Depression: a personal description.

vanity | 03/21/06 | vimto

[vimto]

A part of this was posted about a month ago. I offer this not for sympathy but that the reality of clinical depression be acknowledged.

Waking up to reality was long and hard, for at that very time the pernicious seeds of a deep and unlovely depression were sprouting and poisoning my heart and life. Growing within me was a malevolent life that was not wholly mine. It viciously and unrelentingly began to catch hold of my heart and with demonic claws drag it down into a spiral of never-ending descent. Inside me I was rotting, dying, withering and decaying. It was tangible, it was somatic, I could feel my heart melt within me, my lungs dissolving as water hits coal dust to become slurry along the track.

I mostly sat with my head in my hands. Sometimes I would throw my head back into the headrest of the chair as if to gasp for air. Imaginary sabres hacked at my head while knives and gun barrels were pressed against my temple. Frances Bacon’s paintings have been referred to as depicting ‘man stripped bare of his pretensions’. Bacon’s men, alone and discarded, lie on clinical tables with their skin flayed like slabs of butcher’s carcasses. Painted in triptych they resemble a religious sacrifice or an offensive Christian parody, perhaps both. But it was Bacon’s homage to Velasquez that makes visible the existential terror of Pope Pius II, that was haunting my mind. Sitting enthroned, the Pope is isolated against a inky black background, screaming amid a cage of urgently painted downward brushstrokes that both imprison and impale him. Make no mistake about this image, this pope is going down – down where hell is only an ante-room to the real torment.

My mind began to turn upon itself and speak directly to me in ways I had never imagined possible. “You are useless” it accused as it also pronounced the guilty verdict. And I knew instinctively that I was without excuse. Caught and betrayed by my very own self, as a fraud who had fooled others, I could do nothing other than own up the consequences of perusing a deceitful life.

These were not the projected external voices of psychotic illness, but internally generated thoughts of a crippled mind. They encountered no resistance as they drained my flesh of all vitality and desire. The overwhelming desire to sleep, if possible forever, placed it’s heavy hand on my shoulder. No matter how much I slept I woke up desperately fatigued. Some days I slept for 18-20 hours.

The tiredness was pathological – it never left me. Every waking moment was a wearing withering experience, as wave after wave of overwhelming desire to return to the petit death, broke over and against my heart, my mind and my body. Weariness consumed me. It sucked all my energies and demanded every moment of my concentration. The continual downward motion of my internal being sickened and distressed me. I was continually clawed and dragged from within to ever lower and deeper levels of hollowness. Forever falling into the abyss I suffered a debilitating impoverishment of spirit. Seemingly rolling and tumbling over and over again, I descended below congruence with the reality most people share. I had lost the energy to communicate meaningfully even with those I loved and I had lost the will to bother

Sleep brought a relief from the unremitting tiredness but introduced disturbing dreams. Foul and sickening, the dreams seemed to inhabit me. Sometimes I would awake screaming. They were so intense and crisp and colourful in their clarity. The images inside them were bleak and debasing and degrading. The horrors that life can and does reserve for the unfortunate few were aggregated together for me to gaze upon in seemingly unrelated but disturbing sequences. It was as if I was looking into the recesses of my own black heart and inspecting it’s cadaver and viewing the possible causes of it’s death. As within Mervyn Peake’s Gorhmengast Castle I discovered metaphorical rooms and corridors within me that had been sealed up for years and subsequently forgotten. Entering each one I was witness to degrading occult scenes of pornographic macabre savagery. This nighttime litany of torture and death was preferable to being awake and knowingly alive.

Knowingly awake: a definition. Being awake and being alive and being willing and able to think and act. Being willing to take responsibility and being able to understand what that responsibility is.

It seemed to me, when I was able to make any worthwhile reflection, that my present state was the natural development of a life lived in half truths. In a sense that could have been a perverted depressive thought, one designed to send me deeper into the pit. I had to be careful to identify it as authentic, a thought worth dwelling on and exploring. Discernment was required. It didn’t have the taste of a twisted thought or defensive reaction. No, this was a truth surfacing.

I looked out the window into the mid-distance. The arms of the chair were frayed where my hands rested on them and rubbing repetitively and unconsciously against them. In the soles of my feet and under my chin the muscles continually cramped and needled me. Silent except for the occasional sigh, all but spent and defeated, my body inhabiting a small space, I began to be slow.

Being slow is strangely strange. The clinical term is ‘psychomotor retardation’. I have witnessed this phenomenon before in depressed and psychotic patients. As a nurse on psychiatric admission wards it was regarded as a significant clinical symptom to be dutifully recorded on the person’s case notes. Psychomotor retardation remains a mystery in the sense that there is still no adequate theory to account for its existence. From observation, (as a clinical sign), it gives the impression of the air having congealed leaving the human body unable to move easily through it. It’s like witnessing the effects of viscous air, or a bone weary patient trying to move though unseen treacle. On the inside, (as a symptom), the movements are equally mysterious. For quite evidently there is no treacle to wade through and the air offers no resistance.

Locked into the depressive condition my concentration was acute but turned almost entirely inwards. In a sense the key to getting well was to be able to move concentration, back into external reality, to where it’s focus ought to be….. still working on this....

[vimto]

Kindest regards, comments welcomed.

[dynoman]

How are you doing?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Been there.

I call it going gray.

The world is wrapped in a thick fog that I can only see through dimly. People retreat, becoming unreal or they are too close and their very breathing is like scouring pads on my skin. Indeed it is like my skin has been turned inside out and everything hurts.

I run back into the fog because it is better then the pain.

Get to a doctor, an MD not a PhD and make sure that there is nothing physically wrong with you. Thyroid, blood sugar and a host of other things can trigger this. Also they can give you meds that will help smooth the edges. If you feel you might be suicidal then get a friend to stay near by.

You are going to need someone to lean on. Freepmail me if you want to talk.