Therapy: is this thing working? (part 2)

I’m mostly satisfied with today’s therapy session. As I thought, the psychologist seems to be taking a more holistic approach than mine, as she tends to speak more about self-consciousness and well-being than specific problems. It’s not a bad perspective, given the way multiple issues interact to create situations specific to each individual, classifying people by means of specific disorders is questionable at least.

As promised, I prepared some questions for her, and here’s what I can remember about the answers:

Q: What are we doing now? Speaking? Analysis? Therapy?
A: Analysis AND therapy. She still think of not knowing enough about me, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working on my issues.

Q: What are we working on? How long might it take? Is there something we can’t tackle with this therapy?
A: We are working on improving my general well being by tackling undesired beliefs and improving my self-awareness when it comes to feelings and how I (do not) express them. She doesn’t like to do very long therapies, but can’t say about how much it’ll take, not more than 3 years for sure she said (Ouch!). She’s not against medication, but we agreed over the fact that medication is for the symptoms, it doesn’t solve problems, nor teach you how to live without the symptoms. Then she said my physical and mental problems are all symptoms of psychological suffering, but we could make some memory and attention tests in a future sessions if I felt like that would somewhat satisfy my worries, and I readily accepted. I’m confident I’ll perform awfully on those tests.

Q: It looks like my drive to get better psychologically, as for most other things I do, is more a product of my worries about other’s opinions of me and feelings of inferiority instead of a genuine desire to have a better and fuller life. I suppose we’ll work about these feelings too, but if they are my main drive while doing things, what could happen if I lose this drive?
A: Since I’m used to exploit such feelings to fight apathy and depression, it’s normal to be scared of change. In any case, she’s not going to turn me into a cold, unconcerned and “don’t give a fuck about anyone” dude. We’ll work on reducing my current exaggerated worries, without eradicating it all.

After the Q&A, we talked a bit about how I (do not) interact with my family members, even when my dad is a complete asshole to my mother. But we agreed how my mother is mature enough to react to the verbal “abuse”, so it’s not the role of a son to interfere with what may be their established communication “standards”. What I may do is to eventually express my disappointment for their childish behavior, and not just go to my room as I always did since I was I child.

Finally we talked about my Bad night, and how my depression may be linked to memories of better times (nostalgia) and how my pessimistic view of the future makes them very unpleasant, reinforcing my negative thinking. I still think boredom plays a significant factor here, but she has nothing to say every time I mention it, probably because there’s no way to explain it in purely psychological arguments. We’ll see, if I fail the memory and attention tests like I expect to, boredom will surely add weight to a diagnosis of some kind of attention deficit disorder.

As a side note, I’ll soon receive those 6000$ from my car insurance, so I’m definitely going to make some more examinations to rule out any possibility of a non-mental illness.

Playing guitar, With Fire

It’s late and I’m going to bed soon, so I’ll be short. Don’t have that much to say anyway.

Today I mostly wasted my time because every time I looked at my books I couldn’t find a decent reason for studying. So I’ve done more interesting stuff I guess, but I mostly forgot about what I’ve been doing. I remember of playing around with Ruby Mechanize to see if I could use it to post comments on blogs, and indeed it can be done. But I was trying to comment on a blog where comments were disabled so it was a waste of time after all. But it surely made me remember how much my memory suck, because I’ve almost forgot how to code in Ruby. Well, fuck that, I no more get angry because of that, it’s just pointless to get angry at all, it just adds to my mental and physical stress.

Fortunately, my musical memory is reliable to the extent I can still dream one day I’ll be able to play guitar at the Speed of Light (reference for metalheads). I say that because today I’ve started to learn some pieces of “Playing With Fire” by Stratovarius, and I just LOVE that diad-based riff. I’m also playing around with the intro of “Pull Me Under” by Dream Theater, and realized how kick ass of an effect chorus is. One day I will own one, but for now the one embedded in my amp will do.

That’s all for tonight, I’ll try to make up for my laziness tomorrow, maybe with a new Flashback entry.

So the pharmaceutic industry is evil indeed…

Here’s what I found looking up the SSRI my mom suggested me to try 3 years ago, during one of my first episodes of depression:

For 10 years, GlaxoSmithKline’s marketing of the drug stated falsely that it was not habit forming. In 2001, the BBC reported the World Health Organization had found paroxetine to have the hardest withdrawal problems of any antidepressant. In 2002, the Food and Drug Administration of the United States published a new product warning about the drug, and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations found GSK guilty of misleading the public about paroxetine and breaching two of the Federation’s codes of practice. The British Medical Journal quoted Charles Medawar, head of Social Audit: “This drug has been promoted for years as safe and easy to discontinue…. The fact that it can cause intolerable withdrawal symptoms of the kind that could lead to dependence is enormously important to patients, doctors, investors, and the company. GlaxoSmithKline has evaded the issue since it was granted a license for paroxetine over 10 years ago, and the drug has become a blockbuster for them, generating about a tenth of their entire revenue. The company has been promoting paroxetine directly to consumers as ‘non-habit forming’ for far too long.” Paroxetine prescribing information posted at GlaxoSmithKline now acknowledges the occurrence of a discontinuation syndrome, including serious discontinuation symptoms.

A British Government parliamentary inquiry into a number of prescription and over the counter drugs noted problems with SSRI antidepressants including withdrawal, suicidal thoughts and other adverse effects. The inquiry found that paroxetine (Paxil, Seroxat) has, more commonly than other SSRI antidepressants, a very devastating impact on some users’ lives. Since the FDA approved paroxetine in 1992, approximately 5,000 U.S. citizens have sued GSK. Most of these people feel they were not sufficiently warned in advance of the drug’s side effects—particularly the withdrawal syndrome discussed above, after GSK had specifically advertised the drug as non-habit forming

In the UK since 2001 lawsuits have been filed representing people who have been prescribed Seroxat. They allege that the drug has serious side effects, which GlaxoSmithKline downplayed in patient information.

