Supplement to help with depression/anxiety - TheBody.com's Bulletin Boards

Yeah, antioxidants are my friends, LOL. I remember the very first time I ever heard about them. It was in about 1988, I was watching TV and this program came on, a documentary about how some people were beating the aging process. It explained in great detail, very scientific, about how our cells are constantly being damaged by pollutants and that as each cell divides, the damage is repeated in both new cells and over time and many more cell divisions that damage is simply carried through and the result is what we largely see as 'aging'. Just the body breaking down and falling apart from the cells which compose it being torn to shreds by pollutants. Taking these antioxidants mopped-up the pollutants before they could get to your cells, and if you took enough of them, well - voila! You aged much slower.
I remember that program so well, it had a man and a woman who had been taking them for years pinching their skin and showing the cameras how elastic it still was. They said that skin age was determined by how quickly it snapped back into place when you pulled on it. So of course I went straight out and bought some and tried it out for myself. I'd just gone back to smoking at the time, I'd smoked since I was 16 and had managed to quit for about 6 months prior and my face had cleared up, all the blotches had gone and I looked wonderful. But in the weeks leading up to me seeing this program I'd gone back to it again and I'd quickly returned to having blotches and yellow skin tones and, well, not looking the best. It was just pure good timing and luck at the time that I saw this program when I did.

So I started taking the antioxidants, and like they had said on the show, I took a whole bucket more each day than they put on the label. I did my research and found out which vitamins were toxic and which ones weren't and made educated guesses on how many I could get away with taking each day and not ruin my health. That was before Selenium was included in the ones over here, it was illegal in this country for many years. So besides Retinol, all the others were pretty safe in large doses anyway. The two you have to monitor very carefully are selenium and vitamin A in it's retinol form, but beta carotene converts to A and is excreted when you have enough in your system anyway so they usually have that in them now instead.
After a few months I could see my skin clear again, the tone improved, I looked great again, but this time I was still smoking. I found that they really did work, they cleaned-out my skin/cells of a lot of the pollutants and had the same effect on my complexion as stopping smoking had months before. I was totally convinced and have taken them ever since.
And like yourself, I look young for my age and though I do slowly get older over time which is inevitable, it happens at an extremely slow rate. I don't go out all that much, but when I do and I go to the same bar and see the same people about once a year, I love seeing the jaws drop and looks of horror when they see I haven't changed at all. Gives me a real chuckle. The only thing I haven't been able to stop is the grey hair coming, but a bit of hair colour takes care of that.

ART I have just commenced in the last 2 weeks, I'm on day 14 as I write this. I've just been put on Kivexa and Nevirapine. I had some initial side effects to do with burning sensations in the lining of my mouth but they are subsiding now. I'm feeling wonderful already. Yeah, I got my blood checked every 3 months and my viral load was always somewhere in the tens of thousands and my t-cells around 450 or so. For 8 years the readings were pretty constant. I had one which shot up to over a hundred thousand viral load one time a year or more ago and the next one it was back down again and my t-cells only dipped down to 350 a couple of times. The last time they did I was so fed-up with seeing my body getting worse and worse, my energy levels in the pits, constant colds, skin breakouts of stupid fungal things and flaky skin which had no explanation, I was feeling like an old man and could only do a couple of things before collapsing into a chair and recovering. I kept seeing my t-cells in some magical "acceptable" level and felt like I was dying anyway. I had to plead for about a year to be put on something, tell them again and again that I had no quality of life and needed to give my body a break. My reasoning is that while it's distracted with the HIV, there are a thousand other things it's supposed to be doing but can't, every single little particle which enters our bodies has to be looked at, recognised, seen as friend or foe and then dealt with accordingly. I think I was just being swamped with so much incoming stuff in the form of bugs, bacteria, particles etc that my body was just collapsing under the strain. I had seen tiny little lumps all over my shoulders and chest for months and months, I just assumed I was getting older and my skin was going to pot, but in the last week they are disappearing and it's returning back to how it was before. I'm losing the bloated look I was getting and my energy levels are rising again, I can do a lot now and not get tired. Having HIV is more than just coming down with some fatal infection or cancer or lung condition or whatever and becoming fatally ill, it's your whole immune system being taken over and you just getting weaker and weaker as all the things it should be doing are ignored in favour of the bigger threat. At least that's what my experience has been. I'm over the moon now I'm doing something about treating it and knocking it on the head.

You mention how your depression may be connected to your HIV, and if I want to be honest with myself, I think mine is/was too. It didn't affect me until a couple of years after diagnosis, but if I really delve into it, I don't think I really acknowledged the reality of it at the time I was diagnosed. I think I was in a mild sort of denial for a couple of years. I just kept marching ahead as if nothing had happened, refusing to let myself be defined by anything such as an infection and putting it out of my mind as much as I could. I had already been given herpes at the age of 16 and had dealt with that for the whole of my adult sexual life, since the early 90's I had been taking acyclovir on a regular basis for it and I was very comfortable with having a virus living inside my body on a permanent basis, so when I was diagnosed HIV it didn't freak me out as it might have done to others, I didn't feel invaded or dirty or anything, I'd already gone through that stuff with the herpes 20 years before. It was initially more like "oh, another one, well 'hop on for the ride then' but be kind to me" more than anything else. But maybe I was just trying to laugh it off and be brave rather than let myself get frightened. The only thing that got me was thinking about my own death during the first 6 months all the time, which I found very distressing. It's just not natural for a 36 year-old to be doing that, it's something you expect someone in their 70's or 80's to be doing, not right when you're in your prime. I think that's probably the thing which affects us all the most. We're forced to face something like that all out of whack as far as timing is concerned and it plays with your mind and with your view of your life and your place in the world etc. I couldn't say "ahh... I'll get it done someday..." anymore, all of a sudden it was "oh, crap, there might not BE a someday! I better get started on anything I ever want to do". I remember I felt a great deal of urgency in getting things done in my life, like a cracker had been shoved up my butt, which was probably a good thing because I always was a big procrastinator. I still do feel that urgency, but it's subsided a fair deal.

