WILL THOSE FLAKES EVER SETTLE?

So for me, my cure came in the form of a daily SSRI medication (Prozac). It took about four months to really get me back to anything resembling normal. I also took a non-addictive sleep pill to help get my sleep routine back on track. I went for weekly counselling to correct negative thinking patterns and I saw my amazing psychiatrist once every 2-3 weeks.

“Everything negative that I’d ever done or felt about myself had been stirred up, chewed over, added to, and digested as facts.”

In the months of January and February, when my depression was at its most severe, counselling had a very minor impact on me. However, I’m still glad that I started it at this point. It helped a little and I would recommend that a depressed person goes to counselling ASAP. When I say ASAP remember that you may need to shop around because the relationship between you and your counsellor is extremely important and a good match for one person may not be a good match for someone else. In my experience, counselling had its biggest impact in the third and fourth months of my depression.

“For at least two months I had gone to bed thinking terrible thoughts and woken up thinking even worse ones.”

By this point, my medication was starting to work. It was a surreal and confusing time. The anxiety attacks had stopped completely. My mood was generally pretty good. But in the two months that I’d been severely depressed, I had developed some very undesirable patterns of thinking. Everything negative that I’d ever done or felt about myself had been stirred up, chewed over, added to, and digested as facts. It was as if all these negativities were the snowflakes in a festive snow globe. For years, they had sat motionless on the floor of the globe. They were there, but largely ignored by my conscious self. During January and February, the globe had been shaken violently, causing the flakes to swirl uncontrollably in my head. Now, the globe was no longer being shaken, but the flakes were still floating around. Counselling helped the flakes to settle back down. It helped to correct the bad thinking habits that I had acquired. For at least two months I had gone to bed thinking terrible thoughts and woken up thinking even worse ones. This had become habitual. Thanks to the medication, I was now at a stage where I could begin to correct these patterns.

Coming Soon… Chapter 8: Part II…