Posted by Quintal on May 1, 2007, at 14:07:15
In reply to Am I just a depressive person, posted by jenny80 on April 28, 2007, at 16:38:30
Your story sounds very similar to mine Jenny. I'm in the UK and eaten my way through almost the entire pharmacopoeia. My last psychiatrist discharged me because he didn't believe there was anything really wrong with me. At first I took that to mean he thought I was imagining my problems and presenting them in way I knew could be diagnosed as a mental illness. Maybe he did, and maybe I was, but he left me with a few parting words that helped me take a different viewpoint. He said he didn't doubt my suffering and maladjustment, but denied I was actually mentally ill. He thought that drugs used to treat mental illness were more likely to aggravate emotional disturbance rather than help with this, long-term. That would be a very unusual viewpoint for a pdoc in the US where they get $$$$$ from every appointment and free samples from drug companies, but it's one that seems fairly common among pdocs on the NHS. I despised him for it at the time, but once I cooled a little I saw that most of what he said was true.
I've noticed the uninitiated often think antidepressants work on our mood something like the way Valium works on anxiety - ideally the true antidepressant would make you feel happy soon after taking it, perhaps wearing off at the end of the day or after a few hours until you took the next pill. You'll have noticed that no antidepressant in the psychiatrist's armoury actually works like this? Fortunately such pills do exist and they're on sale at your local pharmacy................ I use Paramol and Nurofen Plus for about three weeks out of every month and they're the best pharmaceutical solution I've found so far. I'd recommend you give them a try, certainly before attempting suicide anyway. I buy mine from a (legal) online retail pharmacy here: http://www.pharmacy2u.co.uk/details.asp?productid=FMPAT32.
Opiates are the closest thing you'll get to optimism in a bottle. They don't make all problems seem to disappear or make me feel invincible like benzos did, the world's still the same place, but as with people who take opiates for physical pain sometimes say, I can still feel the pain but now I can deal with it - it no longer cripples me.
On the optimism thing, I agree with Declan. Some people are (maybe necessarily) more pessimistic than others. Forced optimism doesn't seem like a good philosophy for someone with a low threshold for disappointment. There's at least one former poster here whose militant optimism I suspected was paradoxically reinforcing to his life-long treatment resistant depression. Pessimism can be liberating at times, so I've found :-)
Q
poster:Quintal
thread:754210
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070426/msgs/754929.html