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Depression Causes: Add Sleep to the List?

Yesterday’s post on my sleep apnea diagnosis got a lot of response. Two big lessons from all the feedback: Far more people have sleep apnea than I knew, and those who have since been treated recall the huge mental distress caused by inadequate sleep.

Mood music:

Said one friend: “BIll, I too have sleep apnea. It’s a vicious, horrible physical problem. You don’t even realize how badly the lack of REM and deep sleep is changing your behavior and your emotional stability. Also impacts you physiologically in many and varied ways, including poor metabolism and blood pressure.”

I’ve attributed a lot of things to my occasional bouts of depression: past battles with addictive behavior, the OCD when I let it run hot for too long, personal experiences with illness and death and lack of daylight in the winter. I never really considered the sleep angle, though I suppose I’ve known about that all along.

Getting to the bottom of my sleep patterns started as an effort to deal with snoring and was more for Erin’s sanity than mine. (She’s a light sleeper, which means my snoring really messes with her own sleep quality.) But the benefits of this experience may turn out to be much deeper.

I’ve also gotten a lot of feedback on the usefulness of CPAP machines. A couple of readers reported that it was of little help. Many more readers said the device changed their lives.

Said another friend: “The first night I slept with the CPAP machine was the best night of sleep I’d had in two decades — no exaggeration.”

I’ve been told the success or failure of this depends on how accurately the sleep doctors fit me for the mask. You can bet I’ll keep that in mind when I have it done.

I thank you all for the responses. I’ll keep you posted on how the machine works.

CPAP Masks

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A Super Analogy About Mental Health and Summer

I’m in the middle of a campout as I write this, and though some of those around me are wilting in the 90-plus degree heat, I have to admit that I’m loving it.

Mood music:

It’s not that I enjoy the sweating and humidity-saturated clothing. What I enjoy is my mental state during long, sunny days. I’m always in better humor, more creative and more in the moment than I am in the dead of winter, when I’m more given to depression. The sun seems to play a role in balancing my brain chemistry for optimal performance. This is often called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

The new Superman movie, Man of Steel, presents an interesting analogy for me. Superman gets his strength from the sun. His Kryptonian cells drink it up and become batteries that propel him to great feats.

I remember one Superman comic book series in which the sun temporarily goes out, and Superman’s powers go out with it. The sun returns, but it takes some time for his powers to come back because his cells require a lot of time to recharge.

In a similar fashion, my optimal mental health doesn’t appear immediately after the clock springs ahead for more daylight. This past year, in fact, some of my most winter-like behavior surfaced mid-spring. But once the sun seeps deep into my brain chemistry, I’m good. Very good.

My goal is to get that state of mind to last longer and longer. That my mood fluctuations got worse in spring may actually be a good sign. Usually they rear their ugly heads in early February. That could mean progress. Or it could just be coincidence. I also admit that some of my spring-time brooding was the result of months-long uncertainty about where my career was headed.

I don’t know what the future will bring. I only know what I’ll be doing to make it as good as I can.

For now, I’m just grateful that we’re in the tight grip of summer.

Man Of Steel

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Vice’s Suicide Spread Has a Right to Exist

Vice magazine created a shitstorm by publishing a photo spread of models depicted as famous female authors at the moment of their suicides. I’m all for freedom of expression and would never advocate banning such things. But as an art fan I can offer my critique: This spread was utter crap.

Mood music:

Vice pulled the feature down from its site after a public outcry, but the print version is still available and the magazine got the desired attention in the process. That’s what magazines like Vice are all about — doing shocking things for attention. In radio, that’s what shock jocks do. Fine.

But as someone who lost a dear friend to suicide and has watched many good, talented souls lose the battle against depression and insanity, it seems like all we have here is a glorification of brilliant lives gone to waste. The photos include a model portraying Virginia Wolf at the moment she fills her clothes with boulders and drowns herself. The “Last Words” feature also recreated the suicide of Beat poet Elise Cowen, who jumped to her death from the window of a building her parents were living in at the time.

Though the spread has been removed, the photos also appear with an article on the controversy in the publication Jezebel.

When I say this spread was crap, I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who admittedly gets set off about suicide. But that’s a personal opinion. If people want to create this kind of art, that should be their right.

As well, once something is published, the publication ought to stand by it. Pulling the spread was stupid. If you’re not willing to stand by your art, you’re a coward. I offered my critique. Others should be able to do so as well.

I don’t know if there’s a lesson in here. I’m not one to tell people how they should express themselves. That would be hypocritical of me.

