Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

Why everyone who struggles with depression, anxiety, and mental illness needs to read The Bloggess and buy Jenny's new book:

“Clearly I wasn’t as sick as I said I was if the medication didn’t work for me. And that sort of makes sense, because when you have cancer the doctor gives you the best medicine and if it doesn’t shrink the tumor immediately than that’s a pretty clear sign you were just faking it for attention. I mean, cancer is a serious, often fatal disease we’ve spent billions of dollars studying and treating so obviously a patient would never have to try multiple drugs, surgeries, radiation etc. to find what will work specifically for them. And once the cancer sufferer is in remission they’re set for life because once they’ve learned how to not have cancer they should be good. And if they let themselves get cancer again they can just do whatever they did last time. Once you find the right cancer medication you’re pretty much immune from that disease forever. And if you get it again it’s probably just a reaction to too much gluten or not praying correctly. Right?

“Well, no. But that same, completely ridiculous reasoning is what people with mental illness often hear. …. we hear it from others, but also from someone much closer and more manipulative. We hear it from ourselves.”

From: Furiously Happy
~ Jenny Lawson

Jenny Lawson's (www.thebloggess.com) blog and first book are beautiful and bonkers and broken and heartbreaking and hilarious and profound. She has been brutally honest about her struggles with depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses in her blog and mentioned them in her book.

The next book is coming out and it's entirely about how she has lived with mental illness and how her blog has saved lives. Literally saved lives because of the community of people who shout back into the void that they're screwed up too and they care. I'll let her explain it: http://thebloggess.com/2015/04/furiously-happy-and-scared-and-back-to-happy-again/

As I'm obsessively doing something over and over because I can't get closure (but WHY is iTunes 10.7 not even attempting to download on either of two computers? Why, after 4 attempts, can I not even get the email to allow me to change my password?), it seemed a good time to talk about OCD. Especially with this post hitting Al Stefanelli's blog today.

Now, I'm damned lucky here. I have OCD enough to notice -- but only if you're close to me IRL, and certainly not enough to actually suffer. A lot of the anxiety can be short-circuted by a second party ("Yes, you did lock the door. I saw you.") and the rituals are few and short. I can and have actually deliberately thought out and programmed a couple of rituals into my habits. I have nothing to complain about, really. But I can see "bad off" from where I stand, especially as being tired or being particularly stressed sends me right down the rabbit hole.

I don't like that OCD is almost always played for laughs on TV. Eureka had a throwaway joke about a guy rattling his door precisely three times as he left, and my only thought was "if that's what works for him, WHO CARES?" Monk just about makes me froth at the mouth. The first half of the first season was fairly decent, because they were portraying him in a tailspin out of grief, fighting to overcome his OCD so he could go back to the job he loved. Then it slowly became more and more of a joke that he felt no need to change and everyone around him just had to put up with -- to the point that the character had a psychotic break, (simultaneously and inadvertently coming up with a method of remaining vaguely sane in a very stressful situation)... and nobody even though to even mention this to him. Oh, and it turns out that he was always more than a little strange and came from a whole family of weirdos, ha ha ha.

NOT.

Glee handled it better, and that's not really a sentence I ever expected to type. They were still playing it for laughs, but you knew why Emma had her issues, saw her struggle with both anxiety and the knowledge that she was pushing away the people trying to help her, and saw her fight and try and relapse and fight again.

My favorite OCD character, hands down, is DI Chandler from Whitechapel for a variety of reasons. He's not the punchline of the joke; he's a guy who's fucked up on a number of levels, of which the OCD is only one. He knows perfectly well that he has a problem, and sometimes we've seen that problem overwhelm him. (The scene where he was flipping the light on and off over and over, then tried to walk away? OMG, I've made that noise myself when I turn back. That. Very. Noise.) But at the same time, he's functional and not just at the "able to deal with the world only with the heavy help of an assistant" way. He's responsible for himself (although his Sargent is now starting to mother him), made it a fair way up the career ladder, and has a variety of coping mechanisms. Socially acceptable, non-damaging coping mechanisms, yet.

I wish there were more characters like him.

This is a post about depression. It links to a series of other posts that I think are excellent, important reading but all the same, TRIGGER WARNING FOR EVERYTHING BELOW THIS LINE.

First, via penguineggs, is a House of Commons debate that touches, among other things, on OCD and depression and depression should be treated. Not just treated in the sense of "trying to make it go away" but in the sense of "stop treating it like a life and career-ending stigma and lump it in with all the other health issues that need to be recognized and managed but not judged."

And that wonderful dry British wit is in full evidence with lines like "I am delighted to say that I have been a practising fruitcake for 31 years."

The next link is infinitely darker, but if you've never been in a depressive crash, you absolutely MUST read it to understand what it's like. Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed... And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge.

Or, as The Bloggess Jenny Lawson puts it succinctly, Depression Lies. (I can't recommend The Bloggess highly enough. When Jenny isn't writing stuff that will make you laugh until you cry, she writes some very, VERY powerful stuff about depression that will flat-out make you cry -- but also not make you feel alone, especially if you read the hundreds and hundreds of supportive comments. The most powerful posts about depression are Tighrope Walker, The Fight Goes On, Wow, and It Comes Around and Around, in that order.)

The reason why I'm writing this post today is that I came to a startled realization that I'm in a depressive slump and probably have been for a couple of weeks. And the thing is, when the depression is *bad* it usually has a big trigger and is as easily recognized as the prelude to The Sound of Silence (Hello, Darkness, my old friend).

But when it's mild, when it's weak, it can take ages to realize that I'm not tired all the time and uninterested in anything and trying to live on Ritz crackers and lemonade because of (check as many as apply) I'm trying not to catch M's cold/I'm recovering from the terror of the derecho/I'm physically stunned by the heatwave. I've avoided the cold, I didn't freak at the mild thunderstorm a couple nights ago, and the heat has broken. And still I'm sitting here, with kittens in full "ZOMG, lookit the world!!!1eleventy1!!" mode around me thinking "is it worth going to knit night? Do I even want dinner?"

And *then* I start second-guessing decisions I've made, and that's where the true madness lies. CBT therapy, which is what I had, is based on judging your thoughts against 10 cognitive distortions and number 8, the "Should statement" is my particular nemesis.

I *should* be volunteering for clinic work. After all, I made a resolution to go once a month. (Recent decision: stop going when the weather's over 85 degrees because I'm not physically up to it.)

I *should* be more careful with my money. (Recent decision: fuck the debt, I'm going to live with 2 months more of it and order the Little Free Library I really, really want and not the budget one.)

And bizarrely the most controversial in my mind, I *should* be gearing up for the Ravellenic Games, after all, I've talked about them, pimped them, begged my way onto a team, picked a project... and recently decided to scratch from Team Sherlocked. It's not that I don't support the Games or want to do it (or even that I'm not planning on playing the home game); it's that I looked at how much everyone else was putting into it and thought "I'm not ready for that right now."

And NOW I'm making myself crazyer second-guessing everything, because when I'm crashing, mild or not, I don't trust myself to make good decisions even on the most inconsequential of things.