Tag: Major depressive disorder

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Depression series: Melancholy or Why does my heart feel so bad?

It’s only one line, but Moby made it into a whole song and if you’re an Empath, you might well feel that sense of depression when you watch the video.

For me, when I first saw this back in the year 2000, it brought out the pain of loneliness and a melancholy so profound that it was irresistible as it was seductive.

At the time, death was calling to me, and I felt it, and at some level, I knew it. And while that is a subject for a future blog, at the time, I felt the sweet surrender of despair and while hope remained eternal, I knew things were coming to an end.

And they did in some ways.

Empaths, especially psychic ones, can sense the future. They can sense when something is going to happen. There are many stories of how psychics couldn’t shake the feeling of doom weeks before 9/11, and I wonder how many picked up the coming tragedy of the Boston Marathon Bombings.

This is a different kind of depression to the other kinds. Make no mistake, it’s as potent as any other type, but this one also has a sense of fatalism that can’t be avoided.

You know something is going to happen. You don’t understand what, but it’s there. And your heart, and your soul is heavy and hurting. Your eyes are on the verge of tears, but there is no apparent reason, and all you want to do is curl up in a corner, and hide away.

I know when I finally move on from this life, my biggest regret is leaving those who do love me.

I know they will be fine, but the sense of loss is always there. For the most part, that’s what holds me here in this current lfe.

When a coming event changes life, the Empath will feel it, and they will mourn its passing, even though it has yet to occur.  Change is never easy, but it’s made harder when it hasn’t even happened yet.

Melancholy is a horrible form of depression to experience. More people experience it than you would suspect.

If you experience it, keep a diary, and compare it to major events that happen later. You might be surprised at the results.

Bach Flower Remedies that can help with this are:

Sweet Chestnut – when change is foisted upon you.

Star of Bethlehem – for Shock and trauma.

Aspen – For vague fear and anxiety.

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Depression Series: Diet (part 1) or this depressing food is making me want more of it.

Diet – Part 1.


I have found diet to have a profound effect on depression.

When I eat certain foods, I find that it can make me feel depressed and sluggish afterwards. Below are my own observations on the subject and should not be taken as nutritional advise.

There are a million diet books out there, and lots of information on foods, and what is good for you or not, so I’m not trying to create my own diet plan.

Hopefully the below thoughts are useful to you.

Here are some of the things I’ve noticed in regards to food.

Avoid junk food.

Yes, this is a no brainer, but the energies in junk food are bad for an empath. We readily absorb energies, and if it’s negative energy, we are also ingesting it into our system.

Sugars can depress you.

Avoid confectionery such as diary milk chocolate, or anything that gives you a sugar rush. The spike in blood sugar and drop can really mess with your emotions. If you are susceptible to depression, it can affect you. In regards to chocolate, I’ve found that eating 85% cocoa and above dark chocolate helps satisfy the chocolate cravings. Your body gets more of what it craves without all the added bad junk.

Also note that the purer the chocolate, the more bitter it is, and so you won’t get that sugar fix, but you will definitely need much less to satisfy the craving.

We tend to eat ‘bad’ food, or food that taste great, but isn’t healthy, in an attempt to gain pleasure. When we’re having a bad day, eating something delicious can make us feel better, at least while we’re eating it. Even though I’ve never touched drugs, I understand that it’s similar to getting a high, except with food, the high is very quickly gone.

Little wonder that we eat to make ourselves feel better, especially when we’re feeling depressed, or having a bad day, or simply out of boredom.  It doesn’t help us, though, with dealing with depression on any meaningful way. It just makes it worse.

Try to eat organic certified foods.

It’s not what’s in it, but rather what isn’t it, such as chemicals.

Nowadays, our fruit and vegetables look perfect. The apples are whole and bright, and our vegetables look picture perfect. But when you eat them, they just don’t taste how they should.

An empath will notice, if they choose to do so, that the life force of the fruit is severely diminished. There’s an energy that can be smelt, felt and tasted. Today’s perfect looking food is lacking this.

