(January 20, 2012 at 10:44 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: Yes, it is - though my mood cycles haven't usually been tied to seasonal changes.

Oh, I am sure you being ill has contributed. Perhaps you need a little sunlight. Lack of sunlight and the vitamin(s) it causes your body to produce has been linked to depression.

(January 20, 2012 at 10:59 pm)Shell B Wrote:

(January 20, 2012 at 10:44 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: Yes, it is - though my mood cycles haven't usually been tied to seasonal changes.

Oh, I am sure you being ill has contributed. Perhaps you need a little sunlight. Lack of sunlight and the vitamin(s) it causes your body to produce has been linked to depression.

Yeah - couldn't hurt. Unfortunately sunlight is hard to come by around here from October-May.

Usually I take a couple of weeks and go someplace tropical in the winter, but I wasn't able to do that this year - and won't be able for the near future.

Sit near a UV light. I've heard even just a few minutes of UV treatment can help boost seasonal depression. It certainly won't cure all of your ails, but it might minimize them.

I take 1000 IUs of vitamin D every morning. It helps a bit, but is certainly not a magic bullet. When light hits your skin your body produces vitamin D, so in the darker months you can feel down because of a lack of vitamin D. There are also some other neurotransmitters that are produced from full spectrum light entering the eye, but I don't recall what those are right now.

Y'all should just sit down and play some Dead Rising... guaranteed to cheer you up, perhaps to manic levels like it has done to me.

Don't know if anyone has noticed but I haven't been around much in the last week - been lurking and not posting at all. I've been pre-occupied and pretty low lately.

Then I got the news... my stepmother passed away early this morning. Lung cancer. Thankfully, she died peacefully in her sleep.

I'm feeling pretty numb. Really, I'm not feeling anything at all. I haven't been able to bring myself to call my father - we are not close, and there's a lot of history between us.

As a parent, telling my son that his grandmother is gone was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I'm thankful he is handling it better than I expected.

Kids are weird like that. My stepson got teary eyed when my grandmother died. Then, he sat in front of the television and never said another word about it. I'm really sorry to hear that. I know the relationship between a stepmother and stepson can be very close. Don't call your father if you do not want to. It's all about what you think will make it better or worse. I hope things get better for you soon.

I've taken everything into account from my past years, and the experience I'm having at the moment, and I've concluded that I could be Depressed. For the past 2 years (or more) I've been apathetic towards life. I have constantly been contemplating suicide, going over how and when I'm going to commit suicide, and when my carelessness for life is going to push over the edge and actually commit suicide. This feeling hasn't taken affect to my grades at the moment, I'm still maintaining all A's as a 9th grader (I'm 15) in Highschool, but I still have bouts of apathy towards my grades because I plan on ending it soon. I've been aloof to everything around me, and I have lost interest in everything, and I can't seem to fathom why I've lost interest in life. I think I've been experiencing insomnia, I've constantly woken up during the middle of the night, in which, last Sunday night, I went to bed at 10:00 PM for school the next day, and I woke up at 2:37 and stayed up the whole night, in a depressive manner contemplating yet again: suicide. I'm socially averse, I try my best to avoid social interaction with others, mostly because I don't feel comfortable socializing with anybody except certain friends. I'm fatigued most of the day, and I dread waking up from my sleep. I'd rather be dreaming, where my unhappiness in reality is diminished, and I'm in a euphoric mood with no stress at all. I feel ineffectual in life, I have yet to decipher any purpose in existence. My mood swings from feeling down to feeling euphoric and full of energy, only on certain occasions, in which, it is mostly a despondent feeling every day. I constantly wait for the day that I'm happy, which has yet to happen for a long time. Like a vexatious feeling when you've been deprived of sleep. This feeling has been in place for a few years, and has had an effect on my mental health and sanity, along with my social relationships. I try my best to hide it, and I've concealed my suicidal intentions from my parents. The only reasons I conceal my intentions is so I can actually commit my suicide, without any conjecture from my parents. At the moment, I don't even know if I suffer from Depression, because I'm not going to the doctor, and definitely NOT my parents. Since some members on this forum have experienced Depression, I would really like to know if these are symptoms of Depression.

Cheers!

Yep, they sure are. Please go to the doctor. I know you don't plan on it, but isn't the potential to feel better a preferable scenario to suicide? Life, or at least a lot of life, without those thoughts and feelings can be awesome. Anyway, you only get one shot at life. I think you ought to take it. You can also call an anonymous hotline. One is listed in the first post of this thread. If that is not the country in which you reside, please tell me whereabouts you live and I will post one that is local to you. Keep on trucking, mtp. High school is not a good indicator of life. You really want to give the rest of it a try.

(January 28, 2012 at 8:32 pm)Shell B Wrote: Yep, they sure are. Please go to the doctor. I know you don't plan on it, but isn't the potential to feel better a preferable scenario to suicide? Life, or at least a lot of life, without those thoughts and feelings can be awesome. Anyway, you only get one shot at life. I think you ought to take it. You can also call an anonymous hotline. One is listed in the first post of this thread. If that is not the country in which you reside, please tell me whereabouts you live and I will post one that is local to you. Keep on trucking, mtp. High school is not a good indicator of life. You really want to give the rest of it a try.

I can't really fathom how I would be able to go to the doctor, or much less discuss it to anybody that I know. Although I want to go to the doctor for this, I really don't want to deal with my parents judgment. They would think that I'm just trying to get "pills", instead of help. Assuming that they really know a thing about me, is the biggest joke I've ever heard.