All Entries Tagged With: "Sleeping"
It’s That Time Of Year Again
The birds and singing and the flowers are blooming and Leslie is walking around the house with toilet paper stuffed up her nose. Every year from around March-September I suffer from severe allergies. You might wonder what this has to do with depression, but it actually plays a bigger role than you might think.
I need this invention most of the year.
Allergies make me tired. My body is working overtime trying to fight off all the things that make me sneeze and this hard work drains my energy. Unfortunately the allergy medication doesn’t help me out in the energy department. While it might help my itchy eyes and sniffles the number one side effect is drowsiness. I have tried allergy shots, a neti pot, nasal spray and prescription drugs. Each of these remedies provide some relief, but I can still feel the drowsiness weighing on me and pulling me down.
The number one thing I want to do when I’m feeling especially depressed is to sleep. Some days I just feel so tired that it requires all my energy to just breathe in and out. Sleeping provides an escape. Excessive sleeping is a symptom of depression and one that becomes even harder to fight when I am being weighed down with the drowsiness allergies inflict. This past week I have felt extreme temptation to just crawl back into bed after I’ve only been up for a couple of hours, not because my allergies have been horrible, but because the combination of the allergies, medication and depression just make my bed look so desirable. While it would be easy to just climb back into bed and get a few more hours I have resisted. I know that in order to combat my depression effectively I can’t give into all my urges to just crawl into bed and escape life, no matter how tired my body is.
Would I Get A Rose?
Tareak and I are very honest with each other. We don’t always try to spare each other’s feelings in order to give the “right answer”. My sisters think that some of the things Tareak says to or about me are mean, but I don’t feel this way. With that said….
I love the television show, The Bachelor. I am not ashamed to admit this. The Bachelor on the show gets to choose from 25 beautiful and successful women and ideally ends up engaged to one of them by the end of the series. The Bachelor lets the women know he likes them by giving them a red rose. After watching this weeks episode I asked Tareak,
Leslie: “If you were the Bachelor, would you have chosen me?”
(Note- After almost 2 years of marriage most husbands know the “correct” answer to this question is, “Of course Dear. You are the only one for me.”)
Tareak: “Well, what do you have to offer?”
(Note- This is one of the answers that my sisters would consider “mean”- but one of the reasons that I love and appreciate his honesty.)
At this point I felt my shoulders slump and I quietly answered,
Leslie: “Not much, right now.”
Tareak: “Well, what do you like to do?”
Leslie: “I enjoy sleeping and reading”
Tareak: “I mean, what do you like to do for fun?” (I guess he didn’t think I was serious about sleeping and reading being the “fun” things I like to do.)
Leslie: “Ummm…. I like to bake cookies..?
Tareak: “You know, I don’t know if I would have chosen you. The women on these shows have a lot going for them and look really great on paper, but that isn’t important. I chose to marry you and I’m happy I did so.”
He is right. The women on these shows do have a lot going for them. My brief bio would be something like:
Leslie- 26- Unemployed
College dropout who sleeps all day and reads all night. Makes herself unattractive by pulling out her hair.
Why would anyone choose to be with someone like me? I know that I was blessed with a lot of talents, but they are all dormant right now. The depression that sucks all life out of me also sucks some life out of those I love and am close to.
A lot of times I feel bad for Tareak that he is “stuck” with me and a situation that he didn’t bargain for. I wish that I had more to offer him at this point in life, but right now I wouldn’t give myself a rose, and wouldn’t expect anyone else to give me one either.
Interesting Way of Putting It
This article found on the Psychology Today website says “depression is the leading cause of years lost due to disability.” I have never thought of the time I spend dealing with depression as actually losing years of my life. My life may not be cut short, as in I will die at age 50 instead of say, 80, but I could easily still loose 30 years moping around feeling unmotivated or as my mom likes to put it, “sleeping my life away.” When they put it that way there is a strong urge to actively work on overcoming depression in order to reclaim those years of my life.
The Major Scourge of Humankind
A milestone was reached toward the end of last year, and the press made no note of it. In October, the World Health Organization declared that now, among all the illnesses and forms of injury it measures, “depression is the leading cause of years lost due to disability.”
I have a personal stake in this announcement. In doubting reviews, I was twitted for claiming in my 2005 book, Against Depression, that “depression is the major scourge of humankind.” This criticism was based on a misreading. What I had written was that the WHO and other organizations interested in public health were making that assertion. The full paragraph goes: “Groups around the world have undertaken the same effort using different assumptions and weightings. The results of these analyses are similar. Varied assumptions lead to a single conclusion: Not AIDS, not breast cancer, but depression is the major scourge of humankind.”
