by Atticus CrowI was never diagnosed with depression but looking back all of the symptoms were there. Low mood pretty much all day, almost every day. Loss of interest in things I previously enjoyed. Poor appetite. Insomnia. Low self-esteem. Suicidal ideation. I also had most of the symptoms of social anxiety from as early as year seven. I remember being afraid of eating in front of other people to the point where I would go without food at school or at social outings. Having to speak in class is still something that provokes an excessive amount of anxiety, and at times I have trouble speaking to people on the phone. When I was in primary school I also had most of the symptoms of separation anxiety disorder and I’ve suffered from a high level of perfectionism on and off since high-school.
If I had to write up a clinical formulation for my issues it would look something like this:
Predisposing:
Genetic: My mother suffered depression (postnatal) and anxiety which she saw a psychologist for briefly. My grandmother also suffered depression and was on medication almost all of her life. This increased likelihood that I would inherit a genetic predisposition for depression and/or anxiety.
Early childhood/development: According to my parents I had a difficult temperament as a baby which would have increased stress in the family environment. Increased stress for them would have meant increased stress for me. Increased stress for me would have increased the likelihood that the genes for depression and anxiety would activate.
The stressful family environment also resulted in a lot of arguments between my parents. My father occasionally threatened to leave. Possibly as a result of this, I developed separation anxiety. I remember standing at the screen door, waiting for my mum to get home from work every day. I did that late into primary school and would freak out if her bus was even five minutes late. I also remember feeling anxious about being left at friends’ houses and going to sleepovers. I declined invitations, claiming to be sick, on numerous occasions.
Social-emotional learning from parents: The family environment was also stressful because there was little emotional disclosure. There was also no problem-solving so if two people had an argument then they didn’t talk about it. There was no reparation just time for rumination. And then eventually something distracted you and you started talking to the other person again. Without the modelling of emotional disclosure and problem-solving I didn’t develop those skills myself. To make it worse, both of my parents, to this day, engage in a lot of black and white, dramatising (catastrophic) negative talk.
It was probably their catastrophic thinking and general anxious and negative thinking that lead them to be so overprotective. They disallowed and discouraged most social interaction, huffed and puffed about having to change their schedule whenever I mentioned parties, camps and so on, and caused me to feel guilty whenever I wanted to spend time with friends. They often spoke about the horrible bashings that had occurred in nearby parks to dissuade me from going out.
Their distrust of others and negative attribution style also meant that they pounced on the smallest injustices that arose in my friendships (someone getting to a movie late or someone forgetting to pay back borrowed money) and spoke about them as if they were the most unfaithful, untrustworthy individuals under the sun. Their hypercritical attitude of others probably explains their dwindling social circle and certainly impacted on my own. Of course, I picked up their negative thinking style and spent a good deal of my childhood and adolescence perfecting the art of catastrophising and rumination. I spent hours awake at night rehearsing my failures in my head. The lack of opportunities for social experience, the micromanaging, and the invalidation that sometimes occurred, all stopped me from practising social and friendship making skills. Their high expectations turned me into a perfectionist who didn’t have the skills (artistic, social or academic) to be anything close to perfect. So I beat myself up about by failures and found it impossible to find pleasure in the achievements I did have.
Precipitating:
Bullying at school. Familial, social and academic stressors. Etcetera...
Perpetuating:
During the worst of my depression I self-harmed. I thought that life was meaningless. I hated myself and I didn’t feel like I had any close friends. The close friends I did have seemed to leave me and form other friendships. I fretted over my elderly parents’ mortality. I argued incessantly with them and then felt excessively guilty. I didn’t speak to people much, especially in groups. I drew and I wrote and I tried to find a reason for everything. I felt like things would never change. I had relationships that were hopelessly co-dependent and accentuated by longing, uncertainty, and wanting to be loved but not feeling love for the other person. Then guilt, for not feeling love for the other person. I fought with myself and my thoughts constantly. Hated how automatically my thoughts turned to negativity and depression. Always felt exhausted. I experienced extremes of emotion – odd, wistful feelings of connectedness to everything, and a deep depression that I romanticised with rumination and music long after I had any reason to be depressed.
