I’m not a fan of depression. I’ve had a lifetime to come to that conclusion. My first depressive episodes went untreated and unnoticed in my teen years. The first time it was diagnosed and addressed was after my first suicide attempt, which was also when the world (or at least, those in my circle) learned I was fighting and losing to an eating disorder.
They were much more exotic back in the day, especially bulimia, though they’re still an unknown quantity for most. Unfortunately, that makes treatment very hit-or-miss.
Did I tell you the one about the psychiatrist who thought all women with eating disorders were closeted lesbians? It’s all he wanted to talk about. Prescribe pills – they helped – and talk about eating disorders and being gay – that didn’t.
I wonder what his thoughts were on men with eating disorders? Are they also closeted lesbians? But I disgress.
Treatment for depression is also hit-or-miss, and one of the big problems is that people don’t ask. They worry about embarrassment. They worry about shame.
There’s still a lot of stigma attached to mental illness. There’s isolation as well, self-inflicted to be sure, but also caused by people who mean well but withdraw because they don’t know what to do.
I’m crawling back up again, but it occurred to me that it’s a shame I didn’t record each major depressive episode (I’m not counting the minor dips that last mere weeks and lack the severity of a major crash). I could go back and comb through my journal, but I won’t. I almost never look back at them.
There’s always math.
I have at least one major depressive episode a year. Some last for more than a year, but they still count as one. It balances out the years that had a couple. We’ll skip the undiagnosed years and deal only with eighteen to fifty-four.
Or not. I already know the number sucks. And, what does it matter in the end? Our species is oddly obsessed with quantifying things. If we weren’t, would eating disorders exist at all? Probably – there’s also the control bit.
I do feel a little undereducated considering my time in the trenches. I feel like my expertise could be greater. Thank God there’s a solution I like.
It’s time to read.
My Session With Depression
From Famine to Feast. 
What do you want to record for your episodes? I found a way that helped me track them without going back through journals to revisit and relive: I made a google doc. I set up the questions (always with a scaled option), and had specific questions like “happiness” and “depression”. There were five that I measured. One of them was “ideas.” It wasn’t to list out my ideas, but to say I had them. That scale was a 5 option 1-3 scale: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4+. I found when I was depressed, I’d basically be at zero overall for the day, so it was a good idea to track that. Even if I wasn’t feeling depressed or registering myself as depressed, the lack of ideas showed that it was coming. When it hit 4+, mania was afoot. I didn’t consider an idea like “oooh I have an idea, let’s get pizza,” it was more like “oh, we should paint the bathroom purple and green!” The off the wall ideas that sort of just pop up from time to time. 0 for a prolonged period of time indicated depression. 1 – 2 is my baseline, and 3 is iffy. 4+ is a “oops! This gonna be rough!”
I then saved the test side to my Home Screen on my phone. Every night before I went to sleep, I would take the 2 minutes to rate everything from my day. There were 9 or 10 questions total. I chose google docs because I could share the document with my ex and my therapist. They could organize the data any way that made sense for them. Ex focused on my mania results, therapist on depression. Therapists don’t pay attention to things like “depression is her baseline, it’s the mania we need to worry about,” they care about the depression. Let him have fun with the tons of information because my baseline is depressed. My ex would track the mania. If he saw a spike in the data, he’d immediately let me know. I would ALWAYS argue that the data was wrong, but generally I would decide that he was fretting over nothing and to get his mind off of it, we should go skydiving. At 10 pm. Let’s not discuss the fact that I am absolutely terrified of heights. Yeah, those were the days lol
The point is, I used to want to track it too. I felt it was time consuming, especially when depressed. I came up with a way where I could track it under two minutes and never have to worry about the data heavy aspect of it at all. The info was all there, when I wanted to review it, I’d just open the webpage and ask the program to organize it to show what I wanted to see. It took an hour to set up, 2 minutes a day to maintain, and 5 minutes to review all of my data , any time I wanted, in the way that made sense to me.
I’m not sure that’s what you’re looking for, but if it is, I highly recommend it. Good luck, and feel better
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for such a complete answer. These are great suggestions. I love systems – most of my jobs involved creating and maintaining them in different ways.
Thank you for including the time involved in maintenance. I think that’s mostly what puts me off record systems for my mental health – the feeling that it’ll take too much time (what I’m saving said time for, I’ve no idea).
LikeLike
You’re not saving that time, you’re just not wasting your time with complictated records, which I understand. The reality is that it’s not as complicated or as time-consuming as our brains lead us to believe in those moments. It convinces us that it will take 300 years to set up and at LEAST an hour every night to make it happen; that’s not true at all. It also backs up this message with conceiving every possible convoluted way to create said thing without actually coming anywhere near the simple solution.
A friend of mine had a history with an eating disorder. She was supposed to journal about it every day, but she couldn’t – it was triggering depression by submerging herself in it every night before she went to sleep. She was supposed to keep track of how many thoughts about her weight came up, but the only way she could do this while journaling was to go back and reread her entry before her session, which plunged her back into depression because it was super hard for her to come face to face with it like that. She decided to keep two notebooks – one was a little calendar style notebook with the notes section after the end of the week – the ones with the whole month laid out over two pages, and the other an erasable one. Every day, she’d carry the small erasable one with her, and every time she had a weight related thought, she’d put a tick-mark on the page. When she got home, she would count her tick-marks and put a number in the month notebook – 0-10 being her scale. 0 being 0 thoughts of weight, 10 being 10+ thoughts in a day (sometimes, she’d change the scale and put 15 if that’s what it was, but she generally tried to keep it to a 10 scale (in the notes section, she’d tally that week). Anything over 5, she’d journal about. Any time it was a super persistent thought, she’d journal about it. It was a simple way to document it. When the thought popped up, she made a note about it. At the end of the night, she had to count lines and it was done. She also found that she had trouble sleeping after she put her number in the little calendar notebook, so she would count her tally marks and put that number and add a + to it, so “15+” This accounted for any thoughts she had after she documented it, and also, because she thought about it when transferring the number, so it was accurate with the little plus. She slept fine after that.
Create an easy, sustainable way for you. Based on what you’re documenting, there’s always one out there for you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for sharing this. I’m always amazed by how clever and creative we can be.
LikeLike
You’re welcome. You will find your way. When you do, you’ll be completely successful in this too
LikeLiked by 1 person
Let’s make it easier all around and just say we’re ALL lesbians. Why do labels matter so much to some folks when it comes to who people love and are attracted to? I don’t get the obsession.
I’m glad you’re still clawing your way back—and posting more…great share!!
LikeLiked by 1 person
In hindsight, he was a very young doctor. I hope his opinions matured.
Thank you. Still too much of an emotional rollercoaster for my taste, but things are moving in the right direction 😊
LikeLiked by 1 person
I hope so too.
Excellent. Hang in there!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I appreciate you being vulnerable and sharing your story, your battle with undiagnosed depression and really ignorant people. I hope you are doing better now.
I love seeing people talk about mental health! I do on my blog too (traumajourneyofanika.com). There is a lot of strength in sharing stories and building community.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Your aside about men with eating disorders being closeted lesbians makes me laugh. Love how you can deploy your sense of humor even in a serious subject. Thank you for sharing your story and knowledge to help shine light on this tough affliction.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you. My sense of humour and of the ridiculous are things I’ve always been grateful for.
Thank you for reading. I always appreciate it.
LikeLike