Learning to Trust Again

One thing that I've found particularly difficult about being depressed is that I've learnt to not trust my feelings. Since I've felt bad for so long, and been told that everything's fine, I've come to have a deep distrust for my emotions. One way this has manifest itself is by making it very hard for me to know when I'm not well. I can easily recognise obvious signs of physical illness, such as a blocked nose or fever, but I really struggle with symptoms that are potentially psychogenic. Some symptoms that I get quite frequently are insomnia, headache, nausea, loss of appetite and the whole gamut of emotions like anxiety, sadness, contempt and disgust with myself.

When I get these symptoms, it's hard for me to know if I am "genuinely" unwell, or if I just need to "get on with things". I'm often stuck worrying if I should take time off work, see my doctor, my psychologist, and all the other things that I know help me when I'm depressed, or if I should go to work and try to push through it. Most of the time I do the latter, but every now and then I'll call in sick and feel guilty as I'm not convinced that I'm "really" unwell.

This might be the result of a latent belief that mental illness is not "real" illness, and that it's all in my mind. Or I might have been scarred by spending 9 years in a job where the culture was to make everyone feel really guilty for calling in sick. Or it might be because of my childhood where my mother was in turns sceptical of us when we were sick, and strangely easy to convince we were unwell on the basis of vague and minor symptoms.

Probably it's a bit of all of the above.

Anyway, it'd be nice to be able to just trust how I'm feeling, be able to say to myself "I'm not well today" and take time off without feeling guilty for doing so. But then, that's probably on par with saying it'd be nice to not feel depressed.

Board games for fun and profit

For the past 2 years I have been playing board games socially. When I say board games I am not referring to the kind of game that I played as a child, like Monopoly or Cluedo. The games that I have been playing are all modern and generally fit within a category often called "Eurogames". These are games that conform to a design philosophy that aims to make the game fun to play, rather than fun to win. While most people have a fond nostalgia for the games they played as a child, when I think carefully, most of these games really weren't all that fun. Monopoly, in particular, took way too long, eliminated most players long before the end and made it painfully clear when you had no hope of catching up.

Eurogames, on the other hand, generally keep all players in the game until the very end, often can be played in 30 - 60 mins and usually have a scoring mechanic that makes it hard or impossible to know who's won until the very end of the game. Alternatively, there are many games that are purely cooperative, so all players work together to win the game. Other aesthetic themes are to have simple wooden play pieces and to be quite abstract representations that have simple rules but deep strategy.

One of first games I played was Pandemic, and then its expansion On The Brink. This is a purely cooperative game in which 2-5 players take on roles as specialists with the CDC and attempt to save the world from being overwhelmed by disease. The game uses no dice, but has some (very clever) card shuffling mechanics to add randomness to the game. The expansion really beefed the game up, and I now consider it essential.

Over the past two years I have moved through a phase where we played Pandemic at every opportunity (including our lunch breaks at work), replacing it with Munchkin (and some of its thousands of expansions), then Carcassonne (and all of its expansions).

My workmates and I became so obsessed with Carcassonne that we ended up playing at least 1 game, and sometimes 2, every lunch break for a year and a half and maintaining a league table. This got serious enough that I implemented a TrueSkill algorithm for our league and some of us even bought our own custom "meeples". Heady times, and I eventually made it to the top of our league, but only after the previous leader (my friend R) resigned and changed jobs! In that time we developed very sophisticated tactics and strategies (not the same thing), and I often felt bad for newcomers who'd join in for a game or two.

Anyway, we periodically returned to Pandemic, usually when catching up with R, who became obsessed with winning the game on the highest possible difficulty level. The difficulty of the game is determined by four factors. The four factors are:

1. Number of players. Being a sociable lot we'd always play with whoever was there, whih was almost always 4 or 5 of us. Unfortunately, more players makes the game more difficult.
2. Roles. I would have been (mostly) alright with simply choosing roles, but R was insistent that we always select randomly. This meant that often we'd have a combination of roles that didn't work well together, or was underpowered.
3. Number of "epidemic" cards. Players can choose to use between 4 and 6 (7 with On The Brink) epidemic cards, with each additional one increasing the difficulty.
4. Optional challenges. On The Brink includes 2 optional challenges, a virulent strain and disease mutation.

Just recently I returned to playing Pandemic after 6 months of playing other games. We'd previously won the game, after months of losing (!), when playing on "Legendary" difficulty (7 epidemic cards) and with the "virulent strain" challenge. This time we decided to go for broke and try for Legendary, with both the virulent strain challenge and the "mutation" challenge.

