Posts for category ‘depression’

Max has been having a lot of problems and issues lately.  He has been unmanageable, explosive, and angry.  It seems like he has taken major steps backward after improving quite substantially.

It is not that he has been intentionally getting into trouble.  In fact, even though he is 10 years old he has been crying when he finds out that he has been misbehaving.

The crying in itself is unusual because he has never really cried since he was a baby.  I mean he can fall and bang or scrape his knees.  He can bang his thumbs with hammers so badly they swell and throb in pain.  But he will jump up and walk it off while saying:

“I’m okay, I’m okay!”

When he says this we know he really got hurt but he has always tried to hide it.

But in the past few months he has been misbehaving and crying more and more often.  And as I said he is not doing it intentionally.

A lot of things have been happening that have been affecting him badly.  These are some of them:

• His dad (me) came down with pneumonia and it took several months to get well.  As a result I hadn’t been available to play or go different places with him

• A month ago we had a pre-season snowstorm.  We lost power for 24 hours which wasn’t too bad but his grandparents were without it for 3 days.  His granddad is paralyzed from the waist down and his grand mom has slowed down quite a bit; they are both in their 80s.  Since they couldn’t take care of themselves through this it fell to us to make sure they survived.  We ended up taking them to different hotels each night since we could only book one day at a time.

• Two days after the power came on they had to move to a handicap accessible apartment.  And of course, we had to take care of it.

• But with all of the moves and disruptions Max’s grandmother has been terribly disoriented. So as result we have two more children to take care of.  I make breakfast every morning for them and take it to their apartment.  On days when their pcas don’t show up it falls to me to get them up and ready for the day.  My wife makes dinner for them, takes it over to them, and washes their dishes.  Later on she goes back to put them to bed.

• And then there was the big one. I got a call from a close friend of mine a few weeks ago informing me that his oldest boy had committed suicide.  He was 16 years old.  Max and I have been spending as much time as we can with the family.  My friend is a single parent with 3 boys (2 now) and the youngest is a close friend of my son.  And Max looked up to the older boy.

This is not everything that has happened but these are the biggest.

Max has been a trooper.  He has helped my friend and his grandparents whenever asked.

But with all of the stress over these situations and our exhaustion we hadn’t noticed that he was becoming very unhappy….until the bad behavior.  He can’t listen, he does what he wants, and he is very explosive when he doesn’t get his way.

We’ve had to call in child services and it has been recommended that if he breaks anything or hits us to be ready to call the police.

He’s a far cry from where he had been over the summer.  He is basically back to where he was when he was 7 and 8 years old.

We can see now that the stress has been unbearable for him too even though we didn’t notice it for awhile.

He has also told us that he hasn’t been getting enough time with us.  Well he has, a lot, but there haven’t been any close and happy times.  None of us has been in the best shape.  My wife has been exhausted as a result of taking care of the two of us while I was sick which doesn’t help her disability at all.  And now to be her parents’ caregiver is taking a toll as well.

But our priority has to be Max right now.  Yes, her parents need help but he needs more from us.

As I write this I can hear him in his toy room which is right next to my office.  He is working with his advocate cleaning up the thousand different messes.  He is acting calm and collected with her but this is following an explosion he had after his mother requested he turn down his music.

And it’s raining again.

As a PCA (Personal Care Assistant) I work with many different people. I don’t have a specific set schedule but I fill in for regular pcas when they can’t make one of their scheduled days. In the process I come in contact with people that have a lot of physical and mental issues. Sometimes they have problems coming to terms with what is happening to them.

I am not a psychologist. I can only listen to them and perhaps offer an opinion if they ask. For example, I have one client who seems to have been hit with a lot of things at once. Instead of being able to work on one problem at a time he is overwhelmed with trying to come up with solutions for all of them.

• These are some of his current issues:Just this past Christmas he needed an operation on his lower back because his spinal cord was being constricted by cartilage. Ever since he has been wheelchair bound. He is able to move himself around his apartment but if he goes outside he needs someone else to push him. This is very different from when, as a carpenter, he would be up and down ladders all day building houses.

• His brother died last year. This was the last of his siblings. Something like this can really emphasize your mortality.

• He and his wife have spent the last of their money. Now they are living on her social security check. This means that they have had to move from a decent 2 room apartment to a smaller 2 room subsidized apartment. This has the affect of making him feel like a failure at taking care of his wife.

• More and more medicine has been prescribed for him lately. Now he is suffering from side effects. For example, some of them can cause short term memory loss. And now we find that he will repeat a question over and over again because he has forgotten that he has asked it already. Now certainly this can be the start of Alzheimer’s but when several meds suggest this as a side effect, it is something to look at. But for him it is just another sign of losing his independence. He has to rely on people to take care of him.

• He still owns a car but since the fall he has not been able to drive it. It just sits in the driveway. His pcas all do his shopping for him now. If his wife needs to go on an errand she will call their neighbor. They are also paying too much in car insurance. His decision after a lot of soul searching and talking to his wife is to sell the car. She told me that when they discussed it she cried and perhaps he did too. The man has been driving since he was 10 years old on his father’s farm. That’s 75 years. Yet another sign of lost independence.

• And most recently he complained about pain and swelling in his knee. It appears that he has “water on the knee”. He doesn’t remember falling or bruising it so the cause is a mystery. I was contracted to take him to a doctor. It wasn’t as bad as everyone had thought and the decision was to put him on physical therapy for a couple of weeks. This was more evidence of him getting old and his body failing.