Organic food may not look perfect, and the price is certainly higher, but it’s better for you, and really, you need less of it as it contains more of the building blocks that your body needs to repair itself and keep itself in good health.

Next: More suggestions

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Depression Series: – Apathy or I couldn’t be bothered writing this.

Apathy


Check List:

  • Do you feel heaviness in your limbs?
  • Do you have trouble getting started on an activity you wish to do but you just don’t have the energy?
  • Every movement is an effort, even though you are well rested.

Apathy is when you don’t really care too much about things. It’s a kind of depression where your body might feel very heavy and your energy is lacking.

While it is generally a lack of interest or feeling indifferent to things, I feel it also is connected to depression and generally may go hand in hand with guilt or fear about the future.

I know that at times, I feel a heaviness in my limbs, and I find it hard to do anything, even if it’s something I enjoy doing.

In fact, it feels as though your soul is weighed down by some heaviness which you can’t define.  Sleeping doesn’t really seem to help, or if it does, you tend to find it’s very short term, and before you know it, after a short while, you feel the heaviness again.

Many years ago, I was holidaying up in Queensland, when I visited Seaworld. In spite of being happy to be there, I my limbs felt heavy and everything I did took extreme effort.

I found this stopped when I had a cup of coffee. I felt immediately better afterwards. I am not sure of the connection here, but I thought I’d mention it.

I have pondered if one of the causes of apathy is anaemia.

It might also be poor oxygen circulation by not enough fluids.

I’m not exactly sure, at the time of writing, what causes Apathy. I suspect it’s due to energy blockages. It’s as though the energy isn’t flowing through your meridians.

I think on an emotional level, it’s when you experience doubt of any kind. You feel, what is the point, when something doesn’t seem to be going the way you feel it should.

You can have 1000 successes, but it only takes one setback, real or imagined, to bring you down.

What I have found is that the Bach Flower Remedy, Wild Rose is amazing for it. I know that when I take it, the heaviness I feel lifts right away.

Bach Flower Remedy: 

Wild Rose

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Depression Series – Anti-depressants or how depressing, they’re screwing me up.

Anneli Rufus

Anti-depressants

It’s fortunate that depression is finally recognized as a real problem.

There are help lines out there, organizations (Where I live, there is one called Beyond Blue, which is a wonderful initiative) and they are developing drugs to help us cope.

Medical treatment is still in the early stages, though, in my opinion, but at least they are doing something.

That being said, I have tried anti-depressants. I was going through a terrible time, and my partner at the time suggested I see a doctor. He prescribed them to me. I tried several types, but found they did not work for me.

What I found was that it seemed to cut me off from my empathy, and I felt like I was walking around in a vacuum. I also found that it has a negative effect on my moods and certainly didn’t like my body. It was a very unpleasant experience.

I know that anti-depressants certainly help people, but I suspect that many empaths are not doing themselves any favours by taking them.

They mask the symptoms, not heal the causes.

If you are on anti-depressants, do not go off them without medical advice. It can harm you.

As mentioned, I believe that the Bach Flower Remedies would help many with dealing with depression. Personally, I know I’d be a basket case many times over without them. For those who are interested, I will start blogging about them, and all the ways they can be used to help heal depression soon.

The remedies do work well with any other type of treatment, and this is because they don’t work on a physical level, so they are not like homeopaths, drugs, aromatherapy, and the like, each of which has their own particular set of dangers.

That being said, if you wish to try the Bach Flower Remedies, it’s important to note that they are preserved in alcohol. While the remedy itself is completely safe to take, and does not work on a physical level, some people cannot tolerate alcohol.

There are some solutions to this:

You can dilute the remedies into a dropper bottle of water, and then put 4 drops into a glass of water. The alcoholic content is said to be too small to measure.

You can rub the remedies on your wrist or temples or other pressure points. That does seem to work. My partner responds amazingly well, and she’s sensitive to alcohol.

You can try making your own remedies. There are books on that subject.

I understand that the Bach Centre is making non-alcoholic versions of the remedies. Most certainly they have put out Rescue Remedy in different forms now.