I went on to explain how the WHO assesses disability. It uses a measure, called “disability-adjusted life years,” or DALYs, that gauges how far a disease or injury robs a person of good health. If you live in a country where the life expectancy is 80 but cancer kills you at age 60, you have lost 20 good years; but likewise, if a birth injury partially paralyzes you and leaves you 25% disabled, then if you live to 80 you will also be judged to have lost 20 good years. Actually, the birth injury would be rated worse, because the measure values years in young adulthood slightly more than years in old age. Because major depression is so common and so severe in its effects, and because its onset is often early in life, it tends to stand out in surveys focused on DALYs.
I should add that the panels that devised the rating systems used by the WHO included few or no psychiatrists. Surgeons, pediatricians, and internists made the assessments. When the results of the first surveys emerged, the prominent place of depression surprised everyone. But the findings have been consistent over time. What has changed is largely the WHO’s willingness to stand behind them and emphasize, as it did in its recent the press releases, depression’s awful status. Still, here it is: the claim I was criticized for (but did not quite make) is now the official position of the preeminent authority on global health and illness.
The survey available when I was writing was based on 1990 data; the new report has updates from as recently as 2004. As had been predicted, depression has moved up in the standings – that is, it appears yet more disabling, compared to other conditions.
In truth, the status of depression has changed only modestly. Because they kill children at birth and so rob them of a whole life span, “lower respiratory infections” and “diarrhoeal diseases” remain at the top of the DALYs list. But those categories represent clusters of differing illnesses. Depression comes next, and it is arguably a narrower category.
If you set aside low-income countries and look either at middle- or high-income countries, depression is now absolutely atop the list, above ischemic heart disease and cerebrovascular disease, above traffic accidents, dementia, and diabetes. If you look regionally, here in the Americas, depression is also outright the most disabling condition, above violence and heart disease. For women, depression is the leading cause of disability everywhere, even in low- and middle-income countries, outpacing HIV/AIDS.
One can debate the WHO measures. They count each episode of depression as highly disabling; but then, they omit more minor episodes altogether. Also, they ignore links between conditions. For example, maternal depression is a potent risk factor for infantile diarrhea. Self-inflicted injuries, which are very common in poor countries, are counted as separate from depression. And really, wouldn’t depression be a serious enough problem if it were judged only as disabling as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or AIDS? Still, the WHO Global Burden of Disease study is the gold standard, and it finds depression to be, yes, the severest scourge.
Regarding science journalism, we live in strange times. When isolated academics use esoteric studies and idiosyncratic theorizing to question depression’s standing as a disease, that’s news. But when the world’s leading public health organization, using a quite strict definition of illness, announces that depression has become the leading cause of disability in our hemisphere – you can scour the pages of the press and find nary a report.
Good Start
2009- So far, So good.
Despite my delayed sleep phase syndrome being worse than ever, 2009 is proving to be significantly better than last year. Nothing extraordinary has happened, but I am definitely in better spirits.
Last month I increased my Paxil dosage to 15 mg. It takes a few weeks for your body to start noticing any changes, and so I decided to do an experiment. I had a doctors appointment on Monday and wanted to make sure to get all my prescriptions re-filled at that time. In order to know how much Paxil I should ask for I needed to know if 15 mg was effective. I left Tareak a note on Saturday that we should have the “baby talk” on Sunday night to see how the 15 mg was working. I could tell Tareak was excited to have the “baby talk” and I’m sure was hopeful that we’d be able to get through it without tears.
Sunday night rolled around and we set up a “picnic” on our bedroom floor and started chatting. The 10 mg Leslie could only get through about 2 minutes of conversation before crying so much that there wasn’t any point in talking further. I am happy to report that I was able to get through about 2 hours of conversation (much of it was off topic) before the tears came. This is a significant improvement in any one’s book! The big issue is still my lack of desire for a baby. Since I do realize that I eventually want to have older children I am starting to come to terms with the fact that they have to be babies first. This doesn’t make me feel any more confident in my ability to manage my illnesses and raise a child/children simultaneously, but it is a step in the right direction.
At my doctors appointment on Monday we asked the doctor about the danger of being on 15 mg of Paxil while pregnant since it is such a low dosage. Apparently Paxil is a “class C” drug which means it shouldn’t be taken during the 3rd trimester, but I could be on Paxil during the beginning of my pregnancy. There are other drugs that manage depression, but not ocd, anxiety or trichotillomania that are safe to be on during the entire pregnancy, but I don’t know if my body chemistry is compatible with those drugs. Tareak is also to the point where he realizes that it might not be realistic for me to breast-feed our babies since I may need to be on medication. Earlier in our marriage he was very adamant about our children being breastfed for at least 6 months, but he has now resigned to saying, “If it comes down to not having a baby, or having a baby that drinks formula, I’ll take the baby with formula.” I wish there wasn’t a need for such compromises.
I’m hopeful that I’ll continue to feel in good spirits this year and for Tareak’s sake hope that my desire for children gets stronger sooner rather than later!