I’ve been dealing with depression (and anxiety) for well over 5 years now. I’ve tried so many different medications and treatments with no apparent success. Inevitably, in the course of the treatment, the doctor will ask if I’m starting to feel better to see if it’s worth continuing the treatment, up the dose, or swap to something else. And… I never know what to say. If it’s not going to get dramatically better all of a sudden, I don’t really know how to recognize any incremental progress if it’s happening at all and without being able to do that, I might be passing on treatments that could have helped if I gave it more time.
So if you’ve been in this situation, how did you recognize progress? To the extent that you can put it into words, what did it feel like to slowly get better as you were treated?
I used to have depression before I started HRT. I would dwell on all the world’s problems, and feel despair, and cry at night, and be quicker to anger when people annoyed me. Then within a week of starting HRT - not saying this would work for everyone, but it worked for me - my baseline magically got higher, most of the time I felt ok, found it easier to enjoy things, ignored the world’s problems, was calmer and less judgemental.