Hi all, and to all, I say "hi" In another post our dear friend Geoff in
part of one of his sentences wrote about "levels of depression". And it
was excellent, because it got me thinking. How do we explain the
different levels of depression and indeed...
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Hi all, and to all, I say "hi" In another post our dear friend Geoff in
part of one of his sentences wrote about "levels of depression". And it
was excellent, because it got me thinking. How do we explain the
different levels of depression and indeed, ARE there different levels of
depression? If there are, then the rest of my below vent isn't needed,
and the only thing it will have done will be to continue to exercise my
fingers as they tap away at the glorious keyboard in front of me. So
vent commencing now: I'm diagnosed with chronic depression. But what if
someone else is diagnosed with depression with no word of 'chronic' in
front of it. Are they better off than me? Am I chronically more worse
off than them? I would answer "no" to both questions. And you know for
the first time, I've never even questioned that. "Look if someone has
depression, they have depression Doc". Or am I being blase/silly here,
and there are levels of depression; hence: "we have someone who comes in
and has these kinds of issues, so we'll label this person with "garden
variety depression" and then we have someone coming in who is presenting
all these kinds of things, and so instead of being just in the garden,
this person is at the top of the tree, with chronic depression". You
know, now that I've actually written this out I think I have got the
answer and perhaps it IS "yes". When I've had my mental health plan done
with my GP (3 of them now), there is a series of questions you have to
answer and I think this is something called the K10 test; 10 questions
and if you answer them and get the score of 10, you are fine and
healthy, not a problem with you (although you may have an ingrown
toe-nail, but that's for another website to be concerned with) and off
you go on your merry way. 50 is the absolute worst and you can't get a
higher score than that and I believe that would mean immediate
hospitalisation. The first time I did the test, I scored 32. Not good,
but definitely not terrible. I was still depressed, but not acute. A
year ago I did the test and I was 42. Much worse and nowhere near good
and closing in on the not good side. In December I did the test and I
scored 45. Very bad and things remain to be so. My point here is,
perhaps something over 40 would be labelled as being chronic depression
and anything between, oh I don't know, 25 to 40 would be depressive
symptoms. Gee, I can waffle ... but it does help you know ... if you
just cannot talk to others due to this illness, it does help to be able
to write things down. And for years I've done this with creating a
journal about my thoughts ... but now I've found Beyond Blue and these
wonderful forum sites, I can just type away to my heart is, as they say
in the classics, content. I'm sure that most people will see that it's
another post from me and will bypass it, simply cause otherwise, that'll
be 15-20 mins of their life they won't get back having had to trawl
through the tripe that I tend to post. But that's ok ... cause I've read
it ... just the once and it is kinda therapeutic. Are there different
levels of depression? Ok, now I believe there are. But only after
comprehensive scientific research had been conducted, as you'll have
noticed from above. Over and out, Neil
How do I talk to my doctor?
