Comment Re:LOL (Score 1) 184
Yup, that's usually what people who don't suffer from clinical depression usually say...."GET OVER IT".
I'm in the 9% of people who can use SAM-e to move from a depressive state to a hypomanic state. I spent 25 years not realizing I was depressed because I never hit baseline; alcohol actually shuts off the depression hard, putting me in a normalized state. Very small quantities of alcohol.
I eventually learned, through introspection, that the trigger was simple: any small problem causing an emotional slip had a limited finite range. Once below the shallow floor, I would fall continuously: a minor negative emotion would make me feel slightly down, while a slightly-less-minor negative emotion became an infinitely major negative emotion. It ran down, down, down the rabbit hole, propelled by its own means, outside my own action and violently opposed to my own grip of enforcement. A small shot of alcohol arrested this process for days: one ounce of rum and such negative feelings produced only a finite-bound feeling of negativity, at least for the next few days.
When I realized what was happening, when I framed it as such, I put a stop to it. For a while, I would recognize when the negative emotions started rolling away on their own, when they had hit the tipping point and gone into the descent to madness; I refused to allow them to do so, swallowing a knot of vomit-inducing depression and demanding my mind function on a rational basis, being quite capable of understanding where the emotions should have stopped even when I had no control over them. The very act stalled the collapse, failing to stop it but not letting it fall so fast toward infinity, and perhaps not so far.
These days I don't have such anxieties. Constant vigilance has reprogrammed my own internal understanding of emotional events. The mechanisms moderating my emotions now eschew the amplification behavior entirely; likewise, I have trained myself to have quite advanced deep-set anxiety management, and so am resistant to general anxiety on a subconscious level. In that respect, at least, I stand head-and-shoulders above most individuals, among an elite group of persons throughout history who have trained themselves to respond well when faced with anxiety; a mere side-effect of correcting the mechanism causing my clinical neurosis.
I am now trying to re-train my executive functions, because I never functioned well at baseline. Extreme depression somehow provided a better mental working environment; hypomania was also good. Without anxiety, I feel lethargic--no drive. There was a price to pay, but I will install new habits. My pattern of procrastination is both my own fault and a matter of physical brain chemistry, and the cure to my clinical laziness is simply to get over it and force myself to build new, corrected habits; whining that I have some internal issue with my brain won't get anything done, although I recognize the root cause of non-anxiety pathological procrastination--laziness--as a similar pathology to depression.
Humans enjoy making themselves helpless. It is an ancient trick: become an invalid to make yourself feel important, so that others will sympathize with you, and so that you can criticize those who do not sympathize with you. I have always hated the attentions of others; I respond poorly to praise and sympathy, and have tended to show others how simple all things are, and to hide my own pains and upsets to draw less attention. Perhaps this made it easier for me; my peers, however, have escaped their long troubles of anxiety in much the same way, and those who have not prefer to simply ignore all their previously-depressed friends in the same way alcoholics ignore their former drinking buddies, consistently doing no more than complain that they have problems none of us can understand--claiming that, obviously, we don't have the same problems, because we got better, and they have not. They simply desire their pathos.
