Make-Up and Mirtazapine | Monthly Archive

Archive | August, 2012

Do People With Depression Make Things Up?

by makeupandmirtazapine on August 28, 2012 in Mental Health & Wellbeing

The top search terms that bring people to this site are ‘do people with depression make up things’ and ‘do people with ptsd make up things’. It’s been that way pretty much since the day I first bought my domain name, and they feature in the top of my stats nearly every day.

Which suggests that there are either a lot of people seeking answers to those questions or just a couple of quite desperate people.

As I knew what I thought the answer might be but had never even come across the questions before in any of the research that I’ve done into depression and PTSD, I did some Googling myself. And came up with nothing.

So I thought I’d answer the question in relation to myself. Unscientific I know. But I hope that it might help to shed some light for those of you who are reading this because you wanted to know whether people with either PTSD or depression make things up.

I don’t recall ever having made anything up about either my depression or my PTSD, either in regards to my experiences and symptoms, or my diagnosis.

I do find that between the brain fog that is depression, the numbing medication I was on for most of the last year, and the blackout that my PTSD has imposed on large chunks of memory, it’s difficult to try to describe to the people I’ve been avoiding for months on end just what I’ve been dealing with. It’s possible that my explanations may sound vague or patchy.

Also, I didn’t get this sick overnight. The mental health crisis that began five months ago had been brewing for so many years that even I’d failed to notice that something was wrong. Low level depression at least had become what was normal for me. But I pretended to other people for long after my depression had devolved into a major problem that there was nothing wrong.

There were many reasons for this:

I didn’t want to worry people.
I didn’t know how to tell people I was sick when I could barely identify what was wrong myself.
I genuinely thought that if I ignored the problem I could, through force of willpower, make it go away.
I have trust issues that make it really difficult for me to ask for help.
I was scared that even the people I don’t worry about discussing things with would be so weirded out by the sheer volume of the crazy that was going on in my brain that they’d run away and abandon me.
I’ve turned to the wrong people to help me with the root of these illnesses in the past and they’ve either used it against me, or promised the earth and then left me high and dry.

However, I appreciate that the incongruence between the front that I’ve put on for most of my adult life, and the person with a serious mental illness that I’ve been unable to hide being for the last year, might seem a little incomprehensible to some.

In fact I know that there are some people who have been unable to get their heads around the idea and think that I’ve been melodramatic at best, dishonest at worst, when explaining my illnesses.

Some people would just prefer not to believe that someone they know could have been abused, or could experience thoughts of suicide, or could self harm or overdose. So they choose not to. Regardless of the reality.

But I have never lied about my illnesses.

I don’t understand them well enough. I could never have imagined that there was this place mentally, or emotionally, that a person could be in to be able to have made it up.

I hope this goes someway towards giving you the answers that you are looking for.

Living the Dream

by makeupandmirtazapine on August 28, 2012 in Careers & Working, Mental Health & Wellbeing, Miscellaneous

“If you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ~ Albert Einstein

I’ve talked before about the traditional environment that I grew up in, and the way I was taught to expect my life to be. It’s a way a lot of people want their life to be, ticking off the boxes of education, followed by reasonably stable job, followed by partner who looks good on paper, followed by a suburban house, followed by children.

The only problem with that is that I spent the first twenty years of my life being told by everyone around me that the things that I was actually interested in doing with my life, like travel, writing, politics, helping people, were frivolous and wouldn’t be possible unless I’d made enough money to afford to do them when I retired.

In the mean time I was supposed to knuckle down, fit in, and be exactly the same as everyone else.

I didn’t.

I’m estranged from my family, I decided to opt out of the high-flying corporate career path I started out on to work for a charity, and I spend almost every summer out of the country visiting as many places as I can fit in.

But I still feel like there are things that I’m supposed to like about my life, that are supposed to make me happy, that don’t. Some of that is down to my depression, some of it isn’t.

I’ve been talking about this a lot recently with friends I studied with at university. Friends who stuck with the program, who have great jobs in London, city apartments, and supposedly glamorous lifestyles – that they hate. Everything that they’re supposed to love about their lives makes them miserable. But they’re paralysed with fear at the thought of giving any of it up because they’re supposed to be living the dream.

Never mind that it isn’t their dream, someone would willing perform the seven labours of Hercules to be in their place, and so they stick it out in the vain hope that it will eventually become their nirvana.

It’s a pitiful waste of their ambition, passion, and talents.

