“I’m sorry to tell you that you don’t qualify as depressed any longer,” the mental health woman told me on the phone.
“Oh… I see…” I said, not knowing how to take that.
“That means that we can’t put you in the depression group therapy after all,” she explained, “but you do qualify for our Generalized Anxiety Disorder group. There should be one starting in the new year.”
I told my about doctor this, but I was a little dubious. While I am certainly a rather neurotic person, I don’t have panic attacks or anything like that. She gave me an anxiety scale quiz thingy to do. Then she told me to go to Anxiety BC because they had a lot of useful self-help info for people with anxiety problems.
The upshot?
It turns out that I worry too much.
Now, anyone who knows me but at all will say something along the lines of “No shit, Sherlock.” I have been a worry wart since I was a kid. (Which, it turns out, is actually a symptom.) I know I worry too much. What I didn’t know was that I actually fitted into DSM IV criteria. All you need to do to qualify as having GAD is:
- worry a lot
- worry uncontrollably (people can control their worrying? How? It’s like controlling your reflexes or the weather, isn’t it?)
- Also have three of the following: restlessness (nope), being easily fatigued (yep), muscle tension (yep), difficulty sleeping (YEP), difficulty concentrating or mind going blank (sometimes).
That’s it. You don’t need panic attacks, or crazy social phobias or the need to flick the light switch 14 times before you can leave the room or anything like that. You just need to be tense, and worried, and a little insomniac. Who isn’t?
Although apparently it often goes hand in hand with depression (yep), phobias (look, corpses are SCARY, ok?) and other anxiety problems.
It’s very weird finding your personality being described as a disorder. The Generalized Anxiety Disorder (or GAD) page should start with “Hello, Carol, I can read your mind!” In fact, it probably would, but it knows that that would worry me.
It calls me “allergic to uncertainty” or (more politically correctly) “uncertainty intolerant” and it describes in embarrassing detail some of the little personal quirks that I tend to try and keep quiet about most of the time. For example, it says :
GAD worry can also be described as “scenario building”. That is, worry is often an attempt to try to think about every possible scenario in the future, and then trying to plan for it.
Like, one time I was driving to a friend’s house and was mentally rehearsing greeting her newest housemate, a Chinese guy named Mike, who I had met the other day. If he came to the door I planned to say “hey, Mike, how are you? Is my friend home?”
This is a fairly normal introvert strategy, right? But then the Mike in my head said,
“…I’m not Mike.”
You see, my friend had a number of Asian housemates, most of whom I hadn’t met. What if the guy I greeted wasn’t Mike after all and I was too nervous to notice?
The imaginary Mike who wasn’t Mike then began to call me a racist and generally berate me in an abusive fashion.
“I suppose we all look the same to you!” he accused me in my head.
I became upset and began mentally rehearsing apologizing to the imaginary Not-Mike and try to explain that I was not racist, just bad with faces. It didn’t help that of course he looked just like Mike, because he was in my head. It all became very heated and uncomfortable. When I actually arrived at my friend’s house I decided it would be much better for me to just stay in the car and have my friend come out to me, so I could avoid the Angry Chinese Not-Mike confrontation that I felt would inevitably develop.
It turns out, that’s not so normal.
Who knew?
If By Yes 
“The Generalized Anxiety Disorder (or GAD) page should start with “Hello, Carol, I can read your mind!” In fact, it probably would, but it knows that that would worry me.”
Bwa ha ha ha ha!!!!
Ahem. Sorry. That cracked me up. I know the feeling, it is very weird to realize that your own particular personality quirks may in fact be not what most people would consider “normal”.
I do remember way back though that you said on your LJ that you didn’t think your depression needed treatment, because you weren’t suicidal. Just because you aren’t at Howie Mandel’s level of OCD & anxiety behaviors, doesn’t mean that you can’t learn some tricks that would make your day to day life more pleasant. It’s all a matter of degree.
I’m only three degrees of subnormal! 😀
“All” you need to do to qualify as having GAD? “Crazy” social phobias?
All due respect here, but I don’t think you’ve got anything but drug-seeking behaviors and a need for an attitude adjustment. Please stop insulting the people who actually do suffer from anxiety, paranoia, and clinical depression with this flippantness – it’s hurtful. Having symptoms of these things doesn’t “qualify” you. GAD is not something you sign up for just by being a worrier and a pessimist. GAD is a major disruption that impairs almost every aspect of your day-to-day life. For your own good, take it seriously.
