I find my career as a developer to be quite rewarding both financially and intellectually. However, a couple times a year I find myself in a deep funk wondering what the hell am I doing with my life. How often do you get depressed per year?
Resist the urge to over-medicalize things: if it lasts longer than two weeks and affects your ability to enjoy life, it may be "depression". If you get dumped by your girlfriend or yelled at by your boss and the next three days really suck, it is "life".
My brother once told me: "There is a support group for people who hate their jobs. It is called Everybody, and we meet at bars starting at about 5:30."
Adjust by about six hours and it is equally true for Japanese salarymen.
Many programmers and entrepreneurs are bipolar or borderline. "The Bipolar Edge" is a book with some interesting research on this if you filter out some of the sensationalism.
I think one of the best strategies when depressed is to text someone and pair program. Also helps to keep the internet out of the house so you have to leave to get food eventually :)
The biggest thing though is remembering that it's biochemical, not "real", and that you'll snap out of it.
There're two kinds of depression, to me. There's the depression that's chemical, and that kind can be predicted and dealt with. Then there's the kind that comes from things not being right in your life, and that's the kind that both fascinates and consumes me.
I'm in the middle of one as I type this, actually. Sometimes when depression hits it's in reaction to a mania: There's a big high followed by a crash. But frequently that depression comes in the form of apathy; I'd even say contentment. I have periods of huge excitement, followed by much chiller periods that I'd call a biochemical depression. But that's a depression that doesn't have the pointed emotional aspects that I associate with the word.
When that second kind of depression hits, almost always it has to do with something mental. When those really bleak periods hit, I can almost always find a cause that's tied in with something in my life: Core situations and circumstances that are subtly bringing down other parts of the way I feel. And I've found that if I react swiftly to deal with whatever it is that's causing it, I can end the feeling quickly and get back to a more balanced state of mind.
Getting a balanced, "happy" life isn't easy, because everybody has to deal not only with all their many wants and needs but with the wants and needs they think they should have that they're given from other people. Growing up, I feel many of those problems are problems with actual, logical solutions, but that the answers are convoluted and twisted many many times over. So I'll feel as if I've figured something out, and indeed I'll have gotten farther than I had previously, but a year later I'll realize there's another, much subtler issue related to the one I thought I'd figured out, and then I have to rethink everything.
The result, I find, is that over my life I've managed to stabilize myself quite well. I now face these feeling much less frequently than I once did, and for less of a duration. The cooler, more casual depressions are frequent for me, but those are more relaxing and less worrisome. So in one way you're right, and depressions do snap, but in another way the content of the depression is what matters, not just the depression itself.
Mindful meditation is the only mental exercise that has helped get my life back.
I try to meditate for 20-30 minutes every day practicing my breathing and letting thoughts flow in and out. During this time there's no fighting emotions; if I feel like punching someone, I allow myself to envision it, let the emotion consume me, and then be done with it. Thoughts and emotions seem to disappear on their own if given the room to "make an appearance."
"As you gain experience with this type of meditation, you will gain the understanding that your true essence -
your essential spirit - is not the contents of your mind, but rather the observer of the contents."
http://themindfulnessblog.com/mindfulness-meditation-a-path-...
It's worth exploring other ways of interacting with your emotions. Mindful meditation has been successful for me. If you're interested, the book "The Mindful Way through Depression" is a great starting point.
http://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Way-through-Depression-Unhappi...
I also experience these lows quite often, about once a month. They usually don't last for more than 3 days, and all my energy and passion come back. It's still tough to deal with, especially when you suddenly feel like there's no purpose to the things that just yesterday gave so much meaning and excitement to your life. I learn to cope with them by training my mind to take a moving average of my feeling. This way I'm constantly reminded of my overall long-term sentiment.
People forget that depression is a normal part of life. Its normal to feel depressed just like it is normal to feel happy. What you should do is admit that you feel this way, let yourself feel those emotions, and reflect on how you want to live your life. It's part of being human.
I went through a serious period of depression during high school. I missed a huge amount of school and there was a period of about a month during which my parents were considering having me committed to an institution.
The key to beating depression is introspection. Recognize it for what it is: a couple chemicals in your brain that are out of whack. No small matter, and there's probably a cause. But your mental faculties are still there -- they just have a distraction breaking their concentration. Think of it just like a loud noise, and tune it out, then figure out where it's coming from and silence it.
The expected answer for many participants here would be "never." Lifetime incidence of at least one period of depressed mood is fairly high across humankind, but that's over the course of a whole lifetime. If a young person is depressed for days at a time a few times a year, that young person has a clinical case of depression and is well advised to seek medical advice about what to do about. Both medicine and cognitive talk therapy can be helpful, often most helpful as a both-and combination.
If a young person is depressed for days at a time a few times a year, that young person has a clinical case of depression
That is far from obvious.
