Mental health post #2: What It Feels Like To Me

The most common thing I am asked is what depression and anxiety feels like to me. I’m sure you can guess how hard it is to answer a question like that. Feelings are very difficult to describe and both personal and situational. So let me describe a depressive episode I had in the past (I’ll save one on anxiety for later though I was clearly suffering from extreme anxiety also at this point). The very most severe episode I had was after the birth of my first child (I had episodes before and after this, but this was the worst.)

I took a shower every morning when my baby napped and would sit under the stream of water and cry so hard I dry-heaved. I cried all day about everything. I think I cried more in those couple months that the rest of life! I felt this enormous pain in my heart that was heavy and made it impossible for me to smile. I could not eat solid food: when my parents came to visit and they saw what a bad state I was in, my mom went to Costco and bought every juice she could find. I was grateful to get those calories in because I could not eat for a couple months. Consequently, I lost all of my pregnancy weight and was lower than my pre-pregnancy weight by week three post-partum.

Another thing I experienced was extreme insomnia. I would lay in bed for hours each night trying and failing to sleep. I suspect I had some periods of sleep that I was unaware of but it seemed like I was awake all night, every night. I could not nap either. I could not smile, and I could not find pleasure in anything. Things that I loved before, like doing the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, or watching movies, or eating yummy food brought me no feelings at all. I remember once Derek begging me to tell him what food I wanted from any restaurant and he would go get it. And I could not think of one thing I wanted to eat. I was constantly very, very cold probably from losing so much weight and sleeping so little.

I also had really bad paranoia. If Derek left for even a few minutes, I worried endlessly that something would happen to him: a car wreck, a fall, even the most amazingly improbable events. I definitely have some OCD and it ramped up badly at this time. I constantly was checking to make sure Adia had suffocated in her bed or any of the thousands of things that could happen to a baby.

Something that seemed weird at the time but now makes sense is that I felt slow. Time moved slowly and so did I. I I felt like my body was walking through water. I never really experience what I think is true depersonalization or derealization, but I definitely felt like my body didn’t respond quite as quickly as it should. This was particularly excruciating because once I was given an antidepressant (it took me three weeks to convince my Ob’s nurses that something was deeply wrong), I still had to wait 4-6 weeks to even start feeling relief. The tiny flame of promise from that little pill, and my support system barely sustained me for the next several months.

Thankfully I did recover from that period but it took until after I had my second child that I realized that I experienced many of those same problems even when I wasn’t pregnant or postpartum and that I had a chronic mental health issue. More to come on that…

Feel free to comment with words on how you feel when you are depressed, or what you’ve seen in a loved one who has experienced as major depressive episode.