So I thought I was depressed... [View all]

For many years now, sporadically, I've felt very depressed for a period of time, as in enough to find a shrink. Maybe six or eight of them over the past forty years or so, with an average of maybe 6-8 sessions with each, and they all gave me the standard responses and approaches to depression. After a few sessions with each one, I realized I was mostly just hearing myself talk about what was depressing me but getting no real solutions.

A couple of weeks ago I had a couple of "water cooler" conversations with a co-worker and they set me thinking. So, just on a whim, I looked up whether there's a correlation between depression and boredom, and lo and behold, there's a fair amount of info online about this. So, after connecting the dots and doing some serious thinking about when I've been depressed, and what I was doing at the time, and so forth, I came up with a very non-medical, untrained, wild-ass diagnosis for myself: I haven't been so much depressed all this time as just bored out of my mind.

The ghost of Papa Sigmund has nothing to worry about, but this has given me a not-so-depressing way to think about how I'm feeling. I'll wait and see what happens.