As for the question of whether the spread glamorized suicide and possibly inspired future acts of self-demise, I’m not really worried about that. Art depicting that kind of darkness has always been out there. That’s a staple of the heavy metal music I love so much. People may find that kind of art cathartic or they may not. But neither the art or the artist is responsible for what people do because of that art.

Instead of banning art that glorifies suicide, we need to keep coming up with better suicide prevention tools. Fortunately, there’s a lot of activity on that front, including movements in the tech industry to provide suicide prevention training and forums for those experiencing job depression to make sense of their lives and relate to the pain of others.

As long as such prevention and education activities persist, we have a fighting chance to gain an upper hand over depression, even in the face of art that makes suicide look glamorous and cool.

Vice Fiction Edition

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Teething Trouble

I’ve just started the new job and am happy as hell to be here. I’m finding I’ll fit right in. But when a person is a couple days into a new job, there’s usually an unsettled feeling. In my case, the challenge is not to be an asshole about it.

Mood music:

I’m not sure I’m having much success there, particularly at home, where I’m told I’ve been cranky and snippy and in OCD overdrive. I know the latter is true, because I know my trigger behavior when it surfaces. I get anxious to set up the new laptop, get work email on the phone and get access to all my various online portals. Most of that went fine &emdash; until I tried to access the dashboard for this blog. My username and password wouldn’t work. When I got home, I became obsessed with fixing the problem.

Erin and I tried all kinds of things to get me in and I dug in deeper every time we failed. It turns out I was simply using the wrong admin link. How stupid do I feel right now? Pretty stupid.

It’s been a long season of feeling unsettled as I went through the process of getting the new gig. I stayed a month at the old job before starting here so I could finish my various projects instead of dumping them on someone else’s lap. The result was that I pushed myself hard to the bitter end, leaving myself no time to detach and enjoy being a lame duck. Friends said I should have taken a vacation before starting the new job, and they’re probably right. But what’s done is done.

I have to right myself and pull it together, which means:

  • Being more disciplined about meditation. I’ve been doing it, but I can’t seem to sustain the balanced feeling for more than a few minutes after doing the exercise.
  • Getting a new therapist. Though my last therapist told me I didn’t need it anymore, I’m realizing that I still do. I don’t need weekly sessions or even bi-weekly. Once a month might do it (or not). But I need an objective voice to keep sounding the siren when I go barking up the wrong tree.
  • Making the kids pull their weight. My kids have chores they’re supposed to do. But I have no patience right now, so if they don’t move fast enough I do it for them. Being children, they’re happy to let me do that, but in trying to do everything on the chore side I become a scattered mess. I need to pull back.
  • Praying. Checking in with the man upstairs is always helpful to me — when I remember to do it.

I know I’ll get through this, and the truth is that there are nothing but good things happening in my life right now. I’ll keep you all posted.

Cracked Glass
Photo Credit: W J (Bill) Harrison via Compfight cc
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I’m Not a Hero

In the three-plus years I’ve been writing this blog, I frequently get messages from people telling me I’m a hero for opening up about my mental health experiences. It always makes me wince.

Mood music:

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A new wave of hero labeling hit after a Forbes article came out about my turning OCD into a career strength. One tweet read:

New hero: @BillBrenner70, #OCD survivor, stigma killer, & tech journo who says mental illness can help execs succeed: onforb.es/14olwPK

I appreciate that people find value in what I’m doing, and I love getting feedback from readers. But when someone calls me a hero, I get uncomfortable because I have a different idea of what a hero is. I tend to see heroes the old-fashioned way: someone who risks their life to help others. The image of first responders and bystanders rushing into the smoke to care for the wounded after the Boston Marathon bombings comes to mind.

I’m just someone who talks about the challenges we all have. It falls under the category of “Everybody does it. I just talk about it.”

Useful, yes. Heroic? I don’t think so. I’m just a man who makes mistakes and tries hard to get life right.

Erin suggested I don’t like being called a hero because I feel pressure to live up to the title and that I fear the possibility of failing to measure up. I think there’s truth to that.

Whatever the case may be, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I just want people to have realistic expectations of me.

But then that wish isn’t very realistic, is it? We’re going to see people through our own biases, distastes, hopes and dreams. That’s the human way.

I’ll keep trying to remember that.

Cavill, Man of Steel

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Falling Off the Mountain Syndrome

Something excellent happened in my life this week. I’ll tell you more about that next week. But for now, let me tell you about something that happens whenever I’m the recipient of awesomeness.

I get the wits knocked out of me.

Mood music:

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I woke up this morning with a nasty headache, a sore neck, and a stomach churning acid like an active volcano getting ready to spew lava.

