Rebuild from Depression Blog

The line between quirky and crazy is a fine one. You hear that all the time but I am beginning to see how true it is. I stayed in Fresno with friends last week to attend the Organic Pastures press conference. I nearly missed the press conference because my friends and I were engrossed in a fascinating topic: my mental health and the fine line between quirky and crazy.

The friends are both therapists. In fact one heads the mental health department in a nearby county.

"You are much more than a diagnosis," she assured me as we laughed about some of my crazy antics.

If you have read much of this blog you probably have some sense of my "quirkiness." I expect the event in early August may be the one most worthy of a call to mental health professionals.

Of course, the big question is how much of that quirkiness is just my personality and how much of it is worthy of a diagnosis. Apparently the line can be a fine one and the key distinction is to what degree your "quirkiness" is affecting your social relationships and your ability to be a good family member and good citizen.

That question became the question of the morning as they diagnosed me.

The problem with living every day in a black hole of despair is that we see things differently from that hole than do people around us.

“Buck up!”

“Just make the call!”

“What’s your problem?”

We’ve all heard it and the problem is that if you could “buck up,” you would, but you can’t and you can’t really explain why because apparently it seems so easy to everyone else that “bucking up” should be easy.

My son just lost his first tooth and his world just about fell apart. The tooth was loose and all of the adults in the world talked about what a great milestone it was. He should be excited, right? We thought so. Of course, he’s only five-and-a-half and none of his friends have lost teeth. This was unknown territory for him.

One day I worked in my office with the door closed and although he was playing with his grammy, he barged into my office and curled up on my lap. His tooth was suddenly more loose and he was scared.

By the next morning, the adults had forgotten about the tooth but he was still in emotional turmoil. My husband took him to a movie (a forty-five minute drive) just to distract him. On the way to the movie, the tooth came out. He was suddenly better and fascinated by the thing in his hand that looked like a tiny piece of chopped almond. He nearly lost it about seventeen times before he got it home.

At home he put it into a small silk pillow that is made to put under his own bed pillow. He nearly fell asleep watching another movie that evening until I roused him to go to bed. He headed to bed half asleep but clinging to that little silk pillow like his entire world revolved around it.

And the fact is, his world did revolve around that microscopic piece of bone. His emotions were tied up in it for nearly a week. We didn’t quite “get it” because, of course, we thought he should be excited about losing a tooth. Perhaps the next time will go a little better. Perhaps next time the adults will have a better understanding of the child’s perspective.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I work too hard. When I feel like I have no choice (with a newborn baby and contract deadline), I work too hard. Even now when no one is riding me hard to meet a deadline, I work too hard.

When my son lost his tooth, I told him “it won’t be long before you will be a man.” He got upset. This is what he said to me:

“I don’t want to grow up because I don’t want to work all the time like you do.”

Yowch.

The lyrics to “Cat’s in the Cradle” came to my mind immediately. In fact, I had been promising him a trip to “the coast” with me for about six months.

At my six-month check up yesterday and cleaning, I asked the dental hygienist “how old” my teeth are. “You know that book ‘Real Age’ that adjusts your calendar age for bad habits like smoking and good habits like exercise to come up with your ‘Real Age’? What’s the ‘Real Age’ of my teeth?”

First of all, no patient has apparently asked the question before and she explained how no algorithm exists to answer. However, she did say that my teeth were pretty much on target for hitting their first 39th birthday just last week.

She said, “You have no major signs of inflammation and certainly none that couldn’t be solved with more regular flossing.”

“Inflammation? You can see it in my teeth?”

A big part of my depression story was lack of food nutrients. The memoir portion of the book (which is coming very, very soon) make that fairly clear. As I move past those very bad years and have friends and family conduct their own professional and amateur analyses of my psyche fairly regularly, I start to realize that the long game for me is about a lot more than the right foods. I have had moments in the last six months where I have wondered if I had some major degenerative disease and then when I take a break, I go through a miracle cure.

I have been seeing a chiropractor and my adjustment needs are directly related to the stress in my life. I wonder how many really bad mental health episodes I need in my life to learn my lesson at last and take it easy now and then. The crazy thing about it all is that much of the stress comes from “extra-curricular” activities such as food politics work. Leave it to a crazy person to discover the importance of food by having nutrient deficiencies and then to go bananas over food advocacy work. Just for the record, I am not going bananas, not just yet. I do realize, however, that many of the circumstances that led to depression and psychotic episodes back in the day are things I did to myself. I need to make changes for the long game.

We got in this discussion Easter Sunday as we were discussing inflammation and depression. Inflammation may be an underlying cause of depression. Nutrients such as fish oil and B vitamins reduce inflammation, but so does yoga and sleep.

Someone asked over Easter dinner, “Which one is more effective at fighting depression, fish oil or yoga?”

“Are you in more desperate need of Omega-3 fatty acids or relaxation?” I responded.

At this point in my life, relaxation would be much more effective since that is apparently what I am now deficient in.

