Sheffield, Anne - How You Can Survive When They're Depressed

[oyceter]

(subtitle: Living and Coping with Depression Fallout)

I picked this book up for pretty obvious reasons, and because I thought it would be interesting looking at depression from the other side. It's basically the first bit of literature on depression that I've read, so I don't have much to compare it to.

Anne Sheffield suffered from what she calls depression fallout -- the fallout and often subsequent depression and emotional damage caused by living with someone who is depressed. In her case, it was her mother. She later went through a depressive episode or two of her own, and also joined a group of family members and loved ones of "depressives." I was a little weirded out by the term "depressives" and how casually Sheffield uses it ("your depressive" or "the depressive may do blah"). I personally don't like thinking of myself as a depressive. She is also extremely pro-medication, which I have yet to make my mind up about. She generally says that while talk therapy can be useful, medication is the most efficient way to get well.

Of course, I focus more on the depressed person's perspective. But Sheffield's accounts of several relationships with depressed people and the subsequent fallout really is incredibly... er... depressing. I felt like quite a monster by the time I was done with the book. I feel it probably has good advice for people who have to live with other depressed people, and it is good that there is something focusing on them. Sheffield comments more than once that the focus of books and doctors all tends to be on the depressed person instead of on those around them, which is probably true. So all in all, it probably has good advice, but it was still pretty painful reading it and thinking about all the nasty stuff I inflict on other people.

Comments

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

I think part of it is medical shorthand, but it does also point to a problem with the medical system that uses that shorthand -- the Western mechanized POV of looking at someone and seeing, say, a tumor, or a diabetic condition, or a mood disorder, and focusing on that. It's a v good system in some respects (surgery and so on) and falls down badly in others (I think it's particularly easy for people with mood disorders to slip through the cracks, be mis- or under-diagnosed, to minimize their illness or simply not have the words for it, and the typical "My doctor doesn't listen to me" complaint can become disastrous when treating depressed people).

[oyceter]

Yeah! I often wonder how the psychiatrist and therapist do it, with just some general descriptions to go on, when how everyone describes things must be so different. I am quite impressed with what they have to do.

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

I think the standard checklist in the DSM-IV is pretty good, esp for depression -- it's when you start edging off into things like neurosis and borderline personality disorder and hypomania that I start getting wary of the medical establishment. But they definitely have clinical tools, like the MMPI or other briefer depression-measuring scales (and self-administered questionnaires), as well as observation (the shrink who prescribed my first ever medz left his notes on the table while he went to get samples, and I read "vegetative" -- and the word was underlined and had an exclamation point after it!). At first I thought he meant I was A VEGETABLE, but he explained the difference between agitated depression (someone who can't stop pacing, wringing their hands, talking continuously, super-restless -- a bit like how you were describing your bad reaction to Paxil) and vegetative depression, someone who's withdrawn, doesn't talk, doesn't sleep, doesn't eat, and so on. I think generally when by the time a shrink sees someone who's depressed it's pretty evident (clinical skills require docs do it anyway, but asking a severely depressed person how they feel is an exercise in futility).