I call it Falling Off the Mountain Syndrome. It’s not so much a depression or virus as much as it’s exhaustion. I experience it for a couple days after capturing a long-sought dream.

Some have described the feeling this way: They’ve chased something the way a dog chases after a moving car. Then it finally catches the bumper and experiences a high that turns into the ultimate “Now what?” feeling. It’s an abrupt shift in emotions that shakes one’s innards the way they’d be shaken if you flew into a brick wall.

Another way to describe it is the feeling you get after drinking three cups of coffee too many.

The good news is that the feeling doesn’t last long. But I think it’s going to limit my productivity today.

Next week, the good fortune that led to this latest bout will be revealed.

Facelift

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Control Freak-Out

OCD sometimes makes me feel adrift even when things are going well. I’m feeling it a lot these days and this post, originally written in 2010, captures the malady well.

Mood music:

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There’s another byproduct of OCD that I’ve described indirectly before, but never head on. A byproduct for my own special blend of dysfunction, that is.

Sometimes, no matter how well things are going — and no matter how good my mood is when I wake up — I’ll sit at my desk and suddenly feel awash in melancholy.

It comes over me suddenly, and it can be even more frustrating than the black moods that hit me when there are visible troubles to spark it. When a wave of melancholy hits for no good reason, I sit here feeling like an idiot.

I start to contemplate doing things that are bad for me, like going and binging on $30 of junk food. It used to be that less than 10 minutes after a thought like that entered my head, I’d be doing just that. (See “The Most Uncool Addiction” for a better explanation of why this used to happen)

Things are going very well for me these days. Yet the blues persist. 

As I sit here analyzing my head, an answer is emerging. What I’m feeling is adrift. Not in the sense that my life is adrift, because it’s never been more full of purpose. The adrift feeling is over things I can’t control.

Why yes, everything you’ve heard about OCD and control freakism is true. People like us crave control like a junkie craves a shot of smack to the arm. It grabs us by the nose and drags us down the road until our emotions are raw and bleeding.

That’s why I used to be such an asshole at The Eagle-Tribune. Every story I edited then went through three more editors and then to the page designer. Along the way, everyone after me had to take a whack at it. I’d hover over the poor page designers because it was the closest thing I had to control. Ultimate control would have meant laying out the pages myself. That would have been a stupid thing to do, mind you. I couldn’t lay out a news page to save my life.

When I was the assistant news editor for the paper’s New Hampshire editions, I was out a week when my son Sean was born. I came in one night to catch up on e-mail and saw the message where my boss announced my son’s birth. In it, he joked that I probably stood over the doctor and told him how to deliver the baby.

I wanted to punch him.

I saw red.

Because I knew that was something I could easily be pictured doing. It hit too close to the truth.

The control freak has emerged in a variety of other ways over the years. Getting stuck in traffic would send me into a rage because all I could do is sit and wait. Getting on a plane filled me with dread because I could only sit there and wait. There was the fear that the plane might crash. But the bigger problem for me was that I was at the mercy of the pilots, the air traffic and the weather. I had no control over the schedule, and that incensed me. Today, I love flying.

So what’s my problem now?

I think it’s that all the cool things going on right now are still in play. The various projects are set in motion, but now I have to sit and wait on others to work through their processes. A more normal person would just take these things as they come and just live in the moment. But I’m not normal.

I have to wait my turn. I don’t like that.

But then it’s appropriate that I should be made to feel uncomfortable about it, since I really have no business trying to control any of these things. Other people have their jobs to do, and I should trust them.

I’m working on it.

I handle it better than I used to.

And this particular strain of melancholy is like New England weather:

If I wait an hour, it’ll change.

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When We Can’t Hibernate, We Become Bears

Erin recently noted that things tend to get ridiculously busy in January, during a period of winter when our bodies scream at us to slow down. On the work side we both have several big projects coming due. At school and in the Scouts, the kids’ schedules are crammed with one activity after the next.

Mood music:

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In winter, we’re not all that different from animals that hibernate. It’s hard to get out of bed when it’s frigid and dark outside. Because we humans must get up and get moving anyway, it causes us to get easily depressed, which leads to eating too much or too little. We tend to be more forgetful and we snap at each other more easily.

When you’re already given to depression, mental disorders like OCD and ADHD, and unbalanced eating, all that you suffer from gets amplified. Instead of mild depression, there’s deep depression. Things that aren’t really a big deal become huge calamities. Our responses to normal everyday pressures become exaggerated. Spouses tend to argue more. Kids tend to have more outbursts.

