anxiety, behavioral health, bipolar, depression, major depression, major depressive disorder, mental health, mental illness, personal, psych, psychology, stress, Uncategorized

Depression Hurts

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Depression hurts.  Literally.

Not only does it hurt us emotionally and mentally and where it decides to beat us up in our minds —

—- but physically it takes a toll on us.  Our bodies ache!  Our joints hurt.  Our muscles ache.  We get tired.  It feels like a truck hit us.  A bus ran over us.

I remember going to my doctor a few months ago and complaining that my joints were hurting me — not all of them, but my joints in my fingers and my toes, my ankles and my elbows.  Specifically my fingers though.  At some point her partner had diagnosed me with arthritis and it does run in my family.  She looked surprised and looked through the lab work — she said that the doctor had messed up my lab work, ordered the wrong tests, and diagnosed it off the wrong test.

Now I was confused — why the heck was I hurting so bad!!!  I was going through an awful bout of depression at the time.  She said it might have been the depression, that could definitely cause the pain, but to make sure she would run some labs and get some x-rays.

Off I went for the labs and x-rays.  A few days later – bam! I was fine! Nothing was wrong physically via the tests.

It was the depression.  I was feeling so bad that my body was literally hurting too.  I wasn’t purposefully making myself hurt, but I was feeling so bad emotionally that my body was too.

Depression can come out in so many ways.  Sometimes, people don’t even realize they are depressed immediately.  They know they feel a bit down, but their symptoms mainly appear as the physical aches and pains and fatigue.

At one point, there was even a Cymbalta commercial focused on “Depression Hurts” — a lot of people made fun of it, you can actually find parodies of it on youtube.  But it really isn’t funny… it is real – depression does hurt.  It hurts more than just mentally, it hurts physically too.

7 thoughts on “Depression Hurts”

  2. So, so true. I don’t have depression, but I am diagnosed with fibromyalgia as well as PTSD. I am convinced that the PTSD is a major contributing factor to the fibromyalgia. In fact, I am planning a blog post on it one day!

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  5. Well it makes sense that depression causes physical pain. The brain is the centre of everything we think and feel and it communicates with the body. Sending screwed up messages that we feel as pain and tiredness.
    Your story reflects how important it is to get the right tests done and the wrong tests can provide false positive results.
    There is so much overlap with all illness with diagnoses not being cut and dry or black and white.
    I’m glad that you sorted out the real cause of the problem.

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  6. Yes, it is very important for doctors to know everything and perform the right tests. I don’t like doctors to always just assume “it is in your head” and not perform tests. I have had that happen far too many times. However, my first doctor also had me on arthritis medication which was not healthy for me to be taking since I did not have it – simply because she did not order the correct blood test and then misread the one she did. Her partner took into account my whole health history and figured it out. The whole picture and proper testing should always be done.

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  7. Unfortunately some doctors lack the ability to see the big picture. Some are also simply concernef with pushing as many patients through as possible.

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