…I do suffer from clinical depression, as well as GAD, which led to my being hospitalized for suicidal thoughts. I also struggle with a phobia. If making light of my problems helps me accept and deal with them, then that’s what I need to help myself through this. More tears doesn’t help me.
Please get to know someone better before you publicly berate them, and have some compassion for people who deal with their struggles in a different way from you. Especially when that person suffers from anxiety, because now I may not sleep tonight.
Self-diagnosis isn’t going to convince me…. I was under the impression that in this post you were told once again that you don’t have depression and then entertained the notion of having GAD, despite not fitting all the criteria. (There is more to the DSM-IV than “worry a lot/uncontrollably” and “be tense and tired”. Like you said… who isn’t?)
I think it’s good to get help, but it’s also okay just to be the type of personality that worries, thinks the worst, etc. You don’t need to have a label to validate your feelings. Don’t try to pigeonhole yourself into a disorder. Would group therapy with people who have GAD help you? Maybe, I would say even probably, but when discussing a disorder you don’t understand fully yet, consider your wording more carefully.
Okay. I’m not sure where to start, so I’m just going to break this down line by line.
“Self-diagnosis isn’t going to convince me….”
Didn’t realize that the point of this post was to convince Internet Stranger that Carol has GAD. Let alone the fact that a mental health professional was the one who led us down this path in the first place. Carrying on.
“I was under the impression that in this post you were told once again that you don’t have depression”
There’s a difference between no longer being depressed enough to be part of a depression group and no longer having depression. Most who suffer from depression don’t suffer 100% of the time. I have suffered much worse depression than Carol has, but the fact that I’m not slitting my wrists at the moment sure as hell doesn’t mean that I’m cured.
Oh, and Carol’s still on Wellbutrin. The doctor is keeping her on it. Do they normally do that for patients who don’t have depression?
“and then entertained the notion of having GAD, despite not fitting all the criteria.”
That’s the point of DSM-IV – you don’t have to fit all the criteria. In fact, the DSM-IV specifically says that three or more out of six symptoms need to be present. Which she has.
“(There is more to the DSM-IV than “worry a lot/uncontrollably” and “be tense and tired”. Like you said… who isn’t?)”
Yeah, we know. We read the whole thing. Promise.
“I think it’s good to get help, but it’s also okay just to be the type of personality that worries, thinks the worst, etc.”
Speaking as a person who does tend to worry and think the worst, that’s not what she’s dealing with. Paralysis by worry is not normal, and it’s not okay.
“You don’t need to have a label to validate your feelings. Don’t try to pigeonhole yourself into a disorder.”
If the label gets her treatment to help alleviate the issue, then label away, I say.
“Would group therapy with people who have GAD help you? Maybe, I would say even probably, but when discussing a disorder you don’t understand fully yet, consider your wording more carefully.”
You think that someone who worries about what everyone thinks about her wouldn’t consider her wording carefully? Really? Oy.
Maybe Carol doesn’t have GAD. It has not been clinically diagnosed as such. But from the (copious) research that we have done so far, and from the fact that it was kick-started from discussions with a mental health professional, it seems to fit well. Only time and further discussions with the mental health team will tell for sure.
I don’t have a lot to say to husband, except…
Oh, and Carol’s still on Wellbutrin. The doctor is keeping her on it. Do they normally do that for patients who don’t have depression?
This is exactly what they did for my sister who had low moods but no depression after her move to NY state… Wellbutrin is a common treatment for people with abnormal numbers of stressors in their lives (recent bereavement, bad jobs, abusive relationship, things like that.)
Saying “they gave me this drug so I must be depressed” isn’t really an argument.
Fair enough. You found a nitpicking flaw in one subsection of my argument, a point that I will grant you. But it completely and absolutely misses the point of everything I just said, and you end with a strawman.
Let me clarify this further. The doctor is not lifting the depression diagnosis (and yes, there is in fact a diagnosis of depression). The mental health lady, on the other hand, is saying that she is not depressed enough to be part of the depression group. World of difference.
Finally, no one is making the argument that “they gave me this drug so I must be depressed”. I am making the argument that “they gave me this diagnosis and this drug and they are taking away neither the diagnosis nor the drug”. Again, I hope the difference is clear.
