Depression

Yesterday I had a 4-hour lecture on "Emotional Response" which was designed to cover the basic concepts of emotions and how massage therapy can elicit various kinds of emotional responses in people: some good, some bad and some completetly unexpected.  As myomassologists, we need to be prepared to deal with any and all cathartic moments that may occur in the scope of our practice.

We discussed the basics of emotions, different schools of thought from leading psychologists on what emotions are, how we identify them, how we learn to deal with them, especially as children, and how that can affect us throughout our lives.  In this part of the the lecture, we touched on Depression, which was described in our literature as "another internalizing problem that is related to the emotion of sadness".  It goes on to explain that people who are depressed may: feel sad, be irritable, lose interest or pleasure in activities they previously enjoyed, sleep too much/little, lose their appetites/eat more than usual, be agitated, be tired, have difficulty thinking/concentrating, feel worthless/hopeless/helpless/guilty and have low self-esteem.  As I was reading through this list, it became a personal checklist -- and all the little boxes on the checklist were neatly ticked off.

I will admit that this did not come as a huge surprise to me.  I have felt like this for most of my adult life and have many times wondered if I was, indeed, depressed because it seemed to me that it just wasn't normal to feel how I so often do.  I was pretty sure most other people didn't feel this way, at least on a regular basis.  And I was also pretty sure that when other people had bad days, it wasn't quite as debilitating as when I did.  I also did not know anyone else who, like me, spent 3 weeks sitting on the couch last winter, unable to get up and make herself do anything but the bare minimum required to keep her children fed and functioning. 

I don't know why I never really discussed this with anyone or tried to do any kind of research, but I didn't.  Until yesterday.  I showed my little checklist to my husband, who agreed with all my little tick marks and said that our therapist had once told him (likely last winter during my couch episode) that I was depressed.  So last night at therapy, the topic came up - in a roundabout kind of way - and sure enough, my therapist did indeed say that he thought I was prone to depression, which gets worse every now and then.

Huh.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with my therapist because I think it's always there -- it's just that most days I'm fairly capable of ignoring it or at least working around it.  Other times, when things get a little too overwhelming, it gets the better of me.  For the past few weeks, I've been walking a very fine line.  I'm still functioning but there have been many days when the swirling mass of sadness that hovers above threatens to descend and smother me.

I'm not sure that knowing I'm depressed - or even prone to depression - is going to help or change anything, although at least now I know I haven't completely lost it.  What I do hope is that this knowledge will help the people I am close to understand me just a little bit better.