Most of us know what our biggest problem is. Fixing it just is not always all that easy.

Nutritional deficiencies are a big part of my own depression story. I spent the formative years of my life on low fat diets of bagels and imitation cheeses. Nary an Omega-3 was to be found. I proceeded through life managing nonetheless until my body was charged with making an entire new person. As my son’s brain developed in my womb, he sucked the limited Omega-3 stores out of me and I went bananas from the lack. I produced the food that grew him out of his infancy as well, a food that also required Omega-3 fatty acids and many other nutrients. We just celebrated his sixth birthday and I am finally feeling recovered from my task of producing him.

Omega 3 fatty acids were a critical thing I was deficient in and until I fixed that deficiency, all of the talk therapy in the world would not have gotten me very far above zero. It may have helped keep me out of a deeper hole, but it would not be effective on its own in improving my health.

What has happened as I face the rest of my life and establish structures for myself to maintain my mental health, I realize that the key for all of us is to determine what we are most deficient in that we can change. Focus on changing that. The food nutrients are in our control. It is a fairly easy place to begin.

What I am finding more challenging for myself is engaging in positive behaviors like rest and relaxation. It is sometimes difficult to give ourselves what we really need. Here are some of my reflections on my own life and I am working hard to integrate them into my lifestyle.

Every day should have a wee bit of vacation in it.

Somehow, cannabis has been an on-going theme of our summer and now news of cannabis and mental illness keep the theme alive.

Apparently there is a link between smoking pot and developing psychosis at a younger age. On an anecdotal level, there is a pretty powerful testimony of the link in a recent story about new therapies for depression. In the context of "deep brain stimulation" therapy (only used in severe cases not responding to treatment), mental health victim Sean Miller recounts the marijuana-mental breakdown link in his own experience:

Miller first became depressed in his early 20s, and then again at 27; the second bout of the disease, he says, occurred after he smoked a single marijuana joint while vacationing in Thailand, and was marked by anxiety and fear and brought about his first thoughts of suicide. In both cases, he was helped by antidepressants, though he experienced sexual side effects that led him to explore alternative therapies like meditation.

The depression resurfaced again at 36 after he smoked marijuana with some friends. "It was the dumbest thing I ever did," he now says. “I couldn’t function.”

I don't actually smoke anything, so I thought "phew," but our summertime theme here continues. We've discussed the risks and benefits of growing, considered becoming entrepreneurs, but we don't care for jail. My mom made a case for going organic; a local law enforcement officer told her there is no benefit to organic in this field. "The people on the other end don't care and you'll get a bigger plant with conventional fertilizer."

As a native Californian, I've always been warned against hiking in parts of northern California in fear of stumbling onto a well-armed farm. We've now been warned about our own little area of the Sierra. Authorities estimate there were sixty plantations in our area this year. Helicopters have been busy moving bundles of pot from the farms to a well-armed truck waiting at our local dump. If you get out a good pair of binoculars or a telescope, you might even notice that six big armed men ride around with those bundles (not that anyone here would spy with a telescope or anything).

Technorati Tags: cannabis, depression, Rebuild from Depression

In the comments section of my recent post, Barb brought up the issue of infant trauma in the neonatal intensive care unit. My son was in the NICU for four days; my first son was in the NICU for 18 hours. Barb has worried about the impact of the experience on her own children and I was somewhat cavalier about its impact on mine. My attitude is rooted in my current approach to life, "if you can't change it, don't worry about it." Yet I do know that it matters.

There is a wee bit of research on the subject, or perhaps the beginnings of research. But I am fairly confident that babies don't just forget the early moments hooked up on vents and tubes. Frederick basically told me so on his second birthday.

I took the occasion of Frederick's second birthday to describe to him the events of the day he was born. I kept the description nice and sweet: "we drove to the hospital, they took me into surgery, the doctors took you out of my tummy, and Dadda stayed with you in the baby hospital while they made sure you were healthy." Of course, I added such things as "You were the most beautiful baby I had ever seen."

A startling thing happened in the story. When I got to the part of Frederick's stay in the NICU, Frederick began to cry inconsolably. I started to cry too and it still makes me cry today. (That is, of course, why I don't think about the topic all that much.) Frederick's length of stay and interventions were minimal compared to Alastair's but I don't know what we as parents can do beyond which we are already doing-- loving our babies as much as possible. Keeping them close by breast-feeding them and wearing them next to our chest when they are sleeping are key strategies. (My favorite tool this month is a sling from Kangaroo Korner.)

Yep, there are a whole lot of reasons to avoid the NICU. I guess it's appropriate that I have written this post by dictating (thank you MacSpeech Dictate) while holding Alastair on my lap.

Technorati Tags: depression, NICU

I don't really know what is worse: living in a depressive mental state or living in an economic depression. I have only lived through one and hope not to make it two. I do expect that what's worse is living in both at the same time. Let's hope we don't face that.

I checked out Google trends for the word "depression" and found that more people are searching for it and there has been a sharp increase in news reports on it. Surely the increase is the economic sort, but these times will surely give rise to the other sort as well.

