Depression Forums
General => Welcome our 'NEW MEMBERS'!! => Topic started by: zanther on June 10, 2012, 09:12:47 PM
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Hello,
I decided to join the forum so that I may have a chance to exchange thoughts and communicate with other people in similar situations. Perhaps to get some advice over time that will get me unstuck from where I am a the moment.
About 8 years ago I suffered a first psychotic episode, which came out of the blue. Granted I was living under a lot of stress at the time due to various circumstances in my life. I was relatively old, 37 at the time, and had no previous history with mental illness whatsoever... Following that, I suffered another 2 episodes in a span of 4 years, the last one being in 2007. Since then I fortunately did not experience anything like that, but life had been very hard.
Following my last episode, which was diagnosed as "schizoaffective disorder", I collapsed into a shocked state as I realised how ill I was and the many odd things I did. I felt exposed irrevocably to the eyes of people, particularly co-workers and other people that knew me as a down-to-earth and grounded person. In fact many of the people I thought of as friends discontinued their contact with me and abolished me from their lives. Fortunately, my co-workers were very understanding, and although I was very odd and almost insulting towards them, they understood that this was something beyond my control, that it was a genuine mental illness and nothing more. I am an academic in a UK University and as I was recovering this was a very strong reference point to find some comfort in at least knowing I would continue with my job, a career path that I aspired to since I was very young in high school...
But, the intensity of the psychotic episode was so high that I was really living in another reality no knowing what I was doing or why I was doing it. I spent a lot of money during that period, roaming around Europe in a paranoid state and did many crazy things. All this traumatic experience came flooding back to me as I started recovering and I entered a very deep depressive and withdrawn state. During that period, I had really no one with me and I had to recover on my own without a single person to talk to at home.
At the same period, my mother's health started deteriorating, and in that state I had to cater for her needs and organise her care - in another country... She had chosen not to come to the UK and live with me, so I had to support her, both financially and otherwise, in another country. She was 84 at the time and her faculties were impaired due to rapidly advancing vascular dementia. She died early this year and that was another shock to the system. I have no close relatives anywhere and in the town I live and work I am left with absolutely no friends. I have one or two acquaintances but to be honest I just make a big effort with them so as to have at least someone even though they are not close friends, or people with great understanding and genuine feelings. I will mention more of this later, as in these past 4 years I have found myself forced to maintain relationships like this out of sheer need and lack of support.
After about a year of sick leave to even manage to get myself out of the couch where I spent my days and nights, I started slowly picking up at work to rebuild my career and move forward at least in one direction in life. Work has been going well for me lately and that is a source of goals and directions. But it is not enough and not a replacement for the sheer isolation I experience. At work we mostly communicate by emails and rarely act like friendly co-workers. We don't go out for drinks, or coffee, or a meal at all. There is virtually no contact in our office. People are nice and work well together but we simply do not have any other form of socialising or building friendlier relationships. I have accepted that and in a sense I am fine with it, but that leaves then very few options to expand one's horizons in life. The workplace is often a starting point to meet with people and through them build a network but that here is not happening (I have been working here for almost 17 years and it has always been like this).
I try to rationalise it, by saying this is only our workplace and that we don't have to be friends there. To a certain extent that is true I think everywhere, but yet I do know of cases where people also open up their homes and do become friends through work. I have made friends through my work and it is true, but all these contacts are scattered across the globe and none of them is in my home town...
So that more or less is my situation. In my mum's home country I have some property and at the moment to manage it I have a couple of friends who help me. These two people helped me a lot during the rough times of the past 4 years, but I have to admit that the relationships have been of mutual benefit. One person is clearly "with me" because of fringe benefits through my acquaintance and friendship. She helped me a lot in taking care of my mum, but it was always not without some benefit for herself. I would of course have given presents and even money to anyone who helped us in that dire situation, but what really made me feel uneasy was the way that this was done so obviously by her. To this date we maintain this kind of relationship as I cannot cope with taking care of my mum's house. It is not always bad, this person is good company but I feel oppressed at times by this relationship.
So, although I made compromises so that we had someone in our lives it has not been easy, and it was a negative factor actually on me while I was recovering from mental illness. Still I persevered, and still do so I can get through the difficulties of life, the isolation and the things I have to do to keep things together until I can cope better.
Here at home, I am very alone. With no friends and no one to go out with, and no family of my own left. In the evenings after work, I just sit and watch the clouds in the sky smoking and thinking of the past. Past people, past dreams, my parents and the good years we had. We were at times quite poor, but we still coped and we were there for each other. This I don't feel any more. There is no person on this planet that in all honesty I would feel sorry if they even died... Sure, if I see someone in pain or in suffering I will automatically wish to help them, but it is 'automatic'. It is not me, it is not who I used to be.
