Depression Help Options Covered by PBS Special

May 21, 2008

Depression Help Options Covered by PBS Special

Filed under: MoviesTV, Society Ethnic Racial — Tags: anxiety, bipolar, chronic depression, depression, PBS — Dave @ 11:50 pm

Depression Out of the Shadows aired here on local PBS channel WTTW Chicago on May 21, 2008. I stayed home and watched. It hasn’t been quite a year yet since the “event” in my life that took me into a depression spiral that this blog is pretty much a byproduct of. Having the type of deep pain that literally makes you cease functioning in a normal way is what people in the profession categorize clinical depression. But I didn’t get help. I “self medicated.” And before you start jumping to conclusions, it was with vitamins. And it’s hard to believe but I wrote this piece about what actually worked a full SIX MONTHS AGO. Wow! But here’s the really awful thing about depression ; I’m better today, and I can function, but the “trigger” event and all the bad feelings about it are still so fresh in my mind it is as if NO time has passed at all. I still spend a good part of every day, despite how mind crushingly busy I am, in my head going over the events, the fallout, the ramifications and the causes that in MY mind really destroyed my life. That’s depression. I know I’ve got it. AND, I refuse to get help. So the PBS special on depression took a very inclusive selection of Americans to give their story.

· The old a young guy
· They had an old guy
· They had a young woman
· They had an old woman
· They had a black guy
· They had a business guy
· They had gay guy
· They woman who had just given birth

So on the one hand it’s great they “covered all the bases,” but by so blatantly sending the message “it can happen to you, no matter who you are” it was almost a parody of a PBS special. But it’s good, you know. I mean, hell I feel like Brooke Shields out here talking about my troubles-but they’re all right. So many people around the world, and in even in this country of plenty, feel depressed. And trying to discover the “why” is pretty much pointless. People just are. Unless there’s some specific trigger event like they talked about in the program.

In my case it was a woman leaving me-and it’s covered in various parts of this blog; repeatedly. But it was a life changing and depressing event. Nothing in the world like changing your life for a person and then having them cheat on you AND leave you. Even if the person is really not a great person. Because my ex-girlfriend is not a great human, and she has mental issues (as far as I’m concerned). She’s a classic example of the kind of depression that was talked about in the program last night; a person with a perfectly normal life who just gets no joy from anything, but tries to hide it. She doesn’t smile or laugh very often, doesn’t really hug her kids, and is not satisfied with her life despite achieving all the goals she wanted in life. Just a mess. And the day before she started cheating on my she agreed to get help. I found a place and and had to get her to admit her issues were not “normal.” And you know, there’s a 99% chance that was why she bolted. The prospect of getting help was too much for her. And that’s one of the things they talk about in the PBS special as they show all these various cases. So you get to see how all these people discovered their depression, and how they coped. After the program there was sort of a round table with a bunch of doctors. But here’s a link to the program site. And usually with PBS their stuff ends up online after it repeats several times on the channel, so you should be able to catch it.

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