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Reply To: Depression Thread

#181
Ellen Saunders
Participant

Been on medication most of my adult life for depression. New docs (old one retired) are a little stunned; apparently anti-depressants aren’t supposed to be for long-term use. Okay,fine, but I go off them I eventually migrate to a couch and stop functioning. Wanted to die for as long as I can remember as a child. Brain chemistry? Trauma? A mixture? Something else? Hell if I know. I do believe my depression is anchored in my self-loathing, so if I can actually learn to love myself it should at least ameliorate the depression. Maybe that’s a pipe dream but that’s my working theory and a touch of motivation.

I’ve only been actively suicidal a few times, maybe twice that I really scared myself: wanted to die, prepped or started to prep my life for it, had a plan for how I was going to die and the means to do so.

I’m sort of blasé about it now in part because that emotional state allows me to talk about it without getting wrapped around the axle, and because that state makes it’s easier to talk about it to people I don’t know. There’s often at least one jerk, yannow? You brace for that.

At least one character in most of my longer fiction deals with depression not because it’s something I want to explain but because it’s something I understand and therefore can fictionalize with some authenticity.

Is that the kind of discussion you were looking for?

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