How many times have you dreamed of returning to your “pre-depressive” emotional state? Daily pills, constant sleepiness, feeling on the head, killing on the head, sexual desires, and the fact that without the help of medicines you can laugh while watching comedies, so as not to poison your notions of life to others, assess elementary work for an hour, not a week . Do you have any mental health?
I think that this is all that is needed for depression, that in order to be sick, that you need to experience unmotivated anxiety, react emotionally to trifles and then regret your behavior, be afraid of public speaking and avoid noisy parties? Depression is a disease, very unpleasant, but it gives you a chance to reconsider your life, beliefs and values, cross out emotional anchors, witness something very deep in the subconscious, remove impressive blocks and restrictions, break free from physical and mental clips, regain everything, what I feel in my childhood is when food and taste tastes better, and each new day brings a lot of new positive impressions.
Do not agree to spend the rest on the “maintenance dosage” of antidepressants, you have no right to demand more.
So what is mental health?
Antidepressants and psychotherapy were able to bring me to a relatively stable state, that is, I could go to work, with some, very small, degree of efficiency, perform my duties, maintain some minimally necessary social relations with friends and colleagues. At the maximum therapeutic dosage of drugs for me, I had panic attacks, which was already a great relief, my mood improved, my insomnia disappeared. But at what cost!
I wanted to sleep all day, there was no talk of any productive work, I gained 10 kilograms in weight, stopped playing sports, did not experience any sexual attraction. For a long time I was sure that I was doomed to such an existence until the end of my days, and I internally reconciled with it.
After I started practicing meditation practices, which I will write in more detail below, I have increased optimism, I managed to reduce the dose of antidepressants by half the maximum level, at some point I even completely refused to take them. But, unfortunately, this condition lasted only a couple of months, the very first stress at work drove me back into deep depression.
But even at the peak of my emotional uplift, I realized that recovery is difficult to call. My mood was extremely unstable, I sharply reacted to the slightest stressful situation, I didn’t sleep well.
And only now I understand what real emotional health is. This does not mean the constant great mood and the absence of any anxiety and excitement. This condition also refers to the pathological and in psychiatry is called “hypermaniacal.” Perhaps you had to meet such people in my life, I was acquainted with two, and for some reason both were scientists. They could talk and work for hours, almost days, never get tired and never listened to anyone, always stayed in some elevated-euphoric state. At the same time, the lives of those around them were turned into hell, to communicate, and even more so, to live with such people is absolutely unbearable, and they themselves are rarely happy and successful. I do not think that this is what is worth striving for.
By mental health, I mean something completely different. A person is healthy, if in the absence of any external influence his emotional state is stable, he feels balanced, with a slight deviation towards the positive, he is calm, but energetic and collected, able to concentrate on the task and at the same time get satisfaction from his activities.
A person should receive satisfaction from the process itself, whatever he did, regain the taste of life, the ability to feel, to feel the world as it was possible in childhood. We all understand that that children’s brightness and freshness of sensations is lost, and we put up with it. But it should not be so. In order to correct this state of affairs, we need first of all to understand why this is happening, to discover the reasons causing this phenomenon of the loss of a part of ourselves.