better, and I do not want to make any changes to my meds.

He was kind of saying that we still could, if I find that things are not quite as I would like them to be. And I told him, no, things are not quite as I would like them to be, but I don't think that it is meds right now, it is my life.

I have learned not to ask too much of my meds. And they can never give you a life, anyway. They can only make it possible to do the things to get a life.

So when I am barely getting out of bed to get to the toilet, let alone anything else- give me meds. When I spend half the day crying and don't even know why half the time, give me meds. When I feel like my body is so weak, my legs won't even support me, and I am going to collapse, give me meds. When I can't concentrate on whatever is in front of me, because I can't stop thinking about killing myself, give me meds.

But once I can get myself to work again, I can find some things I enjoy again, I can think of things other than death, and the tears become less frequent- and I can walk into a grocery store and not get so overwhelmed and paralyzed that I have to run out- I think they have pretty much done what they can do for me. The rest is up to me.

Why am I better? I think he attributed it to going back up on the Effexor, but I am not sure. Usually it works quicker than that. The Buspar didn't work, the Wellbutrin increase didn't work, made me worse in fact.

Maybe part of it was just time. There is this myth that depressions never go away on their own. I don't think I've ever had a depression that lasted more than a year- but I did have one very severe one that lasted almost a year (and destroyed the life that I had). And of course mine keep coming back, which is the problem. And maybe I'm a little dysthymic between depressions... But the worst of it, the really bad, can't get out of bed depressions, even in the years before I was medicated, always went away in a matter of weeks or months.

So, while I do know that my depressions are likely to go away, I also know that they are just as likely to come back, so I can't really comfort myself by this line of thinking.

The thing that hasn't come back is the mania. For a miserable two years after being taken off of lithium cold turkey I was manic or rapid cycling- but I was so mis-medicated. Once I got back on a therapeutic dose of Tegretol, no more mania. Even with antidepressants. Now, even the hypomania's seem to be going away- which were always mild, anyway.

If only the depressions were so easy to banish.