Thought Bubbles: Detachment from Constance

In going through this depression and researching the different aspects of what is happening to me, I have begun to look at the depression very differently that when I started on the pills almost twenty years ago. I have learned to look at the situations that surround me with a quiet detachment. It is a way to bare the pain, stop the ostracizing that I sometimes feel when relating my depressive moments to others, who at first seem interested out of compassion, but who are really just fascinated about a story of "mental illness", glad it is happening to someone else and not them.
I met a woman in the mental hospital the second time I went in. She had far more physically wrong with her than I, and much more going on in her personal life. So I followed up the hospital with a few phone calls to her personal number. As we talked, I tried to reach her mentally, give what support that I could. At least I know what depression is, and can talk to a person about it. But I think she was reminded of the hospital and the low mental situation she suffered there (and still continues to suffer at home). But one sees so much hurting all about one's self if one chooses to only dwell on that aspect of life.
I have begun to detach from what I can't do anything about, and attach to goals that I can accomplish. More positive, more in control. Hard if you have not tried it before. Sure, we all have tried to do it before, and maybe it is the anafranil that I am on that makes it easier to be successful in these attempts at this time. Who knows?
Detachment as a survival mechanism, what a delightful answer to problems that could bring on the depression. Too much detachment is a flight from reality and bordering on apathy, just enough should save me.

Fisher Wallace Laboratories: New Hope?

I found an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal that details a device that I have heard of sometime ago, but that is now gaining momentum, CES.
Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation (CES), which sends very weak microcurrent into the brain, was widely used in Russia in the 1940s as a sleep aid. Several battery-powered CES devices won FDA clearance to treat depression, anxiety and insomnia in the 1980s and 1990s, largely because they were similar to other grandfathered devices, and some have been quietly selling to home users ever since. Electromedical Products International Inc. has been selling its Alpha-Stim devices for both pain relief and anxiety and depression since 1981. Many users are military veterans.
Then the bit about Fisher Wallace Laboratories that really got me:
Last fall, a newcomer in the field, Fisher Wallace Laboratories, launched a YouTube campaign lampooning the side effects of anti-depressants and promoting its cranial stimulator as an alternative. Powered by two AA batteries, the device was sends 1 milliampere of alternating current—1/1,000th the voltage used in ECT—through a patient's head via small, wet pads placed at the temples. The company recommends using the device 20 minutes once or twice a day for 30 to 45 days, and several times a week afterward.

The company, founded by electronics entrepreneur Charles Avery Fisher and Martin Wallace in 2007, says the device works by boosting endorphins, serotonin and dopamine and reducing cortisol

Does it work? Columbia University psychiatrist Richard P. Brown says he has used the device with 400 severely depressed patients and that more than 70% find relief—about twice the rate of anti-depressants. "I'm seeing some patients smile for the first time in 20 years," says Dr. Brown, who, like other doctors interviewed for this column, has no financial ties to the company.

Other neuroscientists are wary. "In my assessment of the literature, the level of evidence to support those kinds of claims is not sufficient at this point," says Dr. George. I believe that this is the doctor that I either emailed or spoke to before the VNS was put into my chest.

Dr. Mayberg adds, "It's not a great idea to be exposing your brain to electricity of any type without medical supervision."

Much of the clinical data supporting CES devices is outdated; a few small placebo-controlled trials of the Fisher Wallace device are planned at Harvard, Columbia and the University of Toledo.

"I think a lot of people who use it will tell you it can be very helpful," says Andres San Martin, a Columbia psycho-pharmacologist who says about 50 of his patients use the device, along with antidepressants. Some use it just half the year for Seasonal Affective Disorder, and some have found it helpful in quitting smoking. "But I am looking forward to the double-blind placebo-controlled trials," he says.

"The Trumpet" on Depression

I was reading an article from the The Philadelphia Trumpet magazine entitled Defeat Depression-Master your Mind published in December 2011 the article written by Dennis Leap, and he works out an outline on how to operate your mind. He does so by quoting the Bible and digging into scripture.
He states that twisted and distorted thinking is the major cause of suffering for people flattened by depression. The twisted thinking is illogical, but it seems so real that you have convinced yourself that your depression will go on forever. This was shown to me in a most dramatic way.
I was suffering from allergies big time, so sensitive that even being outside a small amount of time would send me running inside to clear anything out of my lungs by breathing the filtered air from the air conditioning system. I would do slow breathing through a cloth and in about twenty minutes I would calm down. I would have an air purifier in my bedroom and a dehumidifier in there as well. I could not sleep because of the noise. The air, being drier, stopped the dust mites but being drier gave me trouble as well. These things played on my mind. Did life have to be this way? I was already on a restricted diet because of allergies, now even my work outside in the pollen and dust filled air and house full of dust mites were against me. I had been involved in a car accident in May of 2011, and so the body was in shock as well. I had, in essence, a nervous breakdown and ended up in a mental hospital, twice in a six week period for depression and anxiety.
Now I want to illustrate how this mind of mine works and relate that back to the Trumpet article. My allergy symptoms were greatly exaggerated  and multiplied and when the time came to get an allergy shot I let them know about how the allergies were affecting me. The doctor came in and told me that he could handle the allergies, what ever else I had was something else (ie in my mind). I came home and the room that I was in was not as clean as I wanted it to be, and for me a source of some of the allergies. But as my mind grasped what the doctor had told me, the allergies symptoms abated immediately. My mind had made the hell that I was experiencing. I began to relate this experience to the depression and my brain began to unlock, to wake up from the depression. I began to trace my thoughts just as I have been tracing food, and environmental and chemical allergic problems.
The article in the Trumpet quotes David Burns, author of Feeling Good: "Every bad feeling you have is the result of your distorted negative thinking. Illogical, pessimistic attitudes play the central role in the development and continuation of all your symptoms."Dennis Leap in his article states "To recover from depression, people must learn that every depressed feeling has its corresponding distorted or illogical thought. That negative thought came before and created the depressed feeling. If you are depressed, you must isolate, examine and replace all your illogical thinking with thought that is based on true facts. 
This stunned me each time I thought about it. I had been told of this time and again, but until I suffered it blatantly in my experience with the allergies, I did not believe it. Preferring to blame it on outside sources I have wallowed in depression for most of my life. Perhaps I am working toward a real release here.