Changes

I was reading an article in New Scientist about depression, which could be summed up as we don't know what causes depression, and we don't know why anti depressants work but they seem to. It seems that they now believe that with depression it isn't as straight forward as a lack of serotonin, it seems that some areas of the brain serotonin levels were high and some areas it was low. So basically we don't know what causes depression or what we can do to help you recover from it. This probably explains why I am on my 4th different antidepressant and 2nd different anti anxiety.

As well as medical treatment in the form of tablets, it is important that some mental illness is treated with some psychological treatment such as cognitive therapy. I have finally started this stage of my treatment, and it has been very interesting. One of the first thing I discovered was that some of the escape processes that i use today I started doing over 30 years ago. To change these behaviours is going to take time and effort.

But changes in my thinking have already started. After writing yesterday blog about me coping, last night I had a mini crash, it wasn't to the depths of not being able to stop crying, but it was low. As soon as I realised what was happening to me, instead of resorting to my usual behaviour of hiding in bed with a book, instead I sat down and thought what might have been the reason for the dip in mood. Once I did this, a lot has happened in the last week, I gave myself a break. Instead of telling myself I was being stupid and thus sending myself spiral down, I said to myself that feeling low was understandable and that I had to remember that I was doing better than I had previously.

Though I still woke up this morning with a migraine which has put me out of action today, the depression has receded slightly, which if I hadn't given myself a break it would have got worse,

So as I wrote in yesterdays blog, my recovery is happening better than I had previously thought, and changes to behaviours learnt over decades can be changed if you really want them to.