Re: depressed fives?

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: : With respect, I have to disagree. : <B>I see NO major disageement with what you wrote below. I wish to emphasize a very important point: Medication is making up for huge lacks and disfunctions in our society...In and by itself, it will never cure any symptoms, it just shuts off the expression or the screams raising from our subconscious. The real problem is massive misunderstanding of those screams, and of course when it arises, it is bound to create a threat to the other people involved... : Amasingly, when I went through that terrible depression several years ago, they tried to put me on drugs, yet those had NO effect on my inner pain. I had found that running or intense physical activity worked much better at keeping the pain at a bareable level...Drugs only altered my body motion and blurred my mind. : The best, genuine and natural cure to depression is genuine presence, it is empathy, and that is accutely missing in our present society where selfishness and general neurosis are the rule. : NO therapy had ever succeeded in healing my torn relationship to my mother, it is life who offered me a chance to heal it. As I moved to a new neighborhood, I became friend with one of my new neighbors, a wonderful older E5 woman. To her I could open up and talk freely, and things from the past have started pouring out. And she gave me the empathy, understanding and support I had missed until then...Sometimes it doesn't take that much to heal, it just takes the RIGHT THING...No substitute really work!</B> : : Laurence wrote that medication tricks the mind. Perhaps that's so: it tricked my mind sufficiently that I am not dead right now, making it possible for me to bear with suicidal ideation that was extremely frightening and compelling, though I was just too lethargic to do anything, and dug deep enough to get myself some help before things got out of hand. My death would not have been flamboyant; I wanted, as do many depressed people, to disappear. Medication tricked my mind sufficiently that I started washing again, talking again, and eating again. These are positives. Acute depression *hurts*, like a fractured bone: like every bone is fractured, really. The tears will not stop, the pain is intense. OCD symptoms are not controllable. I am sure that many people will not have these kinds of simple results with medication, and suspect that means they did not need it. Some people, too, need to spend a lot of time experimenting with different drugs and dosages until they have something which is comfortable for them. I did a lot of research about SSRIs and wanted my own decisions to be as informed as possible. I have no desire to take this medication forever: for me not to take it now would make about as much sense as for a diabetic to doubt their insulin. : : I'd sugest another analogy. Medication takes an extremely obscured painting and allows you to wipe away some of the worst damage and obscurity, things that have happened to it from withut, to see what the picture might finally be about. I would not take an SSRI if I were not at the same time having intensive psychoanalysis, because I do believe that my psychological life is something to do with me -- that is, I can do something about it. At the same time, I do not think I could have coped with therapy *at all* if I didn't take the SSRI. My first few months of therapy included anxiety attacks, despair, and an inability to communicate that was not therapeutic until I was able to deal with these very difficult feelings. I am not persuaded that psyche is all we have, nor that it's all chemical. I believe, based on my own experience, that there is a complex interrelation between the two, and that both need attention from time to time when things are SO not right. : : Genetics, or probability, perhaps, is also persuasive. I have a bipolar aunt and alcoholic uncle on my mother's side, my sister experiences depression, my father lived on valium and serapax, his mother was hospitalised for depression when I was a small child. Other members of my family are really obviously messed up in one way or another: we have more than our fair share of addicts, sad, and dysfunctional people. Recently, my mother has said things to indicate she too suffers from depression, though I think it sounds like a mild "dysthymia," only she is too intent on being "okay" to notice how weird some of the things she says about it are. The *fact* is that people with my kind of family background are *hugely* more likely to suffer a unipolar depression as I have. : : But it wasn't my intention to talk about medication so much as to talk about what relationship people might see between 5dom and depression: it does seem to me we are acutely vulnerable to depression as a result of coping mechanisms that resemble how depressed people tend to behave: withdrawal, belt tightening, anxiety, trying to figure things out to feel comfortable when they can't be figured out. The amazing result of my first year of analysis is that I feel able to relax in the face of not knowing: not for long, or very easily, but it can be done. I had read a lot about psychoanalysis and similar subjects, but my experience of actually *being* in analysis has effected a fundamental shift in what I understand about the world. As a five, that's a constant source of excitement and fear in almost equal measure. My therapist says that her job is to learn all about me: I tell her that my desire is to learn all about the process. I think we'll be getting somewhere when I accept that my job is to want her to know about me, and that requires a *lot* of trust and confidentiality. I feel it, but I can't do it yet. She's patient, though, and incredibly smart, and has a way with irony and understated empathy that feels like rescue to me. She deals with my medication by mostly making decisions about it mine, not hers, and will not discuss it as part of the therapy except for its psychological consequences in my life. : : I was interested in the fact, for instance, that 5s often test as 4s, which was mentioned in another post here. When my therapist first saw me, and I was PROFOUNDLY depressed, I said the only thing that gave me pleasure in my life was affection. I think people sometimes confuse the 5's habits with the 5's desires. I am withdrawn, anxious, often rather autistic in my way with people. I am fairly obsessive with my possessions, which I have discovered can really be defined into two categories: information (books, cds, technology), and sentimental (objects of personal or professional significance, collections). I long for intimacy and confidential bonds, and feel most myself within them. My need for alone time, for tranquility and for knowledge is in my bones, which makes me a 5, my best times *do* usually occur in private reverie, but I LOVE people, and am driven most in life by feelings of trust, care, and responsibility for those I love. That is a typical way for a 5 to feel, I've learned, but not what people think of us. What is important to us is not always what we do best. I can out-analyze, out-think, out-withdraw and out-worry all those 2s, and 8s, but I would give anything for their openness and easy way with love and affection. That's where I see my therapy doing its bit: helping me to express those feelings in ways that people can hear them. : : Sorry this is so long, but as they say, 5s love a dissertation. : ) : : Bilo

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