I suppose I am depressed, but not in a random and unprovoked way. This life that I lead, the circumstances that I went through in a way have made me dry without anything to hold on to or to hope for any more... I used to love music, I taught myself how to play the keyboards and was very much into classical music and opera, but now it has been 4 years that I don't listen to music. Sometimes I watch something from YouTube, but never any more in the house. I even threw away my stereo as it broke down some time ago, and I don't see myself buying a new one.
There is simply no need any more for that...
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Hello and welcome to the forum, we are a friendly bunch :).
S x x x x
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Hi, I hope we can help in someway
Z xx
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Hi Zanther
Thank you for sharing that with us, I found it very moving and hope that we can help in some way.
Xxx
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Zanther, welcome to the group and thank you for sharing some of your story. I personally find comfort in both listening and being listened to, and I hope you find it similarly helpful here :)
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Hi zanther
Thanks for sharing that post. I can relate to a lot of what you say. It's very true what whiteadder says. Looking forward to your future posts!
Cat
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Hey Zanther ! I'm Louise! Hope you find comfort in sharing on here. :D
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Hi zanther, I'm maddy, I do hope you find this forum helpful xx
Maddy
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.>,
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Hi and welcome
Kate x
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Zanther, welcome to the group and thank you for sharing some of your story. I personally find comfort in both listening and being listened to, and I hope you find it similarly helpful here :)
Thanks to everyone for writing in response to my initial posting.
I guess that what you say Whiteadder is true, it does help to speak and to listen to others. I am not sure how comforting is writing on a website... I've tried that in the past and at the end felt I had to give up. It is a different thing to speak to people in real life. However, there are difficulties in finding like-minded people where on lives and then even harder to build a relationship with them and a friendship.
What I find hard in "real life" is that people are very closed and in a way play/act roles that make them feel comfortable, or so they think. We all do that, we adopt norms of behaviour so that we feel safe in interactions with people, particularly when meeting new ones. But to a certain extent I find that modern society and lifestyle have gone overboard with this.
The second time I suffered a psychotic episode I was walking through the town centre believing I was in the "Matrix", literally...! I felt that I was the only one perceiving reality and having self-awareness and that everybody else was just a simulation presented to me to test me. I started looking intensely at people and the more I looked the more I was convinced they were simulacra... Everybody was downcast, they never looked up straight, never to see who they were passing by, just looking down at their feet and walking. And strangely enough people never talked while they walked (most were alone). I felt truly I was in some alien scene.
During that time I also had very strange thoughts and altered perceptions of reality. I had for a first time an out of body experience one afternoon I took a nap. In this I was fully aware, and that only moments ago I was in my bed and could not tell how I ended up in a weird dome. All I wanted was to wake up but couldn't so it was a pretty horrifying experience. Eventually, things escalated and I ended up in a mental hospital. There I became preoccupied with relationships with people, how instead of improving our lives we isolate ourselves and others, and that the world in general "sucked" because of our choices.
I started exploring silently and internally thoughts I never had before, such as what reality is, the lack of meaning in anything by itself and that we are the ones who have to define what is bad or good and what meaning our actions have. I started seeing that the world we have constructed and live in is nothing but a construct based purely on concepts. Nothing has innate truth and that all in the Universe is relative. I started discovering, in the midst of a paranoid state, concepts that Buddhism puts forward without having ever studied it. I did some reading after that experience and explored things a bit.
But my philosophy of life has always been atheist, at best at times agnostic. I had many many ideas about a superconsciousness and how it would be for the world to be as we see it, not as holy scriptures written in dark ages dictate it to be. Eventually, despite having had many interesting thoughts and ideas I see them as without value as they relate to nothing tangible and nothing that can be experienced in a shared fashion, or in the shared material reality that our existence is hinged upon. I simply think there is nothing "out there"...
Still though, I do have humanist ideals and I did see something striking while in the care of the mental health system. That although most psychotic episodes involve a deep spiritual seeking and questioning, along with some truly paranoid thinking, the mental health professionals completely disregard this dimension. I think that out of this experience, like everything in life, there is something to be learned and to be gained. Particularly when such existential thinking takes place at the core of your being. All they seem to care is to suppress the symptoms, medicate you back to health, and very quickly classify you in some pathological subcategory.
