No prizes for guessing where I've been during my recent long (and longest) absence from the pages of RD/KA!. Thank goodness then for games and old friends, which between them have brought cheer to this would-be scrivener. I'll get to all that later but first, I must return to my self-appointed mission to cast some illumination into the little understood dark corners of clinical depression.
I've already talked about the difference between clinical depression and the bouts of the blues with which everyone is familiar. Another dimension of this difference in scale is that being profoundly clinically depressed isn't just about feeling much worse for much longer than a bout of the blues.
What I mean to say is that being clinically depressed is as much about behaviour as it is about moods. That is to say: the cocktail of despair, self-loathing and so on that characterises profound clinical depression typically undermines all the familiar habits of everyday life. Self-care falls apart, sleep cycles are disturbed, to name but two examples of the bad habits into which you descend as your mood implodes.
A peculiar consequence of this aspect of depression is that these habits can persist when your mood lifts. So you can actually be feeling quite chipper in many ways, but remain trapped in bad habits that keep you down in the dumps even when you're no longer profoundly clincally depressed. Healed but limping you might say, to over-extend the metaphor I used previously to convey the difference between clincal depression and the blues.
Anyhoo, I'll aim to be back tomorrow with some recent gaming updates- I've got another 2 episodes of Serenity to watch tonight, a delight worth savouring. ;)
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