Suicide and end of life decisions

I'm careful.
its never out of hand.
Dont drink.
Always totally sober at work.
Whats weird is I really live the good life in a lot of ways.
Nice home, good job, lots of toys such as RV, kayak, 2 nice bikes, SUV, Vegas and music festival vacations.
Yet Robin Williams had it good too. Sad.
Sometimes things in my head get all down and dark.Its weird in a way.
I just learned through living that if you just keep on keeping on, you emerge from the darkness eventually.

Hope you feel better Face. Keep on keeping on.
Go Ducks tonight. Best concert I ever saw in my life, Autzen Stadium home of the ducks, Grateful Dead, Summer tour 93. Those memories make me smile :-)

Quote: terapined

Sometimes things in my head get all down and dark.Its weird in a way.

And that's the thing with depression. To use our newest popular word, it insidious.

Many times depression is just a thing. It's situational. Mine right now largely is. No job, no money, pending custody case, that constant stress will bring on depression. But it's situational. Soon, these struggles will be in the past, and the rebound will be immediate.

But "down and dark"? "It's weird in a way"? YES. That's the one that f#$%ed me up. Because, as might be apparent, I have to know things. If I don't understand something, I need the answer. And I know the answer is out there. And I just can't stop until I find it.

My depression was one of those things. Simply, there was no reason to be depressed. I never wanted for food. Never had to sleep in a car. A childhood full of love and life. No abuse; physical, emotional, or otherwise. There was just no reason for it. Yet, I ached so bad. This weird mental ache like the deepest sadness you can't even imagine, and for nothing.

Maybe if CTE was known about back then, maybe that would give me the relief of an answer. But there was none. I was simply sadder than was humanly possible, and with no reason behind it, I was convinced that it was just "the way it was gonna be", now, tomorrow, and ever after.

That's the one that got me. That was my life changing event. It's probably the one thing I truly fear, even more than the ocean, and the one I'm subconsciously defensive against almost every day of my life. It's the scary one.

But that one I've had a few times. And every time it has passed. Those are the times I use my addiction experience and stop thinking. It doesn't matter why it's happening, doesn't matter when it'll stop. All that matters is right now. And if it's a fight, you fight. And if you cry, you cry. And if you can rest, you rest. Nothing matters but right now.

And then they pass.

Quote: terapined

Hope you feel better Face. Keep on keeping on.

Roger that.

Quote: zippyboy

Face, you consistently articulate what I feel all the time myself. It's nice to know I'm not alone in my grief. These anonymous forums can be helpful for us all.

You betcha. Sometimes hearing "I know that feel" makes all the difference in the world.

Neurochemistry 101:
The brain is often misdescribed as an electronic switchboard. In reality it is sort of like very moist cottage cheese and the electrical connections are not by physical contact but more by chemical proximity. A pulse travels to the end of a brain cell and then neurochemicals are secreted to carry the pulse across a tiny gap.

Antidepressants focus on changing the levels of the transmitter chemicals such as by inhibiting their reuptake by the cell or inhibiting their degradation.

The favorite antidepressants are Serotonin reuptake inhibitors which keeps serotonin at high levels in the synaptic cleft thus making signals more easily transmitted from neuron to neuron.

Epinephrine, Norepinephrine, GABA, etc. are the less often studied or manipulated neurochemicals.

Many patients acknowledge a "general brightening" of mood but are away that a blunted affect seems to linger.

Any number of things can cause depression: parasites, dietary insufficiency, escaped circadian cycles, oxygen desaturation, alteration of the blood brain barrier that normally protects the brain.

Most neurotransmitters are derived from proteins that cross the BBB (blood brain barrier, NOT beach bum babs), but most of that crossing is by energy dependent and competitive active transport, not diffusion. So the components cross in competition by size, charge and shape.

Drug companies like to pretend that they know what their products do, they don't.

In an ideal world drug dosage would be determined by Age, Sex, Ethnic Heritage, various major genes, etc. We do not live in an ideal world. Drug dosages are approximations and vary widely in individual metabolism.

Hemingway is probably the most well known
manic depressive. He called the down times
being black-ass. When he was feeling black-ass,
he drank a lot, was unproductive in his writing.
His father was also afflicted, and eventually
killed himself. Hemingway had other problems,
he had two major head traumas in the mid
50's from consecutive small plane crashes.
Then the shock treatments in the late 50's
that drove him over the edge.

Bi-polar is serious shit, take the meds if it
gets too bad, you can always go off them.
Don't be a hero.

It seems I touched a nerve.

I've never been depressed, past the usual sadness from time to time. Not in a "clinical" way. I know little about it, and I know that I know little enough about it not to make pronouncements on the subject.

I have felt overwhelmed and essentially hopeless, so as to feel there is no way out of a certain situation, or that nothing will ever be any better no matter what I do about it. But over time I've managed, and things have gotten better in some respects. Sometimes I feel I can make things better, but that it would take so much effort, so much work, so much pain, so much suffering, and the outcome is so uncertain, that I feel like just giving up. more than that, there is a powerful desire to give up, as though that is the real solution.

And in fact I've given up a number of times, just not by ending my life. Instead I took up a self-destructive course. bad diet, bad habits, minimal efforts, massive evasion of everything, things like that.