Appointment

Just got home from seeing my psychiatrist.  It went well and was insightful as usual.  We only meet for 30 minutes every 3 months but I always seem to learn new things.  I of course had to explain to him what put me in the mental hospital and it's a story I've told upwards of 20 times now.  He shed some light on social anxiety for me.  I never thought I'd be someone that had social anxiety but I do.  He said that there is a gradient of anxiety ranging from nervousness and nausea to excessive worrying and obsessing about not irritating people.  I had always thought that social anxiety was of the former type.  I'm definitely the latter.

I saw a book on a shelf entitled, "Cutting" and asked him why people do that.  I told him that I did that a lot before going to the hospital and still don't understand it.  My reasoning had always been that it was stupid to add physical pain on top of emotional pain.  Apparently, a lot of people do it because it is the only way to manifest any kind of emotion.  They can't express their feelings and so the physical pain replaces it.  I can agree with that. He also said that the pain releases endorphins that will ease some of the emotional hurt.  Interesting.  On that same note I asked him why severely depressed people always seem to turn to suicide.  I still can't understand it because anything that happens to people regardless of age or ethnicity just screams of an evolutionary benefit.  Suicide can't be an evolutionary response because the individuals expressing this can't pass on their genes.  So to me it just seems meaningless.  I've been there multiple times so I know what it's like.  It just makes sense after awhile and then it becomes an obsession.  His answer was that we honestly don't really know a lot about what in the brain causes that response to depression but it is usually seen as a way out of the pain.  The subconscious mind is horrible at making logic decisions and it is what prompts the suicidal decisions (my theory).  He then said, "Well why do whales beach themselves?"  I just stared and said that I didn't know.  He continued, "They'll beach themselves and we can save them and push them back into the water but they'll just beach themselves again.  It doesn't matter how many times you save them they still try it."  Weird.  It has to be something biological.

I told him about my lack of emotions and that the only thing in the past 6 months or so that ever made me really smile were birds and squirrels.  I told him that I can be depressed as shit, see two male cardinals bickering, and I'll just be filled with a sense of elation.  It's like something igniting inside me.  Now that I think of it, it's what I would call pure positive emotion.  Just distilled joy and happiness.  He said, "Maybe that's your emotional release.  I think you should watch birds more often."

When I got there I told him that they put me on Paxil when I was at the hospital.  He seemed a bit upset about that and said that Paxil would be the last thing he'd ever put someone on because of the side effects.  He agreed that it works well, though.  I haven't had any side effects except for some drowsiness so he said we'd keep me on it.  He bumped it up to 30mg so I'm anxious to see how that works out.