Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler It's all in your head

Thanks, Fred. And I know you've been there, though you are getting closer to the end of owning that time-share in Crazylahara, I hope. Once again, though, I really don't feel that bad. That's why I was so surprised to "find out" that I "should." And not because I was told I should. My own answers to the questions did it. By only #4, it was, "OMFG! Absolutley! And how'd I let ALL of that get by me? I'm supposed to be a pro." My rug's been hiding so much dirt, that it looks like John Popper crawled under it to die.

I was picked on as a kid so my parents sent me to see a counselor over a couple years time. I really think it did me a lot of good in my latter years. Not saying I don't have the occasional bad day but I'm usually pretty steady and can deal with just about any situation without it bothering me much.

While you are correct about the phrase 'needs help' its actually a sign of a deeper western problem in that we see ourselves as completely independent entities when in fact we are not. It's even worse here in North America where we have wrapped ourselves in a myth that 'our' pioneer forefathers were completely self reliant when the complete opposite is true: pioneers were much more reliant on their community than we are today.

When you and I break an arm, we do indeed 'need help'. I have no clue how to set a bone properly. Yet somehow we have come to the strange conclusion that going to the doctor is not getting help.




I agree with you on the first point, but not the second. When some part of the mind starts functioning 'out of spec' something is broken even if we can't see it.

We are finally able to measure the electrical manifestations of depression to see that parts of the brain are no longer functioning properly. Call it a sprain if you don't like the term broken, but something is clearly no longer working properly.

Point is, depression is much like other things that afflict us complete with physical (albeit not so obvious) manifestations.


Hey, shit happens. Sometimes we catch it, sometimes we don't. Hindsight has to be the most useless human 'skill' there is.

OK, the pedant in me is done for tonight.

Dude, get your shit together. MDD = Major Depressive Disorder. How can you be majorly depressed if you're not feeling that bad?

I've got a question for you Netflix guys. Can we send Bob a movie to cheer him up? I was thinking One Flew Over The Cuckoo's nest.

Summed up in one word. Denial.

From my experience, the people that need this type of "help" the most are the ones that don't think they need it the most. I have a brother and a sister that are text book examples of that. Myself, I've gone through more "theropy" than I care to mention. But, hey. It's help cleared up a lot of my bad thinking patterns.

There it is, Fred! That's why I wrote it. I don't feel very bummed out. I made the appointment a couple of weeks ago, because of only one issue that I wanted help sorting out. I wasn't at all fixated on it, yet I was unaware there was so much more lurking. All of my experience with this stuff wasn't telling me what I needed to know, or do.

So if I can be clinically depressed and not know it, then there are too many people who could be way happier than they are aware is possible.

If one person read it and thought to himself, "That's something I should consider doing for myself this year," I'd be thrilled for them.

Every year your GP does standard tests to make sure nothing is wrong on the inside. No one gets a yearly screening to make sure about the inside.

Senator Eagleton had to bow out of a VP nomination with Ford, when it was revealed he had been to a psychiatrist. If he had had a heart condition, no one would have flinched. It was long time ago, but the perception persists. Even then I thought that voters should insist that every candidate sees a shrink before he can declare.

Of all the artists, musicians and writers I have known, I can think of only a couple who have not sought therapy. When you spend most of your time alone in your own head, you keep dragging more and more crap up there (brain hoarding). It gets so crowded that there isn't room for anything or anyone else and that's when the other components of your life start heading down the crapper. The level of success attained has no correlation to the dysfunction, from my point of view, especially when you add substance abuses to some of their lists.

So many were smart enough no to reproduce and drag a family through the uncertainties of a career in the arts. It's the ones who weren't that I feel badly for.

Personally I think it appears to happen more to women because most guys just don't care nor notice when things are wrong, myself included. My wife had/has boughts of depression and she watches me like a hawk for signs of depression, she knows when things are not quite right with me and I never notice a difference.

Hey, Bob, et al.

I saw your post on the weekend but waited until this AM to reply because composing a long reply on an iPhone, with links, would have been painful.

No worries at all about stepping on my toes or turf. You did not do that, of course, because I have no exclusive claim to psychiatric topics here or anywhere.

Let me add my kudos for your post. You spoke from the heart about very personal issues and tied them to societal health concerns and a concern for your fellow Axiomites. Your encouragement may indeed help others get healthier.

I think that you are on the money about male depression. It is often missed, both by the person suffering from it and from the health providers that he sees. The potential reasons for this include societal (and inner) pressure to just “suck it up/get a grip”, the general stigma of having a psychiatric condition or seeing a psychiatrist, the gender-specific stigma of having depression as a man, and the ways that depression can present differently in men.

There’s lots of good books out there on masculine depression. One is The Pain Behind the Mask: Overcoming Masculine Depression. The authors identify two defining characteristics of masculine depression: dissociating from feelings and acting out suppressed feelings in destructive behaviors.

If a man is not in touch with his feelings because he is consciously or unconsciously pushing them aside – due to their unpleasantness – then it is not surprising that a lot of depressed men, including Bob, will not think of themselves as sad or depressed. I think that situations like this help explain why the diagnostic criteria for Major Depressive Disorder do not actually require a person to identify his mood as sad. The diagnosis is made when a person has five of nine criteria, one of which must include either sadness or anhedonia, which is a significant decline in interest of pleasurable activities. You know, when you just don’t feel like doing the things that you used to do for fun. The bottom line is that the cluster of symptoms leads to a significant decline in functioning lasting at least two weeks (and is not explained by substance abuse – because then the diagnosis changes – or by another psychiatric condition which would take precedent, like bipolar disorder, or by bereavement, which is a separate issue).

The other defining characteristic, according to Lynch and Kilmartin, also helps explain why depression is often missed in men. Rather than appear sad, a man will appear angry. He’ll get irritable, and people will think he’s just a jerk. Or he’ll hit the bottle, and he’ll be identified as an alcoholic, when really, the roots of the alcoholism were in a depression. Or he’ll hit his wife, and he’ll be diagnosed as bipolar, or just arrested and never diagnosed. Or he’ll wonder why he can’t stop cheating on his partners and looking at porn. Sometimes there’s an emptiness inside that he’s trying to fill, not realizing that he’s depressed because he just doesn’t understand his true feelings.

I’ll stop sermonizing for now – but again, thanks for shedding light on an important subject, Bob.