The good news is depression can be effectively treated with SSRI’s and counselling. But, you have to want to do it. When you are at the bottom of that spiral it can feel impossible and not worth the risk of trying. Enormous reserves of resilience are needed here which not everyone can find without support.
It is also worth mentioning that there are lots of people mightily cheesed off with their SM who are not clinically depressed, so maybe look a little wider for a full inventory of your individual situation.
For
deadzone75 only: if you didn’t want to go the meds and counselling route you could try the Costa Rica/
isthisit /
sadkat / sandwich filling treatment option. Just to rule out the SM aspect of your ill health. An experiment. For science.
A useful phrase for neurotypicals is:
"Clinical depression is being sad for no reason." (anger and exhaustion are common extra experiences)
SM sufferers most definitely have reasons for being sad.
I dare say taking antidepressants without solving existing, tangible issues is a grave mistake. You're asking medicine to do too heavy a list, largely asking your brain to deny reality. That's not what they're for.
For clinically depressed folks (they can surely be in SMs too, but very often on the refuser side), SSRIs are one of your less effective anti-depressants. Enough for some lucky few. (
placebo effect is a thing, so the efficacy of some SSRIs is judged higher than they deserve credit for)
Some psychiatrists will prescribe three or four of them in a row because they have fewer side effects.
Other clinically depressed folks may improve with tri- or tetra-cyclic antidepressants, lithium, MAO inhibitors, SNRIs, Bupropion, psychedelics, or any number of physical interventions. This is a partial list largely listing antidepressant
classes. My daughter saw too many doctors who were giving her largely the same medicine over and over and we didn't know any better than to repeatedly expect failure. I had to do a deep dive into the realm of psychiatry and...it's a shit show.
All these drugs get substantially enhanced with talk therapy no insurance wants to pay for. (esp. DBT, CBT) (Talk ain't cheap, despite what you may have heard.)
I bring all this up due to my older daughter's 15 round slugfest with treatment resistant depression. Clinical depression is the one disease that stops you from trying to get better. It's effing evil and if someone out there has a loved one who is depressed, kindly understand it's one of the worst possible things to happen to a person. Imagine having the flu, and never getting better. You don't just "snap out of" the flu. You can't explain why getting up and taking charge of your life is impossible. It just
is.
Get back to me on the sandwich therapy, so I can add it to the list.