I was diagnosed with depression by a psychiatrist in a hospital. I was put on Wellbutrin because he said he was worried about the anxiety side effects caused by many SSRIs since I seemed to have plenty of anxiety as it was. The Wellbutrin worked, and has helped me markedly, enough that a mental health professional is “sorry” to tell me that I would bum out the other depressed people whose meds aren’t working. That does not invalidate the diagnosis of the psychiatrist. Then the same mental health professional said I qualify for GAD and has signed me up for a therapy group, and my doctor’s anxiety scale questionnaire confirmed my anxiety problems so she sent me to the GAD site. This is not self diagnosis by any stretch of the imagination, which you would know if you had read further instead of judging me out of context.
But it is not my job or my husband’s job to sit here and defend me on my own blog. I’m just trying to work through my problems the best way I can.
You made a snap judgment about me and that hurts my feelings. You seem to want to stick to that snap judgment and that makes me unhappy. But I am trying to accept that I cannot change these things, and worrying about you is not going to help me.
I wish you joy in your future endeavours, etc. etc.
Speaking as the person who lives with her every single day of my life, I think that I can say, with complete and absolute certainty, that what Carol deals with is “a major disruption that impairs almost every aspect of [her] day-to-day life.”
But, y’know, feel free to continue to be a total douche if that makes your own GAD feel better. We’re all about the healing here.
PS – starting a sentence with “All due respect here” and then saying something incredibly disrespectful doesn’t make it better. It makes you seem like a complete ass. So’s you know.
My hero.
Wow, that person was a total douche!! Loved this post. What do you know? I wake up at 5am, like I do sometimes when I worry in my dreams and wake up. LOL I could write a book about my life. I find your question on the Dooce community, check out your post, and was in for a laugh fest.
Laughing because this post was like a day in my life and related so well. I admitted to myself that I have GAD (and, yep, I’m self-diagnosing!) and even suffer from occasional panic attacks.
We all know to ourselves and those around us that this impedes our daily lives, but it really helps to just not take it seriously so damn often. Laughter is usually always the best medicine, if not a temporary solution. 😉
Amen! Life is too serious not to laugh at.
I’m glad I gave someone a smile, and it’s nice to hear from the other worriers :-p
The other day I woke up from a crazy dream upset because I was worried that I would have been one of those people in the holocaust who were upset by what the Nazis were doing, but sat back and let it happen. I worried about that for the rest of the day…
Yeah, starting a sentence “with all due respect” is similar to starting a sentence with “no offense”. Some people seem to think that those qualifiers then allow them to make the most patently disrespectful and offensive statements possible, without concern or censure.
This person clearly has not read everything about your journey. And unfortunately, choosing to blog about mental health issues does open you up to a fair amount of criticism – in the same way that blogging about how you raise your kids does. Thor, who I know you read, had the RCMP show up at her door one night because of a humourous comment she made on Twitter that some self-righteous do-gooder in Texas took as a threat to Thor’s children. Sometimes, we just have to roll with the punches.
Let the trolls have their say. Try and respond once, if you choose – and then leave it alone. They just want attention.
And look at it this way – you’re being read enough to have found a troll! Congratulations! I’ve been blogging for three years (or is four? it’s a long time, anyway) and I’ve only had a trollish comment once. Everyone who reads my blog knows me and feels perfectly fine tearing me to pieces to my face. 😉
I know, my very first troll! I feel proud. And stressed :-p
Actually I have read your whole “journey”. Whatever you think my intention is not to dismiss your feelings, I posted because your blog’s sometimes blase attitude toward mental disorders rubs me the wrong way. Situational depression can certainly be hard to grapple with (crummy job, foreign city, etc) but if there’s any chance, like most of your doctors seemed to think, that you don’t need medication… You have a chemically balanced (even if not happy/perfectly healthy) mind, treasure it. Don’t play chicken with drugs, they can do terrible, terrible things to your mental state even when you think you’ve already got it bad. You were lucky to have been put on Wellbutrin, which is as I said, a fairly mild drug often given to people with low moods and situational stressors. Very fortunate that your very first prescription worked out for you, too.
I’m certainly not demanding that you prove yourself to me or anything, I believe that you’re having struggles, but be careful on your journey, I know you were looking for drugs to fix your depression, don’t do the same for your anxiety unless it becomes severe (which it doesn’t sound like it is). Really group therapy might be the best thing for you, learning coping strategies will help.
I’ve spoken out of annoyance but I know I’m mostly transferring onto you my concern with our society’s current views toward quick fix drugs. I’ve seen it go very wrong for so many people. So my point is only that your situation doesn’t sound as severe as you may have indicated, and if so you are very lucky in this, please don’t look solely toward the mental help field for a cure. They can get you halfway there but I believe you’re strong enough to combat a lot of your problems on your own with the right coping strategies. “Troll” you might think I am, but you should feel free to ask me anything if you have questions, I’ve been through the works when it comes to getting help for major anxiety/depression and I don’t want to disillusion you that it’s an easy process. You could come out with many more problems than you had going in and I’m sure that’s not what any of us want for you.
