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What an excellent question, Sean!

It has been in my mind recently because the last five weeks have been the most depression free period of my life that I can recall. I’m still trying to get used to it, but it certainly gives a nice opportunity to view BIID with a clarity that is unobscured by depression. Yes, exactly what is that mal d’etre? The removal of depression has done nothing to remove BIID, yet I feel better able to deal with it.

I guess I would describe what is left as dysphoria rather than depression. I think that Prozac has helped me a lot with depression, but it doesn’t do much, if anything, for dysphoria.

Well, I tend to think that “depression” is just a word like many others. What are you really feeling?

From the clinical/psychological point of view, there certainly is a more precise understanding of what “depression” means. But I am not a clinician or psychologist. It just seems that there are lots of different forms of depression – or the other way round: lots of symptoms are described under the umbrella term of “depression”.

Have you been officially diagnosed by a health care professional?

I know people with BIID who show symptoms of depression. I know some who have got an amputation and say that they are completely free of depression now. I have heard of at least one person who says that he is happy as an amputee but has had a depression (or depressed phase) afterwards. And I know people who show only few symptoms of depression although they have strong BIID.

The relation between BIID and depression seems to be an open question for research.

How is it with transgendered people? Are they depressed before and free of depression after gender reassignment surgery?

@Phil: I’m not sure what the statistics show for GRS (which in my case I prefer to be the acronym for genital rearrangement surgery). However, my experience is that depressive episodes have been milder post surgery than pre surgery. My observation of friends suggests that this is typical.

@Phil, when I talk about depression, I intend it to mean clinical depression. I don’t think of a case of “the blues” or being down a bit.

And yes, I’ve been diagnosed by health care professionals as having chronic depression, particularly dysthymia with episodes of accute depression.

Dear Sean, also in the clinical definitions of “depression”, there are a lot of space and a lot of different forms.

When one looks at the history of psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy, one can get the impression that the concepts and notions, diseases and disorders change quite a bit over time – both the words used for them and the “thing” they describe. These “patterns” are in the eye of the beholder (theory maker), they are hypothetical constructs.

What is real, are your feelings and experiences, and I guess that many of them cannot really be expressed in words or not at all.

Your chart seems to show that BIID and depression go quite parallel. Does this mean they have the same causes or triggers? Or is one the trigger/cause of the other, with a very short reaction time?

There are lots of theories about why and how depression develops, but nobody really knows. The same applies to BIID. So how could we know the relationship between BIID and depression?

A friend of mine who has BIID just recently left a psychosomatic clinic after 10 weeks of treatment for his depression. The depression is not totally, but mostly gone – his BIID is still there. But it hurts less.

You have depression, so you should get better counselling, support and therapy. Seems to be difficult in your region. I wish you that you meet a really good, understanding, experienced, open-minded, nonjudgmental, empathic therapist!

Dear Chloe, thanks for pointing me at a better word, I’ll try to remember it next time (genital rearrangement surgery, GRS).

Did my ‘so-called’ depression correlate with strong biid times?

I’m inclined to think so, especially since those were the times that I acted them out the most. Whether that be due to being able to stay home or not, I know not.

For the antidepressants helping or not, I’d have to say no, not one bit. Now if your asking if they did the opposite, absolutely yes. That is if I was able to keep them down long enough to be ingested, and if I was, the apparent side effect was that I would be the king of my porcelain throne all day, to put it tactfully.

Whether they made it worse due to the fact that I was still a teenager or not, I don’t know, nor does it seem like I will know, as most psychologist, or were they psychiatrists.

At any rate, the ones who can prescribe prescriptions seem to be quite hesitant and reluctant to prescribe any more antidepressants with my history of them exasperating what they intend to treat.

Although, I think one psychiatrist got pretty close to stating the matters quite aptly. Stating that she didn’t think it was depression, but that it was of frustration. However, she stated that it was frustration relating to school, rather than biid.