WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

Whether it is the condition itself or the medication used to combat the condition, depression has an adverse effect on libido. The compounding problem is you just don’t care whether you have sex or not,and very often, you ONLY have sex so that your partner will will be sexually satisfied for another period of time.

For women it can be a little easier to fake satisfaction so that their partner is unaware that there is anything wrong with her drive for desire, but for men, if you are not interested, it is physically obvious. The inability to attain and maintain an erection further drives a wedge between partners and it is seen as a lack of affection, lack of love, lack of attention, or that satisfaction is being expressed outside the relationship, all of which can drive a wedge in any remaining positive aspects to the rest of the relationship.

Sexual side-effects are common with antidepressants, such as loss of sexual drive, failure to reach orgasm, and erectile dysfunction. Although usually reversible, these sexual side-effects can, in rare cases, last for months or years after the drug has been completely withdrawn.

Sildenafil (Viagra or Revatio), vardenafil (Levitra or Staxyn) and tadalafil (Cialis) are all medications that reverse erectile dysfunction by increasing nitric oxide, a chemical naturally produced by your body. Nitric oxide opens and relaxes blood vessels in the penis, helping you get and keep an erection. These erectile dysfunction medications don't increase your sex drive and only cause erections when you are sexually stimulated, therefore if the drive is non-existent, the medication will not help. The aggravating factor is these medications are not covered by medical/health insurance plans, so at $15/pill – sold in boxes of four - it can get expensive to have sex. If you cannot afford it, then you are back to square one.

So do you continue taking the antidepressants so that plans for suicide are abated, and take more pills so you can satisfy your partner (if they work at all), or forgo the antidepressants so that your sexual life will only be affected by the overwhelming feeling that you are not worth having sex in the first place?

These are  personal options and decisions that have to be made with your primary physician.

Durkheim

A long dead, bearded sociologist (Emile Durkheim) once wrote on the subject of Suicide as a social phenomena (Suicide: A Study In Sociology, published in 1895). In this book, Durkheim theorizes that the act of suicide is definitely correlated to social integration. He believes suicide can be linked to the degree to which individuals form an attachment with others and/or society, and he believed it was related to the degree of guidance or regulation the individual experiences from others and/or society). 

Durkheim was a 19th Century Sociological theorist with peers who included other idealistic theorists such as Fredrik Engles, and Karl Marx, who saw suicide as a sociological anomaly, as opposed to a realistic and acceptable means of relieving insurmountable stress experienced by people who see little or no alternatives.

There has been much written about the subject by the living, especially by those who have been some “do-gooder” who feels it is their duty to ensure that the person continue to suffer the stresses of life rather than allow them to end their personal perception of purgatory. Few words have been written about those who have failed to find the courage to complete the task they set out to achieve, as they are branded as ‘depressed’ , ‘mentally unstable’, and other such labels as would make one a social pariah, unworthy of reasonable comment.

Those who think that suicide is a cowardly act have never attempted to kill themselves. They have no idea of the amount of courage it takes to slit one’s own wrists, to tie an effective noose, or to ensure sufficient quantities of pharmaceuticals are available to move forward with one’s own destiny. 
Moreover the intricate planning involved take more than a few minutes of indiscriminate thought. Location is everything – do you want children (especially your own) to find the body – if not where could one complete the final act without witnesses, without the chance of revival, and without the chance that a child might find your remains. For many this is of little consequence, for others with a social conscience, it may mean much. To be remembered as somebody who made the ultimate decision to take control over ones own life/death is one thing – to hang one’s self in a school yard is something else altogether.

In the movie M.A.S.H. (and subsequent TV series) the theme song is called “Suicide is Painless” – mocking the attempted suicide of the “Painless” dentist in the medical unit. Suicide may not be painless, but completed correctly, the pain is momentary at best, certainly less painful than suffering though years of mental abuse and anguish, making suicide a viable option for many – not a sociological phenomena, but a final necessity.

BEST. GRAPHIC. EVER.

Too Stupid To Live

Darwin accounted for the demise of specific species based on their adaptability to their environment. Where the environment would allow, species will not only survive, but thrive, thereby accounting for the varieties of flora, fauna and livestock on the Galapagos Islands where few if any predators were to be found.

Homo sapiens as a classification of animal generally survives where the average temperature and suitable food/water supply will allow, but many individuals still get tangled up in their own feet and manage to drown in puddles that would not slow down a turtle: ergo, intelligence is not a strong indicator of survival.

Human blunders can be as blatant as the mental midgets who go swimming in the ocean in mid-winter, to simple memory lapses that see us putting salt into coffee instead of sugar. Sometimes we don’t even know we have said, or done anything less than intelligent until it is pointed out by a spouse/significant other.