If anti-depressants are working for you, then this is a good thing. I just have spoken to too many for whom they do not work for, and they are in an even bigger mess.

Whatever you do, make sure you know exactly what you are doing. Find out as much about them as you can. This is your body and your quality of life you are dealing with.

Depression is an epidemic and not understood enough yet. But it can be cured. I’m living proof of that. (And others I’ve treated, too.)

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Depression Series: – Exhaustion or I’m too tired to read this right now.

Many depressed people have more than just depression going on with them. They also suffer from exhaustion.

I’m not talking about the kind of gosh-I’ve-been-up-all-night-and-I-really-need-to-get-some-rest type of exhaustion, I’m taking about long term, utter weariness, where everything is a struggle and just getting up and facing a new day is a challenge that is almost insurmountable.

This weariness saps our strength, our internal fortitude, and our resolve to get a move on. Worse, it adds to the depression because it means when we have to deal with things, we don’t have the energy to do so.

Exhaustion is that will make you collapse on in on yourself.

It also triggers the self-recrimination, victim process, and you become very hard, and self-depreciating. You may well blame yourself for all the things you can’t do because you’re tired, and feel that you need to go to extremes in your behavior to change things.

All the while, you know, in the very back of your mind, that you’re in a victim / poor me cycle, and you’re hoping others will notice your extreme behavior and understand that you are pushed way past your limits, and probably can’t take much more before you implode.

This is a very, very serious state to be in, and rest and renewing energies are what is needed. Unfortunately, for some, even proper sleep is a luxury rather than something that just happens.

Those with sleep disorders will be quite prone to this type of depression.

Depression is a drain on the soul, and that leads to the exhaustion people feel.

Exhaustion leads to greater depression, which in turn causes even more drain on the soul.

You can see it’s a vicious circle and one that is very hard to break out of because many other emotions tend to kick in extreme, almost undefinable levels, such as guilt, terror, panic, and the feeling of being a victim.

We are so screwed up as a society that we would rather people repress their emotions and not bother anyone than seek to heal the causes that produce such things.

This has to change.

This will change.

Even if we do it one person at a time.

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Depression Series – You’ve done great! So why do you feel so down about it?

The pressure of success

You’ve done well. People love you, and some even hate you (which probably means you’re doing something right.)

So why do you feel so depressed? Why do you have a sense of anxiety and foreboding that something bad is going to happen?

The trouble with success, and more importantly, reputation, is that they are hard to live up to.

People see what you have done, and what you have said. They see how you have reacted, and admired your calmness within the storm.

But now you feel they expect it from you all the time.  You can’t have a bad day because that’s not supposed to be you. If you get angry over something, you get admonished for doing so, in spite of the fact others (especially those telling you off) are doing the exact same thing. The hypocrisy can be frustrating.

Once you’ve set a certain standard, the pressure is on to not only maintain it, but improve it.

But you know that’s just not feasible. Somewhere along the line, you are going to fail, let everyone down and they might decide that you were deceiving them all along.

We you being fake? We you pulling the wool over other’s eyes? Did you go out of your way to deceive anyone?

No.

However, there is much more to you than this one aspect. You are not just a one dimensional Mary Sue type person.

You have your own fears, doubts, bad days and down cycles.

That’s what makes you feel so down and anxious. You don’t feel you can be yourself on those levels, and not have all hell break loose.

Moments of brilliance are sometimes more the exception than the rule, and when you fail to deliver, your followers descend on you like sharks in a feeding frenzy over bloodied meat.

They may accuse you of being lazy, selling out, ripping off those following. They will accuse you of motives that you never in your wildest dreams imagined.

But is it so? In most cases: no.

It’s not possible to be perfect all the time. You can’t give everyone what they want all of the time.

This is a very severe type of depression, because it is insidious, and you won’t even know why you are feeling the way you are, just that you are feeling it.

Taoism states: After great success, retire.

There is great wisdom in those words, though how practical they are to apply is another matter.

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