Chronic Dysthymia

[Sarah81]

I have just recently had the diagnosis of chonic dysthymia after many years without a diagnosis and just wondering if any one else had had this diagnosis and how they manage to cope with the destressing low moods that never seem to go away.....

Thanks for any advice

[Chimera]

It's one of the diagnoses I was given most recently. I didn't take it very seriously. All it seemed to be was a vague statement by a bored and overworked psychiatrist that something had been making me very unhappy for most of my life, but he couldn't be arsed to work out what it was, so he slapped a Latin name on it. It's like saying sleep is caused by a dormitive principle. It's not a genuine medical diagnosis at all. I've had plenty of other pointless and uninformative pseudo-diagnoses as well.

I know that that's not very helpful (but a diagnosis of dysthymia is not very helpful either). As for how I cope with the constant low moods: well, I don't, I just go on feeling low. I do find it helps to think of my suffering as meaningful rather than a meaningless product of some vague, unobserved chemical imbalance. I still think, as I have thought for decades, that the solution lies in some sort of human relationship, perhaps under the heading of "psychotherapy", perhaps not. It is very hard, for me, to find any real help (especially from the ******* NHS, but I don't want to rant about that), but I'm quite hopeful about the counsellor I am seeing intermittently at the moment.

In my most hopeless moods, I do tend to lapse back into thinking that everything is meaningless, and my constant misery is the product of a brain which has been faulty all my life. But on the whole I think that belief in this so-called "diagnosis" is more a "symptom" of my "mental illness" than it is an explanation or even a description of it.

P.S. I'm sorry if I just sound a bit cynical at the moment. But it's Saturday evening, and Saturday evenings are like Christmas: depressing.

[CBTish]

Low moods that never seem to go away are usually called depression, and from a clinical point of view depression is usually one of the easiest mental illnesses to treat, even after many years. But a long time ago you wrote here about having CBT. Did it not work well? Or did it only work for a while?

[Sarah81]

hi, Yeah i was kinda suprised at the diagnosis and like you think that it is more a symptom of my mental illness that the actual problem....
when i was at the doctor it was like yeah you have been depressed for the last 17 years of your life so you have chronic dysthymia...i felt quite dissapointed at this becaue i know that there is more to it than that and i recon so does the doctor but he is just too lazy to find out what is wrong and jut puts me on loads of different medications like anti psychotics and mood stabilizers as well as an anti depressant and anti anxiety drugs...
after giving me that diagnosis the psychatrist promptly discharged me and i have been fightng to get back to see him or a different doctor but they keep blocking me at every chance...This just makes my moods worse because it feels like they have given up on me and that i should just give up on tryng to help myself.....

Sorry if this is a bit jumbled up but so is my head and my thinking just now...I just find everything the now so stressful to cope with just now and the diagnosis of being depressed for most of my life just doesn't help because i know i feel like that anyways!!!!

I done 18 months of CBT and found it helpfu in my self harming but not so much with my low moods....They seem to be as bad as ever just now!

[Chimera]

after giving me that diagnosis the psychatrist promptly discharged me

Same here. I wrote something in the forum recently to the effect that it almost seems as if they want to get rid of patients with long-term complex or hard to diagnose disorders; but not many people seem to have that impression; so I'm left thinking that I'm just being a bit paranoid. (Not a diagnosis!)

the diagnosis of being depressed for most of my life just doesn't help because i know i feel like that anyways!!!!

Exactly.

[CBTish]

...it almost seems as if they want to get rid of patients with long-term complex or hard to diagnose disorders; but not many people seem to have that impression...

Actually, I have that impression too. It surprises me because hard-to-diagnose is not the same as hard-to-treat. For example, if depression is a major problem in someone's life, then the depression can usually be treated even if there are a lot of other factors confusing the diagnosis.

When I hear of someone with depression having CBT for 18 months but it didn't help with the depression, it makes no sense to me. CBT was invented for depression. It makes me wonder whether the therapist was really qualified in CBT. A lot of the "CBT" in the NHS is done by people who are qualified in something else entirely, and they just try to do CBT out of a book.