The problems begin when your spouse tells/reminds you on a regular basis that you are “too stupid to live”, and the message starts to sink in that she just might be right. It does not take intelligence to live. The smallest microbe on the planet has such a primitive brain that it is no more than organized ganglia of nerves that allow the organism to feed and reproduce, the very basis for the definition of life.

If a person is, by definition of a spouse, “too stupid to live”, then is there any point in continuing to live? If your chosen lifemate sees so little value in your existence, that you could be replaced by an income producing microbe, then what keeps you from joining your ancestors?

Apparently, the slim hope that she just might be wrong - but that slim hope is getting slimmer on a daily basis.

Eeyore Syndrome

I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till I felt that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service, like a drum, kept beating, beating, till I felt my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again, then space began to toll, as if the heavens were a bell and being were an ear, and I, and silence, some strange race wrecked, solitary, here. Just then, a plank in reason broke, and I fell down and down and hit a world at every plunge, and finished knowing then.

~ Emily Dickinson

It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression, to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.

There are three things people tend to confuse: depression, grief and sadness.
Grief is explicitly reactive. If you have a loss and you feel incredibly unhappy, and then, six months later, you are still deeply sad, but you're functioning a little better, it's probably grief, and it will probably ultimately resolve itself in some measure. If you experience a catastrophic loss, and you feel terrible, and six months later you can barely function at all, then it's probably a depression that was triggered by the catastrophic circumstances.

People think of depression as being just sadness. It's much, much too much sadness, much too much grief at far too slight a cause.
In a way depression is continuous with normal sadness. There is a certain amount of continuity, but it's the same way there's continuity between having an iron fence outside your house that gets a little orange dust spot that you have to sand off and do a little repainting, and what happens if you leave the house for 100 years and it rusts through until it's only a pile of orange dust. And it's that orange dust spot, that orange dust problem, that's the one that therapists set out to resolve.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality. Depression is demonstrated in Eeyore's Syndrome - the "Oh, well I guess we need rain too..." flat-line, monotone, lack of expression, lack of vitality, way of  thinking about yourself and the world around you. It gets down to the point you just don't care - about anything; what (or if) to eat, which team wins, whether or not you have friends, and whether or not you live. It just doesn't matter. Period.

When you are depressed, you don't see that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truth. It's easier to help schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside of them that needs to be exorcised, but it's difficult with depressives, because we believe we are seeing the truth.

But the truth lies.

People will say, "No one loves me." And you say, "I love you, your wife loves you, your mother loves you." You can answer that one pretty readily, at least for most people. But people who are depressed will also say, "No matter what we do, we're all just going to die in the end." A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what's really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don't distract us very much.
Depression is so exhausting. It takes up so much of your time and energy, and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse, but the silence is necessary to avoid the stigma surrounding depression.

In Rwanda, East Africa,they have some rituals that rely upon working towards vitality,but they had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers, especially the ones who came right after the genocide.
As described by a natural healer...

Well, they would do this bizarre thing. They didn't take people out in the sunshine where you begin to feel better. They didn't include drumming or music to get people's blood going. They didn't involve the whole community. They didn't externalize the depression as an invasive spirit. Instead what they did was they took people one at a time into dingy little rooms and had them talk for an hour about bad things that had happened to them.We had to ask them to leave the country.

Depression is broadly perceived to be a modern, Western, middle-class thing, but it is a human condition that has probably been around since "Lucy" although known by many different names and shown in countless ways and means in every country and culture in the planet.

Depression sucks.

Black Dog

When others seem to be enjoying life, the black dog stands in the way for a lot of people.

The Black Dog is an equal opportunity mongrel. It was Winston Churchill who popularized the phrase Black Dog to describe the bouts of depression he experienced for much of his life. 

Winston Churchill popularised the phrase 'the Black Dog', although it had been round for many years before. In a way a black dog, hunting by moonless night in a blackened wood is quite possibly the best metaphor for depression. 

It hunts silently, stealthily, approaching its victim unseen and unnoticed until it's too late. No one is immune from it - actors, politicians, homeless people, emergency personnel, middle class families, children, the strong, the weak, men, women, anyone.

But in between clever euphemism and metaphor and personal experience is the cavernous gulf of ignorance. Even family members who love and care deeply for a person with depression can find themselves without understanding - bewildered by what from the outside seems such a minor thing. 

The gulf in understanding, the lack of support from people who just 'don't understand', can lead to the un-consenting and unwilling owner of a Black Dog to feel isolated and alone and utterly abandoned. 

The Black Dog wants nothing more than to keep family and friends away, to make the owner believe that no one does or even can understand what it's like. 

That no one cares and there is no helping hand. 

And once there in the cold dark lair of the beast it saps the life from it's victim.