And we managed it! Sort of.

Unfortunately, all of the extra challenges, and having played for several hours in a row led to me inadvertently cheating as I forgot to implement a rule on 3 or 4 turns, slightly reducing the difficulty. Now I'll probably have to wait another 6 months until R's back in town to try again.

Oh well, there's always Arkham Horror to keep me going until then.

A Better Reception Phone

I was waiting to see my therapist the other day and casually observing the receptionist when I was hit by an idea that would help streamline the act of taking phone messages. In my office at work we rarely use the telephone and so we have two communal phones. Whoever is available answers calls and most of the time we need to leave notes for each other. My new invention will help to streamline this process.

I propose to attach or integrate a small receipt-style printer (like this) into a desk phone. At the touch of a button it will print a standard "someone called" docket (like this) with the time, date and in-coming phone number pre-printed. The user then writes in the message and can either leave it at the phone or tear it off.

For more sophisticated offices, instead of an integrated printer the phone could simply interface to a PC via USB. Pressing a button on the phone would create a new email message with a standard phone message template with the time, date and in-coming phone number already entered. The call-taker would then type in any further details and send it to the relevant person.

Either of these options would far improve the efficiency of this process and would cost little more than most fully functional office phones.

An Improved Emotion Vocabulary

One consequence of conducting counselling, attending therapy and being depressed is I think a lot about feelings. I also tend to be quite analytical so I've been musing on the words that we use to describe how we feel, and how imprecise it can be. Here are some of my thoughts on some commonly used words:

Feeling. This is a word that can mean almost anything, for example: "I feel sad", "I feel like screaming", "I feel that's a bad idea", "I feel empty", "I feel hungry". These five examples are an emotion, a desire, a thought, a metaphor and a physiological symptom.

Frustrated. This is usually used to describe an emotion that is related to anger or annoyance. I think this isn't a helpful definition as I prefer to think of the word "frustrating" describing the situation that I'm in, rather than my emotional response. Like the difference between "alone" and "lonely". Any situation where your desire is obstructed is a frustrating one, but your emotional response could be anger, sadness, anxiety, etc.

Good / Bad / Fine. These are words that barely describe emotions. They are pretty much just code for "comfortable" or "uncomfortable".

Upset. This is a vague description of discomfort. It could mean sad, angry, afraid, etc.

Confused. How you feel when you don't know how you feel.

One concept that is useful when describing emotions is the concept of primary emotions. This is similar to the idea of a primary colour, that is, emotions that are fundamental and that more complex emotions are mixtures of. There are several different lists of primary emotions, but most include something like anger, sadness, fear, happiness, surprise and disgust. Most emotional states can be thought of as mixtures of different amounts of these emotions. For example, hatred is a mix of anger and disgust.

Using emotion words rather than words like "good" help us to better identify how we are feeling. When it is difficult to tell how you are feeling ("upset" or "confused"), try and work out which of the six primary emotions is closest. This will help to improve your emotional vocabulary.

To be happily unhappy

Welcome to this blog. I was first diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder in October 2007, shortly after getting married. In hind-sight I have been living with depression for a lot longer than that. I attempted suicide at 16, and that was simply the culmination of a long period of desperation.

As part of my recovery I have been reading a lot about depression and other people's experiences of it. There are a lot of people writing about how they have been able to rise above their depression, and about their desire to get better. Unfortunately this hasn't been my experience. Much of my struggle with depression is wrestling with the desire to make myself worse. I don't want to get better, I don't want to improve.

Saying these words tends to put people off-side, with many not wanting to help if you don't want to help yourself. The paradox of depression is that the illness itself prevents us from wanting to improve. Once you want to get better, the rest is fairly easy. A prescription for anti-depressants, a lot of counselling and your life should get better quite quickly. The problem is that many of us don't want to do this. Many of us would rather be sad, hurting and in pain. That's why I'm writing this blog.

I am depressed, but high functioning. I have a job, a wife and a few friends. I am usually able to make myself go to work and social events. I generally maintain a reasonable level of hygiene and I'm able to refrain from self destructive behaviour.

None of this means that I am happy.

For me, the biggest irony of depression is that through counselling and a lot of introspection I have dragged myself up to a high level of functioning. I am not in imminent danger of killing myself. But this has done nothing to make me any happier. Even medication seems to just help me get through the day, not bring joy into my life.

This blog is a place for me to share my ideas, but also to give voice to anyone who is depressed and doesn't want to be happy.