Contrary to this way of dealing with mental episodes, is the small group of practitioners that regard psychotic episodes as spiritual crises and of a potentially spiritual emergence nature. It is too silly I think to idealise such situations into something beyond what they are, but it is really cruel and damaging to ignore a deep unconscious reaction to stressors and situations in life that do give you paranoia but also bring you in contact with unconscious processes within yourself and also perhaps archetypal constructs that we are born with.
All these experiences I wish there was some way to explore with other people who have had them, perhaps try to investigate if they have commonalities that can be of practical use to other people. I guess it's the scientist in me seeking to systematise observations and find new knowledge.
But all I do the past few years is just sit silent. Think about these things while smoking and interacting with no one in life. Things are as they are...
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Thanks zanther for your post. I can relate to what you say about spirituality etc... I am constantly searching for new knowledge and a deeper understanding of life.
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Catb,
I think the way to understand life is by following our nature. Our nature I tend to believe strongly is in sharing reality with others, in the fullest possible by each interaction and to try to push the envelope of our mutual limitations. When I suffered my third episode, I increasingly felt unreal as because of my state my interactions were limited. At some point I started asking directly and indirectly people to confirm I existed...!
I don't think that great advancements come from isolation or from introspection alone, a life that I am forced to live the last few years of my life. And of course I am not alone in this, I realise a lot of people of my age group who somehow had it bad, either through misfortune in their personal lives or through similar illnesses, have to live life without any real contact. We all need some time alone, to think and digest our observations from sharing life, but that should be balanced.
The way I work in my area, I am an academic teacher and researcher, is to always do things in a group. I spend a lot of time on my own studying and learning new things but then I try to do any advancement in a shared way with others in my field. Unfortunately that is the only interaction I can have and seems to be the way my future is also prescribed. To use work so much as a goal setting mechanism in your entire life is not stable. There are days that without ever having opened my mouth to say a word to anyone I feel that I might destabilise again and go into some parallel reality. In the evenings I feel really low, pondering about death and what possibilities might exist once we are gone.
Now I have found this forum, which perhaps might help make online friends and talk freely about things. If sharing experiences is to be designated to the virtual world then so be it...
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I think the way to understand life is by following our nature.
I think there's a lot of truth in this. Harder for us as humans than for say, dogs or trees, which I sometimes feel are just as much 'the universe experiencing itself' as we are. I'm intrigued by your ideas and experiences Zanther - the second time this week I've come across the suggestion that some of our experiences can be interpreted as a shamanic awakening.
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I find your experiences fascinating zanther, I too was athiest for much of my life but more recently have found a mystic path via a type of animism, taoism, buddhism and similar faiths; astral travel and out of body experiences are considered normal and in fact desirable - our experiences in the human form being described as our spirit/soul/consciousness having a human experience and that the material world is no more than being an actor on a huge stage (very simplistically put).
I too feel the need to seek more knowledge and an understanding what everything, including life, is all about
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For me these experiences came as part of the package of a psychotic break. At the end of 2005 when I had my second episode, shortly after it I started having what people call "out of body experiences" (OBE's). They usually happened spontaneously either while I was falling asleep or just about to wake up. I learned to control the state so that I would stay in it and experience it, while feeling at all times I was able to move myself to full consciousness and an awaken state if I wished to.
The best way I can describe this is that you have a somewhat dulled awareness and you have full memory of what transpires, unlike in an ordinary dream, you seem to have bodily sensations but not from your actual physical body. The environment you find yourself in and what you experience is still though of a dreamlike nature, so part of the brain that does the dreaming is still active. What one experiences is a kind of virtual reality which convinces you about its reality, much like we do in dreams with the difference that we know that what we experience is an "OBE". After several such experiences I have come to realise that these states are not of any mysterious nature nor do you "go elsewhere". I think one is immersed in his/her own subconscious but you interact with the content in a conscious way. Perhaps that is the value of all this, not the unprovable metaphysical theories people have put forward. You tap straight into the core of your being and you interact with it.
For about a year, between 2005 and 2007, I read and practiced several techniques such as meditation and more or less was set on a shamanic quest phase. I really see no metaphysical connection with all this, unless one simply chooses to believe the mythology behind them. What I do see though is that they bring you in touch with yourself, rather they can be useful in making you see below the artificial concreteness of concepts that we arbitrarily choose to build our lives around. In a way a shamanic quest brings one in touch with the true nature of a human being, which is more animal rather than of a logical abstract being.
