Monday, May 07, 2007

S is for Sad

As you all know, I have bipolar disorder and I've been through several clinical depressions in my life. Depression leaves an emptiness inside of me that I often try to fill with food. I always gain weight when suffering from a long depressive episode.

Does sadness, depression, or death have that effect on any of you? I thought the anecdote about the man who ate all the steaks after his love died was quite strange. I suppose it is understandable, but it still is strange.
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6 comments:

Ben said...

On a related note, I learned today that one of the differences between bipolar depression and unipolar depression is that in the former people gain weight, while in the latter people lose weight.

11:01 PM, May 07, 2007
cl said...

I don't know why eating would be related to depression, but it is. I think it's a fundamental feeling of disliking yourself and thus feeling like there's no reason to take care of your body, but you want to satiate a bad mood at the same time.

1:29 PM, May 09, 2007
cl said...

Ben, we should start a self-help book exchange. I could send you "Making Peace with Food," and I could eat "The Volumetrics Way." Then next month we could fight over "Mind over Mood" vs. "Getting Unstuck." Hehe.

1:30 PM, May 09, 2007
kc said...

I don't have an appetite at all when I'm sad or depressed. When my grandma died, I lost 20 pounds just because it didn't even occur to me to eat, and when it did, it was purely perfunctory. I have a deep association between food and joy, so if I'm feeling joyless, I don't feel like food.

Same thing with sex. It always amuses me when you see people in movies having sex right after a funeral or some other profound sadness (the idea being to reaffirm life or some such whatever). I've never known if that's a movie myth, like the simultaneous orgasm, or if there really are people for whom death and breakups and other tragedy make them really horny. Maybe it's like the food thing. People who feel blue might think eating a giant sundae will make them happy — and maybe it does for about 10 minutes.

12:39 PM, May 10, 2007
Erin said...

I can't eat when I'm sad, either. I lost 15 pounds when my dad died. I just don't feel like eating something if I'm not going to enjoy it.

6:58 PM, May 15, 2007
Ben said...

For me, sadness creates an empty space that I am desperate to fill. Food doesn’t help that much, but it seems like it will while I’m eating it. Sometimes when I’m sad about something specific, it becomes difficult for me to eat for a short time (never longer than a day). That’s usually when sadness is accompanied by anxiety (pretty common for me).

But the endless emptiness that I feel when depressed for a long period of time makes me want to overeat. Which makes me more depressed.

11:30 AM, May 17, 2007

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