I stayed on the computer too long, I went to bed too late. I avoided social situations, I avoided speaking on the phone and I avoided my own voice. I felt self-conscious about smiling, about laughing. I pulled out my hair and cut my wrists. I spent nights and nights alone in my room, wracked with anxiety and uncertainty about unreturned calls from friends or events I had voluntarily skipped but really wished I’d gone to. I battled with an overwhelming sense of uncontrollability. I thought I was abnormal, broken, and unlovable.
But all of those thoughts were just thoughts and all of those social deficits were slowly improved with practice.
Treatment:
Looking back I can identify lots of little steps I took to treat my depression. Some of them were accidents and good luck. Some were thanks to altruistic friends. Some were more self-directed.
It sounds ridiculous but one of the first steps I took to feel better about myself in high-school was getting dreadlocks. I immediately stopped getting teased at school. Much later I would also gain the independence, finances and motivation to go clothes shopping and start to look the way I wanted to look as well. For some reason I was never given that option as a child. But this first step reduced some of the tension at school and taught me – if only in a very small way – that I had some control over my appearance and my environment.
Going to uni was probably the next step. It provided me with a new environment in which to invent myself, away from all the people I assumed didn’t like me in high-school. Away from bullies and cliques and five years of feeling embarrassed and socially incompetent around my peers. Uni was also significantly less stressful than year eleven and twelve.
I decided to study psychology and I learnt a lot about erroneous thinking styles, cognitive biases and so on. I started to realise that when I was depressed, my brain was hardwired to think depressing thoughts which made me more depressed. I realised that being depressed made it more difficult to think of better times, and almost impossible to think of disconfirming evidence for my negative thoughts about myself. I did start to discover positive things about myself. But I didn’t lose the sense that everything was meaningless until much later.
Much later when I started to work full-time. Working full-time gave me access to the finances to go out and socialise. It also gave me access to a lot of well-adjusted adults who modelled good social, emotional and coping skills. At around the same time some of my university friends started to hassle me about hanging out again. With an incredible feeling of reluctance and anxiety I started to go to pubs and clubs which helped me to develop stronger friendships with them, learn how to enjoy myself and improve my social skills. With a lot of difficulty I started noticing when I was intentionally avoiding social situations and forced myself to go to them anyway. Eventually I started to enjoy them.
I also gave up art. I gave up my search for meaning. I decided that it was easier and more fun just to sit around and play video games. I changed my life philosophy to hedonism, which involved learning two good treatments for depression – distraction and positive event scheduling (or having fun.) Giving up art was important in building my self-esteem because as a perfectionist (and an at-best mediocre, untrained artist) I was always down on myself because of my work. Later on I returned to art with the self-confidence I needed to appreciate my work and enjoy what I was doing.
Hedonism helped me to stop thinking about meaning. Hedonism had a lot going for it. You make yourself happy and by making yourself happy you make other people happy. You have fun and other people have fun having fun with you. It was a unique brand of hedonism that still had other people’s interests strongly in mind. I suppose I never lost the sense that positively influencing others was important.
Another factor in overcoming my existential woe was realising the negative slant I was putting on all of my existential musing. In my head I got to the point where I was thinking “life is meaningless” without realising that if life is meaningless it doesn’t matter what you do, how you live or whether it’s meaningless or not. Meaninglessness is liberation.
I always figured that death made all achievements moot. You can achieve things but the people who will benefit from your achievements will die and eventually the entire universe will collapse anyway. What’s the point? But I decided that death doesn’t wipe away the things you achieve while you’re alive. Nothing is eternal so why should you or your achievements have to be eternal to be meaningful? I decided that the only thing that’s important while you’re alive is what you do while you’re alive.
I also realised the importance of selfishness, a word that is often put in a negative light. For most of my life I felt guilty if I did something just for myself, because I thought I wasn’t worth it. With further thought I decided that selfishness is at the centre of everything – humans, animals, nature. It’s an important part of survival. You think about yourself so you can survive. For people in middle-class western culture, it’s more about emotional survival than safety. You need put yourself first before you can properly attend to anything else.
