.....But I'm Missing Yesterday

Hi there everyone.

Thanks for checking in. Here's my third blog dealing with my anxiety and depression. In this one I'm talking about my most recent bout with them. This time they had started a good while before I even realised they were with me.

Quite often you don't realise that your anxiety is there. It can creep up on you subtly without you even realising that you've gone from thinking you were having the odd episode to understanding that it hasn't gone away.

Looking back, it was about a year or so ago when I started noticing the signs. The odd panic attack here, a reluctance to go out there. Something, but I wouldn't say it was major. I thought I was dealing with it when obviously I wasn't.

Like I said, anxiety can be subtle. It isn't always there beating you into submission. It chips away at you, sucking away at your soul until you realise it's too late. By that point, months have generally gone past without you realising the extent of how much it had actually been there.

It had got to the point where I was starting to be wary going out, in fear of a panic attack. I was often seeing the negative in things. I was waking each morning with an anxiety attack.

And I wondered why I was feeling tired all the time.

After a while it's almost second nature. You've accepted that it's there and that it just seems to be part of your life without realising.

Around July/August last year I realised it had got to a point where I needed to do simmering about it. I made a doctor's appointment and asked to go back on citalopram. I'd been on it several times in the past and I knew it worked.

The thing with anti-anxiety meds is they're not affective immediately. It can take a while for the various chemicals to get into your system and start working. They're almost as subtle as the anxiety itself. A lot of people come off them quite quickly as they think they should be feeling better almost immediately, which unfortunately isn't the case.

Towards the end of the first months course I knew they weren't working the way they should. My doctor suggested upping the dose to 20mg and taking a short sick note. I took the tablets but not the sick note. Sarah and I were going to Rome at the end of September and I hoped that the combination of the meds and the break would alleviate the symptoms.

It didn't.

I started feeling noticeably worse in myself. I became more jittery, the anxiety attacks started becoming more frequent, my concentration was gone, the colour seemed to slowly seep out of everything. By November I knew I wasn't feeling right. I could feel myself starting to slip. I hated the thought of going out, I wasn't looking forward to work, and even band practice felt like a chore.

The doctor and I talked again. He wanted to lower the dosage of the citalopram, feeling that it was possibly too high and making the anxiety worse. This time I also took the sick note.

Work were fantastic with me, my manager referred me to our employee assistance team who arranged a counsellor to speak to me. I hadn't had counselling since college so I welcomed the opportunity.

I must admit, I didn't really know what to expect. The counselor, a guy named Stephan, agreed to call me every week to talk. The first session felt odd. We looked at what might have caused the attacks. We looked at breaking down everything, what had been happening to me and why.

It sounds pretty obvious but sometimes when you reflect on things, hindsight can really make things understandable. Three years ago my dad had been diagnosed with early onset Alzhiemers. I'll admit it now but it was something that I've struggled with fully comprehending and, I suppose, dealing with it. Sarah's dad had passed away from cancer. A member of my family was also going through health issues. All of these and more eroded me away until I didn't realise that all that was left of me was just a sliver.

I was now really uncomfortable leaving the house. I was spacing out and became easily distracted. I felt distanced from things. Worst of all, I'd lost all desire and motivating to pick up a guitar and play.

After I couple of weeks we were looking into EFT, or tapping, therapy. It's basically using positive reinforcement and breaking down the negativity whilst tapping away on yourself. If you want to check it out, have a look on YouTube. There's plenty of videos there, like this one that I've used several times https://youtu.be/K6kq9N9Yp6E

The doctor and I also decided the citalopram wasn't working for me this time. After checking a few things, we decided to go with venlafaxine instead, something that was more suitable for depression.

The anxiety was getting more and more under control, but that seemed to have been masking a depression. Well, I say masking, but it was like I knew it had been there. With the anxiety being addressed more, the depression had chance to come to the fore. I suppose it was only natural with me reliving everything negative that had got me to this point. Luckily, the venlafaxine really kicked up. I started noticing positive changes in myself. I could leave the house without an anxiety attack. Hell, the anxiety wasn't even there when I was waking up on a morning.

Am I cured? No, I really don't think so and I don't think I will be. It doesn't work like that. I've lived with the depression and anxiety most of my life. But it feels different now. I feel at the moment I'm more in control, not these negative aspects of irrational emotion and thinking. I've embraced them, knowing that they're a part of me. Occasionally they'll come to the front again but I know now I've got other tools to help me deal with them.

Thanks for reading this, I know it's been a bit of a long one. Again, please feel free to comment or share. Also, there's now a small private closed community set up on Facebook, again called The Order Of The Dog. Please join us if you'd like or you can always email me at rustyred666@googlemail.com.

In the next blog, I'm hoping to look at something a little more positive, but I'll leave that until next time.

Thanks and stay well,

Scott.

First Blog Feedback

Wow.

Didn't expect everything that happened from the first blog.

