Depression Support Group
Depression is a real and debilitating condition that is often misunderstood by family and friends. Its meaning can range from a prolonged period of sadness to an actual mental illness with specific symptoms. Find and share experiences with others who are going through the same struggles.
For me depression comes and goes along with all the things people are supposed to feel depressed about. So I don't see depression as a problem in and of itself. In other words I don't think I suffer from some bio-chemical condition not triggered by typical external events that cause people to feel sad in some way. Depression is just a part of life that I as a living feeling being deal with, and because I'm more analytical than most of the people I know, I notice things that disturb me more often than others.
Was it Hemmingway who said something like: Happiness in intelligent people is one of the rarest things I know." I tend to resonate with that and simply say: "Happiness is overrated." It's through our failures and dissapointments as much as our successes and joy that we learn the value of our acheivements, and how to become better people.
Now having said all that, I've experienced another nagging feeling most of my life, and I'm wondering if it's something that proffesionals might class as a form of depression. If not, what exactly is it?. It's a bit difficult to describe, but it's as if I'm not living in the world I'm supposed to be in. There are a bunch of factors that add-up to this feeling, but there's no one thing I can put my finger on. It's perhaps best expressed by the character Morpheus in the sci-fi- movie The Matrix:
Mopheus To Neo:
"You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life; that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is. But it's there; like a splinter in your mind; driving you mad ... it's everywhere. It's all around us; even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth ..."
Whatever this reality or construct happens to be. It doesn't feel like my home. When I was about 12 years old, two friends and I walked through what paranormal researchers call a dimensional portal. We came here. One friend remembers something strange happening but attributes it to sleep deprivation. I don't. Things changed subtly but in ways that cannot be explained any other way. Since then, I've had a number of other paranormal experiences. I know how it sounds, but I can't be the only one that this has happened to.
Has anyone else experienced something similar? Can we ever get home?
A clinician might see the most negative of signs in my case, as my paranormal experiences, and interpret them as hallucinations or misinterpretations of some normal state of affairs ( whatever "normal" is ). However I would question the accuracy of that assessment because the details of those experiences don't suggest a purely subjective phenomenon.
Other signs such as my sleep patterns, don't match the norm because I'm basically retired, and sleep when I'm tired instead of when it's prescribed. Is waking-up to an alarm clock at the same time every day really a natural state of affairs?
I don't see myself as any more or less "special" than anyone else, other than in the sense that we are all unique individuals, and the things I do, along with the life I've had, include some things that are out of the ordinary. But does experiencing phenomena that is out of the ordinary necessarily make a person mentally ill? I don't think so, and I don't think diagnosing that situation accurately is as simple as making the assumption that paranormal experiences are all in a person's mind.
I have a host of other symptoms, including memory and concentration issues, but I'm also over 60, so age is factor. But I can also still concentrate and remember things well enough to write, play, record, and release an original song all myself.
All in all, given the opportunity, doctors could probably diagnose me along some spectrum of a variety of mental and psychological disorders, which is one of the reasons I stay away from doctors unless it's an absolute emergency ( lol ).
Despite my fringe thinking on the world and the nature of reality, I don't think I have a "problem" or a "disease". In fact, I don't even like the way the word "disease" is used for so many health related problems. It's the old proverb: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So to a doctor, everything looks like a disease. To me, unless there is some poison, pathogen, or physiological process e.g. a genetic disorder that is a primary causal factor, I wouldn't consider a health problem to be a disease.