To some extent experimenting with drugs helped me to learn about myself and experience competencies I didn’t think I had. I found that many of those skills were things I could transfer to sober social interactions as well. They also helped me to relax and build my social skills and learn how to have fun.
Experimenting with my sexuality helped me to better define and understand my personality.
Being trained in Aussie Optimism, a social skills and optimistic thinking program finally gave me some practical ways to make decisions, solve problems, be assertive, cope with my negative feelings and challenge my negative thoughts. Later on I would return to the program and also learn some excellent skills for physical relaxation.
Getting an exercise bike and slowly developing a daily exercise routine helped hormonally. Fixing up other little bits of my daily routine, like getting to bed earlier and taking a shower at night to relax, also helped.
Discovering happy music was enormously important because it allowed me to transfer my love of music to bands that didn’t depress me to listen to. The Beatles, The New Pornographers, Of Montreal, and Belle and Sebastian were all helpful in doing that.
Taking the plunge and asking a friend to escort me to the counselling building at uni was important. Making an appointment to see a counsellor allowed me unload and unpack ten years of shit that had mostly just sat around inside of me. It was cathartic to bounce off an intelligent, trained adult, and learn more about mindfulness and visualisation.
Discovering I was a perfectionist was important and taking steps to overcome it were surprisingly easy for me. I realised I was a perfectionistic one day when I was sitting in front of a two sentence e-mail for a full 30 minutes trying to ‘refine’ it and make it ‘sound good’, all the while my anxiety rising sky high as I thought about how much time I was wasting. I quickly developed a self-timer for perfectionistic procrastination and now I tend to realise when I’m pedantically adjusting things for no reason and move on.
Moving out/house-sitting allowed me to disentangle my life from my parents’ and the strange, emotionally charged interactions I had with them. It helped me to develop my own daily routine, which was much more relaxed and enjoyable. And the distance helped us to develop a healthier relationship which we have managed to maintain despite having moved back in.
And meeting somebody who is amazingly insightful, supportive, affectionate and fun, has also had a big impact on my life.
And that’s where I am now. Over the last couple of years I have shed most of my depression. Up until three or four months ago I still experienced and even sought depressive episodes once or twice a week. Such was the strange romantic pull of a mood I experienced in varying severity for over ten years of my life. I haven’t experienced anything as severe to depression in a while, though I would be surprised if it doesn’t arise again. It’s different now though – I can recognise when it’s coming on, and I have the coping skills and social support to deal with it if it does. I also have a wealth of positive experiences now, that make the depression I used to yearn for unappealing.
Despite being very happy I still suffer from some symptoms of social anxiety. I sometimes experience an excessive amount of fear when speaking in some group situations. I sometimes feel uncomfortable speaking to people on the phone. And I sometimes avoid people – generally people I don’t know very well – to avoid social interaction.
I also have a general level of anxiety that is perhaps slightly higher than is normative and a thinking style that occasionally (but less and less) lapses into anxious thinking. Right now I’m realising that a lot of my anxious thoughts revolve around perceived deadlines. I start to think about what ‘has’ to be done and I get anxious if I don’t do it. It’s not necessarily easy to ‘just do it’ though, because my perfectionism causes me to procrastinate, which increases my deadline anxiety, which (sometimes) decreases my performance when I finally do what I need to do, which increases my perfectionist anxiety, and so on. Like most issues in psychology, the relationship between many of my symptoms is cyclical. I’m working on it and I know I have access to a counsellor if I need some extra help.
I am a clinical psychologist trainee and I got into the field of psychology for a few reasons – people came to talk to me in high school about their problems, I knew a lot of people with mental health issues growing up, I was interested in cognition and why people do what they do, and I wanted to understand myself better. I sometimes worry about being a ‘psych who has issues’ but the truth is everyone has issues. Every single person has issues but some people have the social support and internal resources (often because of professional intervention or training) to better cope with them than others. Some people are lucky enough to have had a mostly positive, early childhood experience, and gain those internal resources naturally. Others need to gain them through professional intervention and study – like I had to.
Professional support is ALWAYS available whether it is over the phone, through your GP, through your school psychologist or through your university’s counselling service. The following is a list of services available in the Perth metro area.