What I have found out during those experiences is that what underlies the human psyche and mind is a mechanism that all humans and potentially other animals share. Apart from the ability to use our senses and store experiences as a learning mechanism for our survival, we have inner default systems that allow us to function (or not...!) in the face of uncertainty. These mechanisms are archetypes that function almost on their own and come to the surface under intense pressure or when we find ourselves lost in a situation. It is very close to what Carl Jung described as archetypes of the subconscious. These give rise to mythologies and religions, a kind of personification of bad and good, which are at the bottom the only two states we use to classify things we experience. "Bad" is anything that threatens our existence or hurts us (physically or emotionally), death being the ultimate "evil" which we try to avoid at all costs. "Good" is anything that soothes or pleases us, or secures our survival. On these two very basic and real functioning modes we have based then our abstract concepts, our religions and the gods that some of us choose to believe.
Even for an atheist, it is really hard work to keep these automatic responses at bay. They are so hardwired within us that they come to the surface almost on their own. Particularly in high stress situation, or in mental illness, they come to the surface as a means to explain what we experience which is so far out of our normal experience that we somehow have to use mythology to make sense of it. That is the other dimension also of modern man: we are trained from a young age to want to make sense out of everything, to find its causality so to feel safer with everyday situations.
I think that the way forward is not to seek through religions to find truths or meaning to what our reality is. They come from very distant times in the past, in some ways more correct but in many ways so out of date that they have no meaning in the face of our modern knowledge about Nature and ourselves. It is interesting to notice the similarities of all such religions, but not because they tap into some metaphysical source of truth but because they come from within human beings across the globe and time. They serve as proof that the underlying mechanisms of the human brain are universal among humans, they are the common denominator that can link us together if we correctly set our reference point in this reality.
It is the only reality level we can experience and I also believe the only one that exists for us. If we are so prone to make "good" choices that ensure our survival and minimise our suffering, then such a choice is collaboration and co-existence as it enhances mutually our survival.
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It is interesting to notice the similarities of all such religions, but not because they tap into some metaphysical source of truth but because they come from within human beings across the globe and time.
For me, these two things are not mutually exclusive. It's possible that's just a psychotic element of my condition, but I'm sticking with it as it keeps me going now.
:)
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It sure would be nice if people could get together with an open mind to share experiences and try to find ways to explore what might be...
I do not accept dogmas, as I think Nature is by itself open without barriers. If we accept the concept of the "All" that Buddhism puts forward then all is ... all at the same instant. All its parts in some way or another should be accessible to everything within it.
Hence I chose the empirical path of discovering things myself by observation, reading, and sharing information with other people about their experiences. My starting point is not from religion (everyone needs a starting point if they are to define a path in space and time...!), but the ethics and philosophy as founded by the classic Greeks, Buddhist philosophy (but not belief system) and Humanism...
I have found that events are created when two or more parts in the Universe "meet", or collide. It is the same thing with concepts: when an idea meets another idea then we have an event, something new being born. In a sense everything is defined not in isolation but in relation to other things. That is also how we perceive time by observing changes in our surroundings and ourselves. Without these I cannot imagine how existence would be...
If things stood still, if nothing changed, then there would be no concept of locality nor of time, at least the linear time we perceive and are bound to in this Universe...
In my very profound experiences which ended up in psychotic episodes (or partly) in the end, I also was taken aback by the observation of many weird synchronicities. It felt like something was trying to communicate by creating "coincidences" around me that were harmonious to my thoughts and questions of that moment. I do pay attention to such coincidences even now and wonder...
To give you an example of something that was subtle (but arguably could just be a coincidence): when my mum died, and I learned the news, I had to go to Tesco's to buy some things. In the car park I sat in my car very sad. I put the radio on classical FM and this piece by Karl Jenkins came on, a very melancholic piece, and it started raining. I felt very sad and without any reason I focused in the distance and ahead of me was a sign saying "Sorry...". It was of course to say something to customers about a service not being available or something, but the whole "composition" felt like there was a shift in awareness so that something or someone, somewhere, wanted to communicate this to me.
You might say that all this is wishful thinking, that we interpret things randomly and eventually something is going to seem to have meaning it really does not possess. However, it is interesting to entertain the possibility that if something exists beyond our reality and is able to communicate with us in some form, this would be a way to do it. To shift your awareness to something seemingly disconnected so as to create a synchronicity. It is like the Universe is in a constant flow of information and perhaps this is how it's done...
Perhaps others have such experiences. Perhaps they do not have meaning. But it is I agree a source of inspiration and hope for something beyond the infinitesimal span of our existences in this reality...
