Posted by Jonathan on January 30, 2002, at 15:16:20
In reply to RIP My Life, posted by ELA on January 29, 2002, at 12:06:13
> The prospect of this rehab programme I have to go on has really sent me into another dark mood and feelings of despair. Just when I thought things were finally starting to improve, I get all this.
Emma,
I'm so sorry that this has happened so soon after you felt you had turned a corner. I hope that, like your dark mood before you decided to return to uni, this one will lift in a day or two and you'll start to see some positive aspects to this programme: perhaps you'll discover a nice pub in the vicinity ;)
In my experience, I'm afraid these potholes on the road to recovery are inevitable. They become easier to cope with as you learn to recognise that they are only temporary. I haven't found an AD that makes them less deep; what I'm taking now just helps me sometimes to get out of the pit in days rather than weeks. They don't mean that you're not yet on that road; I still think you were probably correct in identifying the weekend before last as your turning point.
A very different melodramatic event nearly fourteen years ago was my turning point, though the illness crept back again after several years respite. I need another kick now, and discovered a couple of months ago that getting away from the home environment where my depression became really bad last summer, back to where I was happy all those years ago, might help me to recapture the positive emotions I started to feel then; the remaining obstacle is to find a way to hold on permanently to those positive emotions.
Perhaps getting away for four weeks, both from college where you became ill and from the emotional pressures of home, will help you to handle the difficult decisions you have to make and coming to terms with the illness that nearly prevented you from reaching your 21st birthday (so much more than I've ever had to deal with), as our trip abroad before Christmas enabled me to rediscover how it felt to be happy.
As a student about a quarter of a century ago, I started to drink much too heavily when I fell into depression. Both before and after that, although I perhaps drink a little more than average, I've been okay and not needed to make a conscious effort to cut down, even when I became depressed again but away from the student social environment, or when I returned to uni for an MSc course but was no longer depressed.
From what you said earlier about liver damage, you clearly need to deal with this problem immediately, rather than wait for it to resolve itself like mine as your depression lifts: remember the Norman French warning to visitors entering Magdalene: "Garde ta Foy" - protect your liver. It doesn't necessarily mean that alcohol will always be a potential problem for you, and since your depression, unlike mine, has an obvious physical cause, that is unlikely to recur and mess up the rest of your life as mine has.
I meant to answer a couple of your earlier posts but have inexplicably been going through a worse patch the last few days and felt too inconsolably miserable to do anything. Yesterday morning (always the worst time of day for me) I felt terrible and couldn't motivate myself to get out of bed and go to an appointment with my therapist - the fourth in succession that I've missed - despite feeling very positive about both him and CBT and having been on an NHS waiting list for two years.
Good luck, Emma. I hope you'll find some way of sending owls to us at PSB while you're away.
:) Jonathan.
poster:Jonathan
thread:17455
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020125/msgs/17544.html