XML Feeds5. SO WHY DOESN'T GOD HEAL ME?
By flip on Sep 23, 2008 | In My Story | 2 feedbacks »
You must have wondered about this by now: if depression is a medical condition, an illness, why doesn't God just heal it? Why do I, and thousands of other believers, have to fight every day? Why can't something just zap us, shake our brains up and fix up all the chemical imbalances, and we live happily ever after?
The honest answer is: I don't know. And anyone who claims to have an answer to this complex issue, is (in my opinion) a blatant liar.
4. AFTER THE BEGINNING...
By flip on Sep 16, 2008 | In My Story | Send feedback »
I never spent time in a psychiatric facility after those two major episodes, but more than once it was touch and go! For many years I went on medication, stabilised, went off medication, started sliding down again, went on medication, stabilised,... You get the picture!
Things got to a point in the mid-nineties. We were driving to the shopping mall, past our local hospital, then past a traffic light where police (not traffic officers) we're stopping traffic to make way for an ambulance on its way to the hospital. We wondered about it, decided it must be some important person, and went on our way. That evening it was on the news:
3. SO WHAT IS DEPRESSION?
By flip on Sep 9, 2008 | In Medical Information | Send feedback »
I think by now I need to give you some facts about depression. I'm not a medical person, so I have taken most of the following material from the website of the American National Institutes Of Mental Health, specifically from the section dealing with depression. I hope it gives you a bit more understanding.
Depression is a serious medical illness; it’s not something that you have made up in your head. It’s more than just feeling "down in the dumps" or "blue" for a few days. It’s feeling "down" and "low" and "hopeless" for weeks or months (or more!) at a time.
2. BEFORE THE BEGINNING
By flip on Sep 2, 2008 | In My Story | Send feedback »
Officially, as I've said, my story began in 1978 - but if I look back with the knowledge I now have, it started long before that.
The first characteristic symptoms I can remember date from eleven years earlier, when I was a farmboy in what is now Northwest province. I should have been happy and carefree, but I wasn't - I was already battling a monster I knew nothing about, and I wasn't doing too well.
1. LET'S START AT THE BEGINNING
By flip on Aug 26, 2008 | In My Story | Send feedback »
Officially, my story starts in late August & early September 1978: I was in the then South African Police Force when I suffered a total nervous breakdown. I ended up in a facility in the east of Pretoria for two weeks. Diagnosis: depression. Treatment consisted of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), a cocktail of very powerful drugs, and counselling sessions (of which I can't remember anything - in fact, I remember very little of those two weeks and the months after it).
If you followed the link for ECT above, you will have read that "common initial adverse effects from ECT include short and long-term memory loss, disorientation and headache". I had them all. Then, and even after 30 years short-term memory is still a bit of a hit-or-miss lottery.
I left that facility with a bagful of drugs, basically a zombie. I went back to work, continued with the drugs (mercifully in lower dosages) and went for counseling sessions with my psychiatrist, both of which tapered off over the next few months.
Less than a year later I was back in another facility