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Thanks for sharing that experience - I love synchronicities and I do belive there is sometimes more to them than just coincidence and perception. My wife and I once had a shared (in terms of content, though not exactly timing) dream. It went like this. I dreamed that some sort of upheaval had occurred in society and people were on the move. We were on a minibus with some strangers. Out of the window I saw Stonehenge, but not in its usual place. It was up high on a steep hill, and the hill loooked kind of symmetrical and built in stages, though still beautiful and natural. Everything seemed to take on a 'glowing' quality and I knew this was where we should make our new life...Anyway, I didn't mention this to anyone. Two weeks later my wife relayed to me a dream she had had the night before and I was amazed by the parallels. In her dream we had been forced to move but she couldn't recall why. We ended up walking along the coast somewhere, until she saw Stonehenge, high up on a cliff this time. In her dream she also had a sudden sense that we should live there.
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I have been marking exams for the past week in 10-12 hour days. I cannot take any rest in between as there is no time left to deliver the results. I feel very tired all the time and at night it is hard to fall asleep. When I stop working during the day firstly I'm in no mood to do anything else, but then again there is nothing or no one for me here to just keep company and get my mind off all this... After my depression I managed to pull myself out of the hole and at least start working again, but in terms of anything else I simply do not live.
With my mum's death I feel that now there is no one in the world that I have a connection with. I keep thinking of death and how it must feel at the last moments of consciousness. I try then to envision the darkness and the absolute stillness and how it must be to not exist any more... Usually this is what I think about at night in bed before falling asleep and it is very disturbing. I really don't know what else I can do...
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I keep thinking about my mum... Can't help it...
Last January I visited her for 3 weeks during Xmas, and before leaving I sat with her and I played some piano music on the computer for her to listen. She was really in a bad state with vascular dementia and was not entirely together in her last weeks.
She recognised the piece somehow, but couldn't put her finger on who wrote it. She always loved Chopin and could identify his music straight away in the past, this one was one of her favourites, the "Tristesse" (one of the Etudes: No. 10 Opus 3). When I told her who it was by she said: "What a shame for such people to die and disappear from the world...". I said "yes, but their music stays on...".
About 2 weeks after that she followed her favourite composer... Aren't we really just nothing? Why do we bother and do all that we do? Isn't everything without any value in the very end? While we are alive we have this illusion of solidity: "solidity" of reality, "solidity" of things even concepts that aren't really there...
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Zanther. Sorry you're up to your eyes in work.
Have you ever read the book 'SynchroDestiny' by Deepak Chopra? He teaches there's no such thing as coincidence, those experiences are all messages about the potential of each moment. Learning to listen and even follow those messages can open up a whole new outlook on life. I might try read that book again.
Cat
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I'm sorry you're feeling down Zanther - hope tomorrow you feel a little better :)
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Zanther. Sorry you're up to your eyes in work.
Have you ever read the book 'SynchroDestiny' by Deepak Chopra? He teaches there's no such thing as coincidence, those experiences are all messages about the potential of each moment. Learning to listen and even follow those messages can open up a whole new outlook on life. I might try read that book again.
Cat
Dear Cat,
My opinion of Deepak Chopra is not very high. I have listened in the past some of his CD's on "chakra meditation", and although I think all this is just mental maps and symbols (the "chakras" I mean) they were good and relaxing making you reflect about things and to balance the way you feel. However, the rest of the stuff he says, particularly trying to blend in mishmash way quantum mechanics with eastern philosophies to produce a kind of nouveau cuisine eastern style philosophy to western markets is not to be taken seriously at all.
For all that he says there is no real evidence or usefulness other than just to say whatever comes to his mind (and I think not randomly but with an aim to maximize his marketability and revenues out of all the things he does).
Coincidences may just be what the word says... Otherwise there is no single event around us that we would not interpret as meaningful: a leaf falling the moment you have a particular thought, a bird flying or crying when someone dies etc... All these things happen continuously, and since we attribute great value to most of our thoughts all the time some of these will coincide with one such external event. This was what the ancient Greeks did extensively in interpreting observations as answers to questions or to try to forecast the future, as did many primitive or uninformed earlier cultures (some probably still do and don't get very far with this!).
As I posted in an earlier message, I have considered the possibility of something more subtle taking place but I also stated my great doubts about all these things. It is just suppositions without any concrete, repeatable and shared evidence. Occam's razor principle says adopt the simplest explanation when faced with a question and the simplest explanation in all this is that it is meaningless. We just need to find things at times to comfort ourselves when faced with the unknown, loneliness and the eventual guaranteed loss of our existence.