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Share your recovery story here
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Disclaimer: this is my recollection, and we are all different. I'm slim, fairly athletic, eat very healthy, exercise moderately regularly, am an engineer, am male, and 40-ish years old.
I am writing this primarily for the benefit of those suffering and perhaps struggling to find hope. I recently really struggled with hope, not finding many success stories on "The Internet", then realised my hypocrisy, in that I had a six-year-long "glowing" recovery story in my back pocket that I never bothered sharing once I had recovered. I notice a lot of people start posts when they just start on medication, then disappear. Presumably a large % of these people did what I did: as soon as they felt better, they turned their back on anything depressing, and returned to living.
I suffered a serious episode of depression seven years ago, and probably with the help of medication, time, and interpersonal psychotherapy with a therapist, recovered and functioned for a good six years before another serious episode. I'll label the episodes A and B. The symptoms of both depressions were text-book clinical:
o impaired ability to think (80% impaired)
o insomnia
o social isolation and loss of pleasure/interest in my passions
o hopelessness
Lifestyle leading to A (seven years ago):
o working 40-70 hours per week in stressful roles (in a technical field) where I was pushing my brain to learn new material, for about six months
o trying to support/solve/resolve a relationship that ultimately could not work, for about a year
Lifestyle leading to B: (now)
o working 40 hours per week (in a technical field) but studying another 40 hours per week, again driving my brain almost non-stop, for about a year
o trying to support/solve/resolve a relationship that ultimately could not work, for about a year
I must admit that ALL through the above I had and still have dysthymia and fluctuating mood, but not debilitating (in my case, not physical, but mental: not being able to think or handle stress) clinical depression, and my recollection is that the mood stabiliser in small doses actually helped (dissolved) some of my dysthymia (made everything a bit easier). Truly.
Episode A:
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I was started on a therapeutic dose of anti-depressant and mood-stabiliser for sleep. The latter immediately gave me sleep I was missing for weeks and weeks. I recovered slowly but steadily. I returned to work in a month, in limited functionality. I got into a new sport - swimming - and found a therapist I really identified with. I remember two or three months later at times I felt top of the world. I had my wits back, and felt level enough to do anything. I actually felt *advantaged*, as if I was a drug cheat. To be a purist, I slowly tapered-down the doses of both drugs. Six months later I was on a maintenance dose of the anti-depressant and mood-stabiliser. I later tapered the anti-depressant to zero and only took the mood-stabiliser at a small dose for sleep as needed. I gained a touch of weight while taking the medications, but I quickly lost it all and returned to my previous weight.
The psychotherapy exercised my brain and the therapist very skilfully guided me to get in touch with my emotions, to have a better feel of myself and the emotional world around me, and there were moments where I was overcome with emotion so much so I could not speak. Living more of an emotional life (i.e. based on love) became more important to me. In the West we spend most of our lives denying our emotions.
The following year I went travelling for three months on my own (armed with the mood-stabiliser, which seemed to help my depression when I felt a bit down, worked full time in my old challenging profession, worked in another city (commuting home on weekends by plane), and then quit work and moved cities to return to school to complete a post-graduate engineering degree in a field of my dreams. I was nearly 40 years of age, and I did all this with almost no help from anyone else. I had my wits, and a bucket-load of energy.
Episode B:
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Recent, and I re-started on the same doses of the same medications. I tried two anti-depressants, prior, this episode, but I did not feel well on them. Two weeks later at the end of a very satisfying family lunch I suddenly just felt good. Exactly as advertised by anti-depressant literature, my spontaneous (gut) interest in things and zest for life and the unknown returned, life was just automatically easier, my sleep was corrected, and I was relatively happy. It is extremely difficult to articulate the state. Maybe that's why descriptions of what anti-depressants actually can do are hard to find. Honestly, I was surprised. IMO at the very least the medications restored my sleep, and at the most they gave my brain what it needed to heal, and I think heal is an appropriate word because when I was depressed, I just couldn't pick up anything complicated with my mind and think about it/work on it. I think the medications improved my state of being.
My side-effects to both medications have reduced to almost zero: a slight sexual effect, a slight weight gain (3 lbs), I sometimes sweat (full-body) at night, and I have more appetite for tasty things like bakery pastries. Otherwise, I am unchanged. Amazing. This after three weeks of being on the certain combination of medication.
I hastily decided my brain was all-healed and began tapering the mood stabiliser down to 3/4 of the therapeutic dose, and in the following days my mood sank. I then re-tapered the up again (yesterday) and immediately feel better. I'll stay on this dose for a while before thinking about tapering.
I'll post an update when I have something more to share.
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