Speaking to so many people who suffer from poor mental health, those that do seek help, nobody seems to have been asked the 1000mph question.
We’re going to be looking at all sorts of aspects of the experience of diagnosis, from the very seeds of deciding to look for help for the very first time and forwards through that experience. But for now, we’re going to skip a little bit forward into this experience and talk about something that’s never asked.
1000mph question? What and why?
Well, it’s actually very simple. Once somebody finds themselves sat down with a mental health professional, the word ‘depressed’ or ‘depression’ will have come out by one party or another for sure.
What is not really established though is what the experience of that depression is for the sufferer, in one key respect…
One set of people talked to fall into a category where they would say their experience of depression is a ‘flat’ one. These people say they feel, to use a UK expression, ‘flat as a pancake’. Unmotivated. Slowed to a crawl. Heavy. Drained. A typical person said “oh, I just can’t get out of bed, then I sit on the sofa and I can be stuck there, I just won’t get up, I just feel sh*t and down”.
Then the other set of people experience their depression entirely differently. These people say they feel negative thoughts piling in on-top of each other, unrelenting, and fast. They will be exploring every thought, turning them over and over, and then another thought comes in. They’re busy exploring and imagining every possible outcome of an imagined scenario, and then another one, and another one. These people’s experience of depression is not flat, it is coming at them at 1000mph.
So the question really is to ask if they experience depression as an intense experience of thought after thought coming at them at 1000mph?
Now, why is this question important?
The descriptions above should answer that, people experience depression quite differently. The answer to the question actually can really help in diagnosis, and the 1000mph question is probably the single best hack to finding out what the person experiences, in terms that can go on to inform how to help them.
Of all the people spoken to, who’ve been asked if they have EVER been asked a question along these lines by a mental health professional or GP, a grand total of precisely NONE have said they have. This is despite the fact that ALL of them had an answer one way or the other.
If you suffer from depression, and you fall into the 1000mph camp, then this blog could very well end up being of serious help to you. So, if your experience when you are ‘down’ can be described as ‘really fast’ and ‘unrelenting thought after thought’ even coming second by second, one after another, and ‘intense’, keep following!!!
We’ll go into what the 1000mph answer shows, and the ways it can help bring about actions that are going to finally help you later in this blog. Mental Health professionals haven’t seemed to work out that asking the question can ‘hack’ very quickly to understanding the sufferer’s condition, and potentially it can start the steps of informing a diagnosis really efficiently. It’s much much more informative than asking someone ‘how they feel’, as all that would really do is get the answer of ‘what they feel’ at that time, which never looks at thought velocity and frequency and does not look at what the actual features of your condition are.
A note at this point, if you don’t fall into the 1000mph camp, this blog is most definitely still going to offer things that can help you. All of it straight talking, and all of it making very simple sense.
On the next post, we’ll be looking at the “diluted sea of advice and information on mental health” and why people go from one thing to the next, when what they really want is just for something to work …if you’re one of those people, we think you are finally on the right blog.