But in relation to the depression, it wasn't until about 3 years after diagnosis when I had left my partner and was on my own, living in a rented house and not making ends meet and then getting laid off from my job and finding myself with no income and then at the same time having a whole bunch of losers come into my life and ruin what was left of it that I totally lost it and had a massive breakdown. And by that time no amount of positive thinking or doing healthy and creative things was going to work for me, medication was the only option in order for me to be able to function and not kill myself. I got so bad I couldn't hold a conversation, my mind was blank at the slightest hint of stress, someone would ask me a question and I couldn't answer even the simplest thing. If I was in a social situation and someone was making small talk, I would just have these thoughts running around like mad in my head "I know I'm supposed to say something..... I can't think what to say....." I would struggle and struggle for anything to say, my mind just was blank and I couldn't come up with anything coherent, and this was from someone who used to be the life of the party, always a quick response, able to put people at ease etc. Depression decimated me. I withdrew into myself and became a vegetable in my own world a lot of the time. The saving thing for me was when I was allocated a home of my own by the government, a small one bedroom bungalow with a front and back garden in a quiet place. I had become homeless and was living in a rooming house filled with cockroaches and drug addicts and foot fungus and had no kitchen of my own, no shower, no toilet, only one little room with a crooked single bed a few people had probably died in. When I finally got my own place I shut that front door and locked myself away for about a year and healed myself.
My problem was largely that I wasn't able to say no to people and had let people come into my life and alter it to suit themselves, I just wanted to please. I was too sensitive and a slave to what was going on in my environment at any given time. Too easily affected by my surroundings. Through a lot of healing and closing myself off from the world I learned that most of what had pushed me to depression was just not being, or feeling at least, in control of my own life. Once I was able to control who came into it and have absolute and total say over who came in my front door and how long they stayed there, I started to regain myself and heal. I did a lot of spring cleaning and removed just about everyone from my life because they were all toxic for me. In the year I was healing I worked out who I was now and what was important to me and rather than see the good in everyone and accept people at face value and forgive their bad behaviour, I gave myself total permission to say "if they aren't good for me, they aren't coming through that door." I ditched friends old and new, family, whoever I felt didn't care about my feelings or suffering and even though it was basically everyone I knew, I was happier having no-one in my life than even one person who was toxic for me. I started fresh and gave myself permission to know that even though everyone has a good side and everyone is basically right in their own way, for me it's OK to say "I don't like that person or how they treat me or how they behave and it's OK for me to not want to know them." Before I could never have done that. I felt I had a moral obligation to accept everyone on some level and if I said "go away" to someone I was being a selfish and bad person. I learned a lot in that year.

I think that all of us who suffer from depression can do a lot to combat it by taking back control of our lives and feeling able to say "no" more often. For me it was the feeling of losing control over my life which pushed me over the edge to begin with and kept me down in the pits of hell for about 5 years.
That's also why beginning ART is something which has made me feel even more empowered, the last thing that had me by the balls was the virus, going and having it monitored month after month, year after year was soul destroying for me when I could see and feel it killing me but could do nothing about it because my t-cells hadn't fallen below some magical pre-determined level. That made me so angry and frustrated. I really think they need to get off their arses and realise that it's the viral load which is the killer, not how well your body is or isn't coping with it. This "it isn't below the required level yet, see you in 3 months time" approach just made me feel frustrated, futile and angry, while I felt my body and quality of life slowly slip away.

BWB, if you are feeling moderately depressed, even without knowing you or your particular situation, I would say to you find anything and everything that annoys you and vexes you in your life, people, situations, things, whatever, no matter how small you think it is or how trivial, and give yourself total and utter permission to do something about removing or fixing them. Take away all stresses for the sake of your own well-being, if it's people show them you mean business and be clear in what you need them to do, I was ruthless far beyond what most people would feel comfortable doing, you don't have to completely cut people out of your life, but do bear in mind that each and every little annoyance will eat away at you and join together to make a burden which will depress you more and more. If you feel you are in total control of your life and what happens in it, even in relation to the HIV (which I really think we all need to make friends with, not fight, like the herpes, if it just lives in you and doesn't hurt you then it shouldn't be cause for stress, you can co-exist in peace maybe), you feel empowered and strong and those feelings go completely against the grain of depression. They help to cancel it out and heal you.
I also have noticed that those of us who suffer from depression seem to be more caring and sensitive to others than the rest of the world a lot of the time, we care too much at times it seems and work ourselves up into a mess, it seems like we take on the world's problems and everyone's in it onto our own shoulders. No wonder we get stressed and depressed. Try caring a little less, or at least diverting some of that special care to yourself. I have seen in myself and with alarming regularity in others who suffer this insidious condition that we always tend to put ourselves last on the list and that needs to change if we are to feel better in ourselves. It won't make you a horrible person if you think more about what you want and your own well being and less about others. Try it.

Just my thoughts on it.

Taurus.

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I'm like fake fruit...... I don't bruise that easy.

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