Too many people are basically handing over control of the decisions about their lives to some sort of hive-mind that they don’t seem to have that much in common with.

And it almost makes me grateful for my illness.

One of the, admittedly well hidden, blessings of my battle with suicidal thinking is that it has forced me to try to create a life that I actually want to live. A life I’m supposed to want just won’t cut it because it still doesn’t give me anything to cling on to and live for.

So if I find that what I really want to do is sell off all my worldly possessions, cut all ties with everyone I know, and go and become a hooker in Timbuktu, that is exactly what I have to do.

Otherwise I’ll be unwell forever.

Or until this stupid illness kills me.

And I think we might all be a little happier if we spent less time trying to fit in with who we think each other are, and more time being honest about what we really want, think, and feel. Being true to ourselves by pursuing the things that interest us, concentrating on doing the things that we’re good at, and judging our success or failure by our own measures.

Leaving other people’s ambitions alone so that they’re there for other people to pursue, and not wasting time, our own and everyone else’s, on projects and relationships that we have no interest in.

Why I Don’t Feel Sorry For Jennifer Aniston

by makeupandmirtazapine on August 25, 2012 in Celebrity, Sex, Dating & Relationships

I picked up a magazine for the train ride home this weekend. It was Grazia or something like it. And the front page story was something about how we should all feel sorry for Jennifer Aniston for some new relationship drama or other.

As someone who spends a considerable amount of time in doctor’s waiting rooms I’ve read a frankly ridiculous number of Poor Jen articles over the years. So while it seems that this latest crisis is already passed, and Poor Jen is now actually engaged, I’d be willing to bet this blog that the next one is just around the corner.

Which is why I’m still going to go ahead and post this list that I wrote on Sunday of the reasons why I’ve never found Jennifer Aniston a pity-inducing figure.

1. She looks like this:

2. Friends.

Jennifer Aniston was a cast member on one of the most successful television series of all time – making her one of the most successful actresses of all time.

Her ten-year career portraying Rachel Green in Friends netted her an Emmy in 2002 for Outstanding Lead Actress in Comedy Series, and was the spring-board to an unfathomably successful film career that has spanned another decade.

Aniston reportedly collected a $1 million pay check for each episode of the final season of Friends which also, along with her colleagues Courtney Cox and Lisa Kudrow, made her one of the highest paid actresses of all time.

3. She’s fabulously wealthy. Aniston’s net worth is estimated as being somewhere between £110-150 million dollars.

4. She appears to be the picture of health:

5. She has an adorable dog:

6. Brad Pitt.

Yes, I know they’ve been divorced for the last seven years, but Aniston had him during his best years, when he was the All American Poster Boy. Before he adopted the Ozzy Osbourne meets life-long homeless guy look that he’s been sporting throughout most of his relationship with Angelina Jolie.

And since divorcing Pitt she’s dated a string of the most eligible men in Hollywood. Every one of them apparently handsome, charismatic, and successful.

7. She has a beautiful home. Three of them, actually.

8. George Clooney.

Since divorcing Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston appears to have lived essentially the same lifestyle as George Clooney. Yet while Clooney has been lauded as a playboy, acres of news print have been devoted to how sad and lonely Aniston’s life must be.

It’s not so much the double standard that bothers me, because I don’t think George Clooney’s apparent inability to sustain a long-term relationship, despite being one of the most eligible men on earth and able to attract almost any mate he wanted, is particularly enviable either.

What bothers me is that no one seems surprised by the ongoing coverage of Aniston’s life. No-one appears to question the idea that a highly successful woman with so much going for her should be written about only in terms of her supposed desperation to hold on to a relationship.

No magazine editor appears able to comprehend the possibility that she could be happy on her own terms, with her own life and her own staggering successes.

And not only can they not imagine that she could be happy without a man, they insist that a woman who must have preternatural self-esteem is trying to cling on to any man who’ll have her for all she’s worth.

Otherwise she will never be ‘complete’.

Now, maybe this is actually the reality of her situation. Maybe desperation, rather than the pressures of intense media scrutiny and the difficulty of maintaining a normal relationship in the context of such a global level of recognition, or even plain old incompatibility, is the reason that she has remained single.

After all, no relationship could hope to withstand the pressure of such insane expectations.

But somehow it seems unlikely.

No, I think that Jennifer Aniston knows that her life is a pretty good gig. The engagement’s just the icing on her cake.