A friend who teaches kindergarten noted one day last week that three kids were put in timeouts and two others got sick, all at once. I chuckled, because I remember the same stuff happening when Sean and Duncan were kindergartners. Kids are simply brutal in the dead of winter. Why? Because the academics and special activities ramp up when their little brains are least able to take it.

We seem to experience similar behavior in the summer, but the difference is that activities slow down that time of year. Spring and fall are when we’re most productive and agreeable.

I don’t have any solutions to the problem. I don’t even know if what I and others have observed has any scientific research to back it up. But I do have a suggestion.

If those you work with and live with seem like jerks lately and you want to bite their heads off, take a breath and note that you’re just as bad. Then engage in small acts of kindness. Hold the doors open for people. Remember to say good morning. Smile even if you don’t feel like it.

When we do these things any time of year, we become better people. In winter, it may well be the key to our survival.

Roaring Bear

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My ADD Ran Over My OCD

As I struggle to get through all the stuff to be done at work and home before Christmas, something is occurring to me: My ADD runs over my OCD this time of year.

Mood music:

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I guess I’ve understood what happens for a while now. It’s all part of the seasonal depression that whacks me upside the head come Christmastime. For most of the year my challenge is to control my OCD, to keep it from overtaking my mind and sending me into physical overdrive. But earlier this year, I learned from my doctors that I also have ADD. It feeds into the winter pattern where I’m much more easily tired and forgetful.

Unfortunately for me, December isn’t a time where I can kick back, enjoy my December-itis and let the world float by on pretty clouds. At work, we’re busy finishing up some big projects we’re using to kick off January. At home, there are appointments and Scouting activities to drive the boys to. There are gifts to wrap, laundry to fold, groceries to buy, homework for the kids to finish up and a house to clean.

I’m like Luke Skywalker after he escapes the wampa cave on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back, flailing around and stumbling in the snow.

So what am I sitting here thinking about? I’m feeling whiny because the damn OCD doesn’t surface when I really need it. As insidious as the disorder can be, it’s pretty damn handy when there’s a lot to do. It gives you a drive other people don’t have.

In recent years I’ve had a lot more success harnessing that piece of it while keeping the darker traits locked away. But when winter roles through, the ADD kicks in and spoils everything.

Funny how this works. It’s like the person who longs for summer heat waves in the dead of winter, then pines for winter’s icy grip when he’s sweating through July and August. In the summer I want to be a little more mellow; in December I need the overdrive to get everything done.

What to do?

Fight it, of course.

Erin’s worried I’m not going to get done everything I have on my plate. I’m out to prove I can get it all done.

What could possibly go wrong?

ESBWampaCave

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Me, Duncan and December-itis

I’ve had a lot to say lately about my own efforts to manage winter’s depressive effect on my brain, but this is also a challenging month for my younger son, Duncan.

Mood music:

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I’ve written at length about Duncan and my struggle to help him when his ADHD comes crashing into my OCD. I’m proud of who he’s becoming. But no matter how much progress father and son make on our mental health, December may well remain the month that throws us for a loop.

I feel like I’m having an easier time of it this year. I have depression, but it’s just the tired, memory-challenged kind. So far I’ve mostly escaped the feelings of sadness and outward crankiness of past years. Yesterday I visited the nurse who manages my medication and she doubled my Wellbutrin intake for the winter.

Now it appears to be Duncan’s turn for such an adjustment. His teacher has been praising his behavior all fall but, like clockwork, he started experiencing difficulty in class as the calendar switched to December. We’re hearing about the usual winter outbursts. He’ll argue with classmates, his temper comes to a boil easily and so on.

It kills me every year when this happens, because I know he inherited his mental health challenges from me and my side of the family. It’s not his fault.

The good news is that we’re getting better at anticipating his behavioral changes and responding faster. This afternoon I’m taking him to an appointment where his medication might be adjusted. We’ve also been blessed with some outstanding, nurturing teachers. I was particularly fond of his first-grade teacher, who was there when Duncan first got his ADHD diagnosis. She worked closely with us to make adjustments in the classroom that helped immensely.

His teacher this year is another gem. She meets with us whenever we ask and keeps us informed of Duncan’s progress by email. When he started acting up a couple of weeks ago, she invited us to call her at home in the evening. Few teachers do that these days, and we’re grateful for it. Duncan also has terrific classmates who cheerfully help him stay organized. And when he has a mood swing, they’re patient with him. Impressive, when you consider they are all under the age 10.

I chalk it up to the loving environment of the school. The place is far from perfect, as I’ve noted before. But as time goes on, I’m more convinced he’s exactly where he should be.

The trick now is to get him — and his teacher and classmates — to the other side of winter in one piece.

Duncan and Bill