A few months ago, I decided to go ahead and book an overseas vacation. I hoped that it would give me something to look forward to, and that it would help to finally put a dent in the anhedonia and apathy that have been such a challenging part of my depression. I decided to go […]
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I Am the Architect of My Own Destruction is Juansen Dizon’s second book of poetry. The book opens with a letter to the reader, which begins “It’s hard to write when you want to kill yourself. It’s harder when you don’t really know the reason as to why.” Throughout the book I felt like I as
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I have never had a problem with medications in general, and in my work as a nurse, I’ve seen how much good they can do. Despite that, I’ve gone off the meds I take for depression a few times, and that’s what this post is about. My first episode of depression was in 2007. I
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Content warning: This post talks openly about suicide and suicide attempts, in the context of exploring my own thoughts about suicide. It’s National Suicide Prevention Week, so it seems like an appropriate time to talk about suicide in all its ugliness. I have attempted suicide multiple times; most were associated with my first episode of
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Wouldn’t it be nice if the treatment of depression was simple? Unfortunately, there’s nothing simple about depression treatment in the real world. Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) refers to depression that hasn’t responded to trials of adequate duration and dosage of at least two antidepressants. When determining whether the illness is treatment-resistant, it’s important to consider whether
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An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison is an intimate look into the havoc that bipolar disorder can wreak. The book captures her journey with bipolar, from its emergence in her late teens to its effects on her accomplished career as a clinical psychologist and university professor. The book contains rich descriptions, and it’s searingly
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Ketamine is a relatively new option for managing treatment-resistant depression that has a different mechanism of action from other antidepressant medications. Ketamine itself isn’t new, though; it’s a dissociative anaesthetic that’s also known by its club drug name Special K. Over the last 10-15 years, multiple research trials have shown that it has an antidepressant
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In Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things, Jenny Lawson uses “furiously happy” as a weapon to counter mental illness, and intends to “destroy the goddamn universe with my irrational joy and I will spew forth pictures of clumsy kittens and baby puppies adopted by raccoons and MOTHERFUCKING NEWBORN LLAMAS DIPPED IN GLITTER AND THE
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There’s lots of information out there about crisis resources for people thinking about suicide, but resources accomplish very little if we don’t reach out to access them. There are many potential barriers to help-seeking, and I wanted to talk about a few of them here, based on my own experience with major depressive disorder and
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Job interviews are unpleasant at the best of times, and to me have always felt very fake. But throw mental illness into the mix, and they can be a huge obstacle. There are a number of aspects of job interviews that particularly worry me. Answering unexpected questions My cognitive symptoms of depression aren’t as bad
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