In early 2004, GSK agreed to settle charges of consumer fraud for $2.5 million (a tiny fraction of the over $2.7 billion in yearly Paxil sales at that time). The legal discovery process also uncovered evidence of deliberate, systematic suppression of unfavorable Paxil research results. One of GSK’s internal documents had said, “It would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy [in children] had not been demonstrated, as this would undermine the profile of paroxetine”.

On January 29, 2007, the BBC broadcast a fourth documentary in its Panorama series about the drug Seroxat. This programme, entitled Secrets of the Drug Trials, focused on three GSK paediatric clinical trials on depressed children and adolescents. Data from the trials show that Seroxat could not be proven to work for teenagers. Also, one clinical trial indicated that adolescents were six times more likely to become suicidal after taking it.

I confirm the withdrawal problems, when I forgot to take the pills I felt so bad I wished I was dead even more. Then I asked myself why, and took the damn pills. In retrospective, deciding to stop taking Paroxetine after a few weeks of treatment (slowly decreasing the intake to reduce withdrawal symptoms) was a wise decision. People struggling to get off this drug have all my support and respect.

I know this is capitalism and the other systems have failed and shit like that, but hell, we’re talking about children and suicides here!
And while an unlucky man could be sentenced to death because he’s supposedly a murdered, the people working on that company are still there and they’re still making billions. So someone tell me what’s the difference? They’re both murderers. No, wait, the former might even be innocent!
I know, this is only a simple example of the twistedness of this world, but the point I’m trying to make is: are depressed people really sick? Refusing in participating to this massacre we call life is really a sign of insanity? Or do I see things this way because I’m depressed?
Damn, I wish I could know what’s wrong and right without even thinking, as religious people do, but most of the time I’ll be lying myself.

The way politics and economics are exploited to drain money from the poor and bring even more wealth to the rich really drives me mad, so this will not be the first time I’ll complain about that.

Anyway, today I feel somewhat better than yesterday, the depressive thoughts are still here, but they’re easier to suppress. The lack of something interesting and challenging for my mind to wonder about clearly leads to boredom, and boredom leads to depressive thoughts. So I need a new obsession, even though I’m not dropping my previous one, guitar: I always loved rock and metal music and someday I might be able to play in a band. But given my current problems with mood, memory and social anxiety, it’ll be all pointless. You can’t just be in a band and keep forgetting your songs and panic when you’re on the stage…

Hopefully my new obsession will come soon, as always. I tried to make this blog my new obsession, but it worked for about 10 hours, as I should have expected, I’ve never been much passionate about writing. Though lately I started to suspect how my “ability” to get bored might be growing exponentially with time; I just hope this isn’t true, because if that’s what’s really happening, I’m screwed.
So if I’m going to be screwed, I need to be prepared for that, and even if I hate to say this, I’m tempted to take some of that Paroxetin. I still have a couple dozen of pills here at home. But you can’t take that fucking stuff as it was a serotonin candy, it’s fucking addictive and you got to be prepared for the whithdrawal when you stop taking it. If only I could afford some weed or such…

My life is a loop

Beside having a generally low self-esteem and self-confidence, I consider myself a good programmer. I’ve spent at least 3 years programming pretty much everyday, constantly challenging myself at writing simpler, more manageable and extensible code. And I’ve succeeded, until I got bored. Now I code only for university projects (because I’m forced to).

Giving a proof of my coding skills is no simple task, especially if I want to stay anonymous. But I’ll think about how to do that when I will not be forcing myself to study 8 hours per day for an insanely difficult numerical analysis exam. (Yeah, I’m bored with coding and I study computer science, so there’s a 99% chance I’ll be a programmer for the rest of my life. Indeed a good reason to be depressed, but it’s not the only one: it’ll be too easy!)

So, what’s the point of such exceptional claims about my coding skills? Well, because I’ve condensed as much I could remember about my life in a simple loop:

1. I’d like to spend my days playing video games (World of Warcraft, I miss you so much…) and watching TV series, cartoons or anime, and barely doing anything else. But I feel guilty about doing that when my parents are making sacrifices to allow me to study while I’m doing anything in my power to avoid any sort of job. It’s no surprise I’ve realized how spending my life as a Hikikomori will be hardly, if ever accepted by society or by my family. Given I can’t see how I could get rid of that feeling of guilt, it would not be a bad idea to look for some way to improve my perspective about the future.
2. This could be a constructive activity (which must not be boring) that may actually develop into some kind of job, and solve the money problem (yeah, I thought about crime, but it’s not that easy if you don’t have a natural inclination for it).Given I’m very curios and always looking for new stuff to try, it is almost automatic I’ll stumble upon such activities.
3. Get obsessed with the activity I thought might be my life goal, work on it as much as I can, focus my thoughts on it and forget about anything else, and then…
4. Get bored when what was new and exciting becomes part of the daily routine, when too much work is required to accomplish some improvement and when my goal of making money with that activity is so obviously far away to make it not even noticeable with a Hubble telescope.
5. Get depressed for failing in trying to make my life better, or forget about that and goto (2).

So I tend to get obsessed easily, and this is my primary way to cope with depression. My obsession may be either a trait of Asperger’s syndrome or Obsessive–compulsive personality disorder, combined with some kind of Inferiority complex and a need to compensate for that . Unfortunately, I don’t learn much from my obsessions because of my tendency to also get bored easily and lose attention, while my memory fails as much as a ruined, amnesic 50 years old floppy disc with Alzheimer’s. Still I prefer to engage in more or less useless obsessions than face boredom, depression or guilt.