In all honesty, when I started the other day I thought that it would be read by a few friends and family members and that would be it. By Monday afternoon my phone went mad. Messages, emails, comments and shares. People I knew and people I didn't were getting in touch with me offering me support and telling me their stories. Some I had to sit for a few minutes to compose myself before I replied back. All of them were thanking me for starting to share my story.

Writing the blog was very cathartic for me,  and it also opened up lots of other avenues of conversation. I created a closed group on Facebook, also named The Order Of The Dog, so people could have somewhere to share with each other. 

Also, it allowed me to have certain conversations with people I knew. My dad was diagnosed with early onset Alzhiemers three years ago and has had various degrees of depression both before and after the diagnosis. On Tuesday afternoon we sat and talked for two hours about, well, lots of things. I'll admit it was probably the longest and most personal conversation we'd had together for several years. My dad came from a generation where you didn't talk about things like that but since his diagnosis he's become a spokesperson for alzhiemers, trying to raise awareness of the disease. After the talk he agreed to sit down with me at a later time to talk about his depression and how it's affected him.

I'm hoping to write my next proper update in the next few days. I'm not 100% sure what I'll talk about next, but I'm starting to put together a list of subjects I want to broach and people I want to talk to. There's already been some interesting people come forward and I can't wait to work with them.

If you want to join the Facebook group, do a search for The Order Of The Dog and we'll get you added. Also, if you'd like to contribute or talk to me about anxiety and depression email me at rustyred666@googlemail.com

Thanks,

Scott.

Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself.....

My name is Scott and I suffer from depression and anxiety.

I was first diagnosed in my late teens. I already had a feeling that my head didn't function the way it should. Not majorly, but enough for me to question things but enough for me to know something wasn't quite right. I would have said normal, but what's normal anyway?

Things came to a head around that time when I put myself in hospital with an intentional overdose. I don't particularly remember doing it or the reasons behind it all, all I knew is that I didn't want to exist anymore. No great, romantic farewells, just a mix of tablets and drink. After a few hours, my body started rejecting it, vomiting into the toilet. It was probably the vomiting that saved me.

I was taken to hospital where they said it was too late to have my stomach pumped. I remember being wheeled around corridors in wheelchair, feeling like I was in a bubble. It was trippy and surreal. That and sitting in a chair looking out of the window watching the sunrise, feeling gaunt and eroded away from existence, were the only things I really remember from the time.

I had a brief spell of counselling whilst at college, the usual kind of stuff to try and help me. I hoped that it was something I'd grow out of butility it wasn't to be.

My first attempt with meds came a few years later. I was prescribed Prozac, the new hip wonder drug, to help stable my mood swings. Like most of Generation X (in reference to the Douglas Coupland novel that spawned a literary movement) I'd read Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, a writer's memoir on suffering from depression and the affects of prozac on her. It helped her so I have it a try. After a month or so I felt my mood's balance a bit, so I took it for another few months then stopped. Hey, it had worked and I was okay now, right?

Every now and again I'd go back to medication. When I felt I needed it I would go back to the doctor's and get prescribed something. Most of the time it was citalopram. I knew it worked with my depression and also helped with my anxiety. I would take it for about six months to a year or so, then come off it as I felt better.

And so the cycle continued.

The most recent time felt different. I spent most of 2015 waking up with an anxiety attack. I was finding it harder and harder to be out in public. My mood was fluctuating, but was spending more time dealing more time dealing with the black dog than not. I went to the doctor's and signed back up for citalopram. I started taking it but after a couple of month's it wasn't doing anything but taking the edge off things. Life had lost it's luster. I could barely pick up a guitar. The usual things I enjoyed seemed meaningless. My attention and focus were all over the place. I was somewhere else. The dog had well and truly taken a hold and it wasn't prepared to let go it's hold.

On the suggestion of a few people I went back to my GP. I changed my meds to venlafaxine. I went on the sick from work whilst I worked on myself. I started counseling and therapy. I slept. I learned to change my ways of thinking. I made things public on Facebook and with my friends and family. I fought it the best way I could.

It's taken me a few months to get here but I'm back, but this time I feel stronger. My attitude feels better, I'm enjoying things and life. I feel my laughter is no longer hollow or fake.

I've started this blog to cover not just my fight and my story, but that of others. Mental illnesses are cruel and will happily steal everything from you that it can. I want this to reach out to people, to let everyone know that we can get through it. Some days are better than others, but every day here is a victory.

The blog will have my story, but I'm going to try and include the story of others too. If you want to take part, feel like telling your tale, then let me know. You don't have to suffer from depression, a family member might and you want to tell people things from your perspective. That's cool. I want this to be a forum for as many as possible. It's not just about me, it's about you too. We can bond together to help other's with the daily fight. And not just with this blog either. I'm hoping to incorporate videos too, of me, interviews with other people and stories from people who's life has been touched by this.

Any feedback, messages, offers of stories or interviews, then drop me a line @ rustyred666@googlemail.com. Let's do this.

Cheers,

Scott.