If it rubs you the wrong way, don’t come here.
And since I’ve been struggling with depression for fifteen years and simply never sought help before this year, I don’t really think I have a chemically balanced mind. And since every professional I talked to told me I did sound depressed and should get help, and since my blog stats don’t support your claim that you have read everything… you seem rather defensive.
I didn’t even mention a desire for anti anxiety drugs, not is my doctor or anyone else considering them. Please stop reading your own concerns onto me and my blog. This will be my last time responding to you. Go find a blog that doesn’t rub you the wrong way, and good luck working through your issues. I do wish you the best. I especially think it’s cute how you thumbs up your own comments. Hurrah for self-encouragement!
If you’re checking your stats, you probably know exactly where I came from, huh? Since I used to be a troll expert (I was stalked for years by someone on AOL – I’m honestly surprised that she never found my blog, which is temporarily down right now, but has been around for years & years…I guess the pseudonym change worked, even though I only changed it out of boredom, not to hide my blog), I’m totally nosy, and I like discovering new blogs to read, I came over to check out your troll.
I don’t suffer from depression (my partner thinks I do, but I think it’s completely normal to be depressed about suddenly becoming disabled, losing your job, getting your car repo’d, losing your home to foreclosure and having no idea where you’re going to go) or GAD, but have been around lots of people who do, including my partner (the depression, not the GAD), and I think your attitude about mental illness is healthier for you than writing dull technical posts about the issues that upset you. Humor is an excellent coping mechanism and I think that if you didn’t have a sense of humor about things, you’d probably end up suffering even more.
Can you see the IPs that arrow up/down, because I find extra up arrows for your troll and down arrows for you and your husband kinda suspect. Anyway, hang in there. I, personally, think you have a great attitude about problems are painful for you.
Thanks, and welcome! Yes, I do get IPs and I’ve blocked Lucky’s IP from commenting. I don’t think I can block the arrows, though.
And I think it is absolutely normal to suffer from depression from those things, but depression is depression after all. We’re all in this together, in a way.
I just read your “About Me” – I don’t know if you’re on Facebook, but if you are, we have a page for our rescue – Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary. Right now, our website is down (part of the financial problems, we lost our server and with it went my blog, my partner’s blog, our rescue website, and a hundred or so domains…but we’ll have the blogs & the rescue site back up soon), but the FB page is a decent substitute for it.
It’s too bad you live so far away – we have a German Shepherd rescue that could probably use your expertise. The worst separation anxiety that has ever existed…well, at least in our home. We rescued him to keep our Anatolian company after our GSD, the Anatolian’s best friend for 9 years, died expectedly in June. Anyway, it started a whole bunch of dog problems.
I bet. You can email me if you want, and I’ll see if I can help.
er, unexpectedly, not expectedly. Duh. The GSD was 13, but except for some arthritis and being deaf, she was healthy. She had cancer, but only got sick and then had to be put to sleep within a week. It was the best way for her to go, but it was a horrible shock to us…and to her bff, Dante.
My mom suffers from depression. I know what it’s like to live with. I also know how much of a releif it can be to finally have a Dr say this is what it is and this is how we can help you. Labels don’t mean jack to us, it’s to the benefit of the Dr (and future Drs who look at the file) to have a label, so they have a starting point on how to help.
Oh, and we joke and tease my mom all the time. Depression is depressing enough, we need to laugh.
Good luck.
Thanks. Depression is hilarious! Look at Dooce…
I just found your blog on dooce. I read the question about the troll. I agree with Lucky that there is an overabundance of self-diagnosing by individuals, and over-medicating by doctors.
However, that’s where my agreement will end because Lucky chose negativity and insult to express their point of view, which is exhausting and ultimately boring to read. Not everyone has to agree with another person’s opinion, but remember we are contributing to someone else’s personal blog, and the valid points we have to make are overshadowed by any form of negativity.
If Lucky were genuinely concerned about you, their post would have taken a different, more positive/motivating/enlightening tone. Kudos for blocking them.
On that note, I am sure you are doing what is right for you. I see this blog as a way for you to cope. Laugh. Recover. Keep life in perspective. Please continue using YOUR blog to discuss YOUR issues….
I’m pleased to have found another worthwhile blog to check in on.
Thanks, Kelli. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
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