The medicalization of depression is itself questionable. There are eloquent dissents by informed critics. It's certainly the majority view right now, but is more a paradigm than a proven truth, and these things are notorious for being subject to fashion. It wouldn't be surprising if, in a decade or two, the pendulum swung the other way.
I agree with you about the medicalization of depression. The unspoken boogey man behind this is that the professionals say this kind of thing in the belief that medicalization is a lesser evil than the prospect of young people killing themselves. Its the old problem of whats good for society isn't necessarily good for the individuals. Wide spread medicalization of depression saves lives, but the cost is that individuals offen get medicalized for things they don't need.
professionals say this kind of thing in the belief that medicalization is a lesser evil than the prospect of young people killing themselves
Yes. Untreated depression is a huge cause of mortality among young people. Young people in developed countries don't die of much else besides traffic accidents (and at least some deaths of young people that are reported as traffic accidents may be misreported suicides).
There is also the issue of subsequent degradation of a person's quality of life if depression is not treated when the person is young. Most twenty-somethings are resilient enough to get through quite a few episodes of depression and to stay employed and to stay in romantic relationships, but each depressive episode tends to cost a patient work productivity, intimacy with significant others, and other sources of personal reserves for the next episode. It is UNUSUAL for young people to have prolonged (days-long) episodes of depressed mood if they haven't had a parent die or something like that. That's an issue that should be looked into. Perhaps part of what is going on in this thread is that people are applying different criteria for using the term "depressed." Physicians have taken care in multiple research projects to develop diagnostic screening tools that standardize how much by way of depressive symptoms is enough to be of concern. If you have a concern, get the opinion of someone with clinical experience and see if you can go through life without repeated episodes of feeling worse (and doing worse) than you need to.
the professionals say this kind of thing in the belief that medicalization is a lesser evil than the prospect of young people killing themselves
Interesting. I hadn't heard that before. How do you know this?
Have suicides really gone down with the advent of antidepressants? I remember lawsuits about increased rates of suicides among adolescents prescribed some of them. It would be interesting to know the overall rates.
I don't know how the participant to whom you are replying knows what his post reported, but concern about suicide is definitely one of the motivations for urging more treatment for depression. An organization for suicide prevention
puts up billboards in my town to remind family members to have their depressed relatives treated for depression, saying that untreated depression is the main risk factor for suicide. That factual statement is correct, as I can verify from having read many books by psychologists or medical doctors about mood disorders. I got into this reading back in the 1990s as part of studying suicide risk in different cultures,
and research on this issue continues to be replicated across many studies with different investigators in different places.
You ask about one category of medicines, the SSRI medicines commonly prescribed as antidepressants. They do have a genuine risk of INCREASING rather than decreasing suicidal behavior in some patients, now recognized in their prescriber labeling. The Goodwin and Jamison textbook
details the research on this issue over many pages with lots of footnotes to primary research papers in peer-reviewed journals. My overall impression of the mechanism for increased suicide risk upon SSRI treatment for depression is that some depressed patients go from thinking that there is nothing they can do to thinking that the one thing they can do is to harm themselves. That's why I follow Goodwin and Jamison in thinking that for most depressed patients whose history of mood variation is poorly known, the best initial treatment is a mood-stabilizing medicine (such as lithium, carbamazepine, divalproex, or lamotrigine) rather than an SSRI medicine. But I am not a physician, and I urge persons who are concerned about their depressed moods to check with a physician who has clinical experience with depressed patients to be evaluated for what might or might not be at issue.
Very common. Around one million Australian adults and 100,000 young people live with depression each year. On average, one in five people will experience depression in their lifetime - one in four females and one in six males.
Not sure about being depressed but there are days that I feel really down mainly because of my job situation.
It usually lasts for a couple of days but could easily be alleviated by hanging out with friends. There are times though I tend to make it worse by spending time just by myself.
I'm basically depressed 70% of the time and feeling terrible and unproductive, but it seems like the work I get done during the rest of that time makes up for it. Passive income is good for that reason.
Exercise: absolutely. I wish someone had told me when I was younger how dramatic an effect it has. (I mean mentally and emotionally, not physically, though obviously there are physical benefits too.) It still amazes me.
spending an hour by myself once a week
Man, I'd go insane if I only got an hour's worth of solitude a week.
Interesting. I feel like I'm the only person who hasn't noticed much of a difference, emotionally speaking, even after dramatically increasing the amount I exercise. (I biked about 8 hours a day this summer, and now that I've started work, I ride my bike to work.)
I can second this. Over the past few years I've regularly attempted to start exercising. It makes me tired, it bores me, and I just don't feel better. I know it's supposed to make you feel fit but that just isn't the case for me. I thoroughly hate it.
My brother once told me: "There is a support group for people who hate their jobs. It is called Everybody, and we meet at bars starting at about 5:30."
Adjust by about six hours and it is equally true for Japanese salarymen.