We have set up our lives so that we need very little cash to scrape by and it's a darned good thing because we don't have a whole lot of it. California's economy is in the crapper and with the little cash that we have, it would appear that we have more than the state does at the moment since it is on the verge of issuing IOUs to its venders and holding back state income tax returns. Ouch. Our problem is that while we are not a direct vender of the state, we are venders of venders. Trickle down economics has an ugly side.

Knowing it was coming and being set on not going bananas in my pregnancy over things I cannot control, I actually got to work on what I am calling "a product for the new economy." It's a data product for California public schools that is priced for a school on a budget with quality unsurpassed (of course, see California Standards Test :) ). Now I need to spend my time marketing it, another project that takes me away from the blog. My point is that I have made a concerted effort to "go with the flow" and take a stab at turning lemons into lemonade. Who knows if it will work (our focus has been on custom work up to this point which really doesn't require the marketing effort), but it will busy my brain on something, an important issue for me. If my brain is focused on something productive, it cannot also be filled with anxiety. I used this strategy successfully throughout my pregnancy.

If you need food for your next meal, my strategy isn't going to help for that. But if you do find yourself anxious about the times ahead, spend some time thinking about ways to take advantage of it. You never know what you might come up with.

Technorati Tags: depression, politics, economy

Just over one year ago I announced here on this blog that I was expecting a baby in December. “I don’t know if I am feeling more fear or excitement, but it’s definitely a combination of the two,” I wrote in 95% excitement and 5% fear. We did not plan to have a second child, though I do admit now that we really did want a second one more than just anything else.

This week was baby Alastair's first "half-birthday." He is six months old and I realize that perhaps my greatest achievement (ever) is making it this far healthy and sane. With my first son Frederick, the depression began in pregnancy. I had some psychotic episodes just before the birth and in the first few months postpartum. Major down cycles continued for years. For two years I was pretty much incapacitated. From there, my mental health improved each year. In this second pregnancy and postpartum period I had one bad episode that I wrote about, surrounding a surgery for Alastair, but I weathered the surgery well with some focus and tools. I stayed out of "the pit" as I call it here.

At this six month milestone I reflect the tools that got me here.

Technorati Tags: Amanda Rose, B vitamins, iron, magnesium, Omega 3, postpartum depression, pregnancy, Rebuild from Depression, zinc

I am currently exhausted and in recovery mode from a whole lot of work. We are all so vulnerable when we are exhausted and we need to protect ourselves from all of the little things that take away our energy and patience. It is those little things that can sneak up and kick you right down into the pit. When I am exhausted, for instance, I do not go on vacation and do not run a bunch of errands. I try real hard not to commit myself to too much work. But still, I end up with an email problem, I lose my keys, I can't find clean socks for my son. Researchers have studied what kinds of stressors get to us and these "little things" have a huge impact.

Researchers call them "daily hassles" and they are more highly associated with going bananas than are the "big" things like losing a spouse or getting a new job.

The daily hassles most of us share are the rising cost of goods, concerns about the health of a family member, losing things, or looming household maintenance. These days, the rising cost of goods and our major cuts in income probably feel a whole lot bigger than a "hassle." Just the other day we were hiking in the Giant Sequoias and came upon a great example of a daily hassle: The guy next to us parked on top of a rock.

Recognizing the role these daily hassles can play in my mental health, I really do try to reduce them. I try to keep my keys in one spot. I try hard to do anything well in advance if it has a deadline. If I find myself worrying about the economy, I take stock of what I have and know it is a whole lot more than my grandparents had during the Dustbowl days. When I have a day where it feels like seventy-five things are going wrong, I try to balance that feeling with "daily uplifts:" I try to do something that will help me feel healthy or rested, I complete a task, or I spend time with my sons.

Today Frederick and I are going to make video or audio recordings of some of his stories. We may try to capture some of Alastair's pre-talking noises. We may spend a few minutes in the hammock together or pick ripe nectarines and figs and eat them in the orchard. It is a good way to balance the hassles that plague me on days like this. Perhaps I will take a ride up to the redwoods and see if someone else managed to park on a rock. Getting the truck off the rock without a scratch actually ended up being a good bit of fun, probably largely because it wasn't my truck.

Technorati Tags: depression, daily hassles

Does Zoloft cause nutrient deficiencies?

It's a great question and is actually addressed in the Drug-Induced Nutrient Depletion Handbook.

The basic idea is that your body has to metabolize any sort of medication and some of the medications that we take in an on-going fashion essentially have the opportunity to deplete us of certain nutrients if we do not get enough of that nutrient in our diet.

In the 2001 edition of the book there is no research that indicates that Zoloft causes deficiencies. I did a quick literature search as well and found nothing additional. If you have seen a scientific study on the question, please add it to the comments below.

Read more on vitamins for depression and magnesium and depression. See the short YouTube video on vitamins for depression.

This post is part of Fight Back Friday.