Citations:
Exercise is an Effective Antidepressant http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/mindandbody/a/exercisedep.h...
Sunlight / Vitamin D and depression http://newfoundlandnews.blogspot.com/2008/01/sadness-seasona...
That doesn't mean you should barf a "Vit D good" information packet on every story about depression, though. Without taking the time to add context, it looks rude and dismissive.
Americans put such a high value on privacy to the point of isolation. I believe that that isolation allows psychological problems to come to the surface when they would otherwise not. Part of that is loneliness, part is the built in need to conform to a group's social dynamic which includes not acting crazy. Your behavior has a strong influence on your psychological state, so acting normal and happy can help regulate your moods.
Not to imply that this is a cure either. Including meds, these are all just treatments and they may work better for some than for others.
I've noticed this too. In addition to increasing cognitive load, stuff also tends to accumulate emotional baggage over time. (E.g., when your towels remind you of your ex-gf or whatever.) Just going through the house and throwing stuff out every couple years is profoundly therapeutic.
The drugs work for a lot of people, although it's essential to make lifestyle changes (exercise, sun, healthy diet) in addition to using them... but the people who are in the worst shape can't muster the energy to get out of depression until they start taking the drugs.
Anti-depressants are pretty amazing-- far from a panacea, but pretty effective.
Last summer I had my first panic attack.
Saying that, I wonder how many people who say "I had a panic attack" have ever experienced a full on, face on the floor, depersonalizing / derealizing panic attack.
It felt like I was losing my mind.
$250,000 in debt, followed by the disillusion of an 8 year relationship, loss of a job, and a move across the country in a three month period. Chase that with years of outright poverty (earning less than $10,000 [net] over the course of two years.)
7 days of Xanax and the wounds inflicted by three years of prolonged anxiety began to heal.
I probably would have killed myself if it weren't for the seven tiny pills that let me keep coding.
My company launches in about two months.
[not my real account]
The worst part was the month during which I thought it was a physical medical condition, and the absolutely rotten quality of treatment I got in many cases. One example was (during the worst attack I ever had) a 7-hour ER wait, including 6 hours locked up in the psych ER, without being told why this was happening. Once I was able to see a doctor (1 doctor on staff for the whole psych ER) he was able to explain what was happening and why, but even then, all he could prescribe was Buspar, which doesn't do anything for panic.
My experience is that the attacks don't go away entirely, but they become rarer and much more manageable. The depersonalizing attacks that feel like bad drug trips don't happen anymore for me (and stopped happening once I got appropriate medicine) because once I get to a 4 or 5 (heart racing, painful muscle tension, inability to concentrate) on the panic scale I can get it under control, taking a benzo if necessary.
Luckily, I have my anxiety in check now that it has a name, but, I've seen too many discarded people laying on hospitals floors with sheets over their faces.
My current girlfriend is a third year in med school, I've begged her to ask the other med students to be especially kind to the patients during their psych rotations.
To compound the badness of the situation, I went to the nearest ER, and I was living in Brooklyn at the time-- in a nice neighborhood, but 1 mile from serious ghetto territory. So the hospital was in the ghetto. Bad idea.
The waiting room was about 10 by 10, with six chairs and twice as many patients. Even if you were self-admitted, like me-- actually, I didn't even want to go, but a girl I was dating thought I should-- you couldn't leave. It was 6:00 pm on a Monday and there was one doctor on staff. By the way, Monday afternoons in the spring are the busiest time in the busiest season for psychiatric ERs, so there's literally no excuse for there having only been one doctor on staff.
The TV was extremely loud-- probably 90 decibels-- and some of the shows that played were rather violent. Since 2/3 of the patients were obviously there for anxiety-related problems, this was clearly a bad choice.
You had to ask the nurses to use the bathroom, and if you pissed them off, they'd threaten to bump you to the bottom of the list. Since I was "compliant" and got out in 7 hours, I can't imagine how long the waits are for the people who were uncontrollable.
Be careful not to line yourself up for another fall. It sounds like you take your trials too much to heart and need to learn to make a bit of distance between what is genuinely important and 'worldly' successes.
I mean, just take care and don't get sucked into thinking your new venture is everything.
That doesn't imply drugs are the wrong treatment. Maybe circumstances like the ones you experience are like accidents that break things. If some treatment can help the healing, why not. It just seems dangerous to assume that one can not live without the drugs forever after.
Anxious people tend to be more prone to panic attacks. A panic attack usually begins with a benign biological malfunction (misfiring of adrenal gland, slight breathing irregularity set off by allergies) that would otherwise be mild and possibly ignored, but if it launches a feedback loop of negative and anxious thoughts, it can become panic.
So the cause is, in part, biological. That doesn't mean that cognitive-behavior therapy in addition to drugs isn't usually a good idea.
Not saying that there can not be biological causes (malfunctioning nerves/brain/whatever), but it doesn't exclude the possibility of "logical" causes.