With everything hitting him at once like this he has become very unhappy. I can’t say that he is suffering from depression. That will be something that a doctor would have to determine but I know he dreads ending up in a nursing home. If that happens, he says, he will get into bed, turn his face to the wall, and wait for the end.

I have heard a lot of people say things like:

“Come on, he is in his 80′s now. He should expect these things to be happening.”

“He is lucky to even be alive at this age.”

“He should just slow down and accept any help that is offered.”

“You know if I was his age I’d love to be going into assisted living.”

But I’ll tell you a secret. These people will say this now but when they actually get that age they will be resistant to the change as well. Why? Because they will find that they are losing their independence. They won’t have any control anymore over the things that they do or how they spend their money. Or worst of all, keeping their bodies from falling apart.

This is where my client is at. He has gone from being a strong robust independent man to an invalid. His wife is also in her 80s and she has been declining so she cannot help him very much. This means that he has to rely on strangers to take care of him. He has been having a very difficult time coming to terms with all of this.

When I am with him we get to laugh a lot. To him I am “the kid” even though I’m in my 50s. I do as much as I have to to get him where he needs to be but otherwise I let him do as much as he can himself. And I listen to his stories. He’s got a lot of them.

When I am his age I hope I have lots of stories to tell my son who is 9 now. Max has been trying to make sure I stay healthy.

He gets me working out constantly: “Max, how many times do you think I can run around the track??”

He is after me to lose weight: “Come on Max, I’m not that heavy!!”

But you know what, I can see myself in 30 years being in the same place my client is. I see it as part of my job to help him transition from unhappiness to acceptance and perhaps be able to take a more active interest in life again.

I was talking to my therapist this morning.  I said “My family is unhappy.  My wife is unhappy.  My son is unhappy.”  In a quiet voice I followed that with, “and I’m unhappy”.  He had to get his hearing aids because he heard the first two statements but missed the third and thought maybe he just hadn’t heard it.  He got it the second time.

The three of us had a bit of trouble last night and I had been thinking about it on the trip to his office.  Why is everyone unhappy?

Before I get to that I want to mention the run in I had with a policeman this morning.  I was traveling down a main road that had breakdown lanes on each side.  I came to a point where there were trucks and backhoes working in the one on my side.  And of course there was the obligatory policeman.  He had stopped my lane of traffic so that trucks could move and men could sweep the street.  He was standing in the lane for oncoming traffic and he was signaling those cars to pass behind him in their breakdown lane.  This would seem that we would then have room to drive down a short distance on the lane he was standing in but we had to wait.

When he decided we could go he stepped into our lane and waved the cars on.  The oncoming cars were still traveling the breakdown lane so those in front of me pulled into the oncoming lane so they wouldn’t hit him.  As they passed him he began to scream, jump up and down, and point with both hands towards the lane he was standing in.

“Morons!  You are supposed to be driving in this lane!!  THIS LANE, IDIOTS!!”

After the first 3 cars passed him he jumped into the oncoming lane in front of me…good thing I was going slowly.

“Why are you following those morons??  Move over into that lane!” he said again pointing downwards with both hands.

I pulled my car into the correct lane and started to pass him.  I thanked him for directing me but that seemed to set him off more.

“You are a MORON for following THEM!!”

I responded “You’re a moron”.  Luckily my windows were closed.  When I thought about it later I wondered who the bigger moron was, us, or the person leading us.

I bring this story up because of the fact that I went from 0 to 60 in anger when this man yelled at me and called me a moron.  I certainly spent enough time worrying about him rather than about my family’s and my issues.  When I arrived at my therapist’s office I told him the story.  I brought up the question of depression again; am I depressed?  He doesn’t see it; he has told me this many times before.  I’ve also gone to doctors and they say the same thing; basically that I am sad, unhappy, and down in the dumps but I am not clinically depressed and the anger is a result of this.

I have a lot of things on my plate right now: no job, an 8 year old son with bipolar disorder, pdd/nos, and odd, and a wife with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia.  The doctors believe once I get everything straightened out my mood will shift.  This is known as nonclinical depression.

On the other hand my wife has clinical depression.  The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) describes this as feeling sad, helpless, and hopeless.  She was taking medication for it but stopped when she became pregnant with Max.  After he was born she found that she couldn’t start taking it again because she was now getting a reaction from it.  She has tried many things since but nothing has helped.

And then there is Max; with his diagnoses and living with two parents who are unhappy what is a boy to do?  He already feels very different from other kids.  He has mood swings that bother him.  He’s constantly taking medicine that he doesn’t like.  And he has two parents that are very unhappy.  Even though they try to hide their feelings it still affects him.  As a result he is very unhappy and possibly depressed.

I would say that individually we are three depressed people but I find that combining us together is more than the sum of its parts.  We work off each other and things tend to get worse.  We become 3 times 3 times 3 depressed or depressed cubed.

What can we do about this?  Well, we are all in therapy separately.  We also have a family therapist.  My wife and I are looking for marriage counseling because as she said this morning we don’t want to divorce we just want to stop being unhappy.  I continue looking for work.  She is still looking for some medication that will provide relief while not killing her. And we both are continuing to find the best help for Max