Major Mood Disorders welcomes Marci Sparmic as she describes her story

This morning I took a few medications, can’t even remember their names–that’s how messed up I’m in right now. I haven’t had much sleep in the past three weeks and they say that this is a prime moment for hallucinations caused by depression. My diagnosed severe depression has been with me for about five years and there’s never been improvement in sight. It wasn’t until yesterday did my hallucinations become worse, the thought of seeing my lost friend took over me.

My Depression does Cause Hallucinations

Sometimes these hallucinations drive me mad, they happen mostly when I slept very little but at times occassionally. Am I prone to psychotic depression? My husband works a nine to five job, comes home pretty good mooded–lord knows his mood is his way of cheering me up, but sometimes cheering isn’t really possible. I often pretend I’m happy but not really, I’ve lost sight and track and interest in things I liked before. Once we went skiing in Switzerland when I was 20 and it was great, loved it and I’ve always been skiing since, but once depression took hold of me, I never skiied again. Sometimes my dreams take on the hallucinations and I walk around in my sleep, my therapist may really believe that I am heading into a psychotic depression.

My Severe Depression and Hallucinations

This severe depression makes the situation more agonizing, sometimes I see things that aren’t there, that shouldn’t be there and that doesn’t make sense–I swear that they are there. Sometimes when I walk, my hallucination induced depression makes me believe that I am walking on a straight path, that the tangibles are there but I feel like I were floating up and up, getting lighter and my head calming–but it was only getting worse. Trying to snap out of it feels like I have, that I look again and I haven’t, strange isn’t it? My hallucinations depict a moment of initial triump and then followed by a swift landing back on Earth. I’ll give this journal entry to my therapist when I’m done, I’m sure that he would like to know what I am feeling.

My therapist told me that most people experience auditory forms of hallucinations but I am not sure, sometimes I hear faint sounds but other times feels very distant, or soft for me to pick up.

I often feel light-headed, lacking attention and focus and that I see my dead friend in front of me sometimes, except that she’s not dead. The moment seems to be lost all the time, the skies seem the darken much earlier and my mind wanders off to another place–in act, I am betting that I always am somewhere other than where I am supposed to be. People don’t understand what it’s like to have these hallucinations, that they think it’s just going to go away like a bad rash, but it hasn’t, it won’t. Some nights I wonder if I will ever sleep, often I am lying awake and yet I know that the depressive hallucinatory symptoms will come again right after, right aay and with swiftness during the day. At times like these, I think that resting is the only thing that I can do, but resting is pleasurable and it doesn’t happen all the time for me thanks to my severe depression.