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You are surely not alone. None of us is born to burn. But a lot of us "feel the burn", just not the burn that comes from hard exercise.
I spent more than 3 years trying one antidepressant after another until I got to Wellbutrin. I've been taking it at 450mg since 2006, and it's made my life - well, I can't come up with the right word. The experts say, "depression is treatable". I wonder sometimes how they define treatable. Does it mean that at some point a depressed person stops being depressed because they find the right medication? Or do they no longer need an antidepressant? I'd say that the outcome is very much unique to every person.
I'm okay with the possibility that I'll need antidepressants the rest of my life to maintain mental stability. I don't forget what untreated depression felt like, and I don't particularly want to go back there.
A few years ago I was beginning to feel depressed again, so I talked with the psychiatrist about it, and he added Mirtazapine to my cache of medications. I guess Wellbutrin needed a booster. It did get me back on track.
Another way treatable is looked at is a combination of medication and therapy, which is the treatment plan that I follow. Statistics show that that's the most effective way to treat depression.
Then in around 2012 I started feeling pins and needles in my feet and legs. Tests showed that I have peripheral neuropathy and by now I have burning pain in my feet and ankles. I've tried a really long list of medications for it, but nothing has helped for very long. I had a spinal cord stimulator implant in June of 2017, and gave me 80% pain relief. I'd forgotten how it felt not to be in awful pain. It did the job for a year or so, but was starting to lose its effectiveness, and had to be adjusted every 3 months. Right now, I don't feel like it's doing anything, but I learned a few months ago that I have severe spinal stenosis in L4-L5. I'm scheduled for surgery in late September, and the surgeon tells me that it could give me some relief, but I won't know until I recover from surgery.
So, welcome to the club.
Jim
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@jimhd So if they say the optimum way to treat depression is a combo of drugs and therapy that implies a depression that is a combo of physical and psychological, is that accurate? So if you did not have the physical depression I wonder if you would still have the psychological, i.e. still require the therapy. Just curious.
I know I have had the psychological variety, which lasted about 30 years or so I guess. I never had any therapy, just lived with it and it was AWFUL. By the time I was in my thirties I had decided to myself that it was an imbalance in my 2 personalities, i.e. the "twins" of being a gemini. The reason that idea came to me was that I was clearly aware of my mood swings, cycling between being pretty happy and okay, to being severely unhappy and having much self-loathing. A very dysfunctional way to live but I did it a long time and kind of got by. When I would have the bad swings I would become very melancholy. My wife noticed how when I would choose to take what we now call a "mental health day" from work I would often choose to take a rainy day off. I used to love the rain, it really blended with my mood. But I was not manic depressive. I have seen what manic depression looks like first hand and I was never that extreme and I always had a grip on reality. But I was a sad guy.
The way I worked out of it was through a lot of "self therapy". That is a discussion for another time because it would take a while to explain. But I think I finally left the last dregs of the depression behind when I was about 55, although the biggest parts of it were dismantled when I was about, maybe, 35-ish. It was a wonderful experience to leave that all behind, let me tell you!
Jim, I am glad you have managed to stabilize your depression. Mine was probably not as bad as yours, or at least I was not suicidal except that one period in my twenties (and as a kid I thought about it periodically). Best, Hank