[Not Applicable]

First off, I know we can't fix our MLCers and that isn't what I am trying to do. I know they have to get through this on their own.

However, ever since about two weeks ago when my husband said, "If my feelings came back, I would wish I was dead" I have been having a nagging feeling in my mind. I've done a lot of reading about some of the strange symptoms he is having and while they are common in MLC they are also signs of depression. My husband told me he isn't depressed when i suggested it to him, but he also couldn't come up with another word to describe what it is he is feeling. I think he is thinking more about depression as sadness and what he has is more a numbness. In any case, he isn't happy and that is clear.

I'd never forgive myself if he were to become suicidal and I hadn't said anything to him. I'd like to have a conversation with him about his symptoms (not the cause or our situation), some of which he probably doesn't even realize he has like the memory issues, and how they can be related to depression (not MLC as he doesn't like hearing that) and just let him know that if he ever feels the need or feels he could benefit from seeing a psychiatrist or getting treatment I will support him and stand by him. I do believe he was treated for depression at one point when he was in his first or second year in college. I don't know a lot of details but i remember him saying to me something about it in the first year of our marriage. I seem to remember him telling me he wanted to run away from the university and thought about throwing his books under a train or something. He is a doctor himself so i would approach it from a clinical perspective to make it more palatable.

I'm just wondering if anyone ever attempted something like this with their MLCer. I don't want to pressure him to go to a psychiatrist at this point but just to let him know if at any time he wants to that I will support him in that. They say MLC gets worse before it gets better and there is the depression phase coming up at some point and I would rather do something proactive at this point if I can to provide him with a cushion to fall on if he needs it when that time comes. Not meaning I am the cushion but the cushion being feeling it is ok to seek help if he needs it.

[Thunder]

Changing,

I doubt saying anything to him will make a difference.
He knows you love him and he knows you support him, but by telling him IF he is depressed you will support him only is saying you feel there is something wrong with him that he can fix.
Just my opinion.

I think being consistent is the best approach.  Let him know, which I'm sure you do, that it is ok for him to talk to you about anything and you're not going to get angry or upset.
He will trust you more and more the more consistent you are.  He will be convinced he can come to you for anything and feel comfortable doing it.

I just don't know how you can approach him about depression without it seeming like you think he is depressed.  Unless you have some way of doing it, in which it seems like his idea.  ??  Most men feel they are weak if their admit depression.  Not manly. 

[Velika]

I have been told that the best way to handle this is to get someone that the MLCer trusts who is not the spouse to approach this topic.

I actually wish I had asked some trusted family members to do this with my MLC-H last year. I feel that, handled well, it is the loving thing to do, even if the MLCer may not be receptive.

I was also told that a way to handle is to address the feeling or symptom without diagnosing and ideally through gentle questions.

I struggle with this myself as my MLC-H has recently acquired a bunch of guns. He too has not hit depression after intense high-energy manic phase.

[bluerose]

When my h and i were dating , i was pregnant, that when he was around the age 17-19 he went through a period of depression. He said it had gotton to the point where his grandmother was going to take him to the hospital. He dodnt go into a lot of detail about that time and i didnt press the issue but he said he snapped out of it. I think he daid it lasted about 6 months. My h also mentioned quite a few times after bd that he was depressed. I thought if i was there for him ot would help. Obviously it didnt. I wish i would have done things different. He also told me in 2015 that he often wondered what wad wrong with him. I told him he was having a mlc and to do some reading on it. He told me that he thinks he was having one when he first left but not anymore. My h is now a vanisher. We hardly talk. I doubt that he would even open up to me at all at this point. He does know that i love him and want to work things out and rigjt now thats all i can do.

[Reallytrying]

My H was very resistant to the idea that he was depressed even though it was quite clear. My thought is coming from you it will only be met with defensiveness. If someone else sees it they may be able to approach him but I know even trying to get h's family  to see his depression wasn't productive. And this was even before BD. I read a book called loving a depressed man which was helpful in giving strategies to communicate without alienating him.

[Velika]

C4E, I found this to be an excellent article on the topic, addressed to the depressed person:

http://whatismidlifecrisis.blogspot.com/2013/07/selection-from-carver-joseph-phd_16.html?m=1

[barbiedoll]

My husband asked me one day " do you think I am depressed?"   I said I believed he was but we need to do some research or go to the doctor.   He then used it against me from that point on.  Yep, said I "diagnosed" him because I could not face the marriage was over and a whole slew of remarks.  Flatly denied depression but let me do an online question are with him.  He had many symptoms.  But it then made him very angry.  I too worried, because he said he knew the best place to drive his truck off a bridge.  I went to the doctor and told him everything.  He gave me a pamphlet and told me " get him in here ".  Not possible.
This is also very interesting. 

Why depressed men leave @ storied mind


RCR Edited: I got the link pasted in so you should now be able to click through to Part I of the series.

[Ready2Transform]

Mine made the decision on his own to seek psychiatric care in 2010, coming off of a long bout of depression/anxiety throughout 2009. I was extremely supportive. We discussed that he would likely be given some sort of medication (something we'd agreed before was over prescribed from what we saw from friends), and I supported him if he wanted to try it.

He first visited his medical doctor that ordered blood tests and initially gave him the bipolar diagnosis. He was given Seroquel XR which is an anti-psychotic, and a referral to a psychiatrist.

The Seroquel was overwhelming for him, both from side effects and from his fears of 'going crazy' as some members of his family had. He did both talk therapy with a separate counselor and a changes of meds to various SSRI drugs through the psych, who wanted to retrain his brain with the drugs and stabilize him before digging very deep into the family issues.

He said he enjoyed the talk therapy the most, and there was a brief improvement with one of the SSRIs and the talk therapy. But the physical side effects again sidelined him, and the last med change sent him into the darkest pre-BD place. He stopped everything cold turkey against the recommendation of the psych, and it was hell with an in-house monster for about a year until BD.

It was in that year off of drugs when he casually mentioned hearing voices that told him to hang himself with an electrical cord in the garage. I know where this came from - he had an uncle (by marriage) that did just that when he was very small. And if you saw our garage - it was an illogical thought. I believe the imbalance of serotonin, by Dr. Joe Carver's words, was bringing up horrific memories and he was personalizing them instead of seeing them for what they were. In his case, it passed.

Having said all of that, even though treatment is a logical response to a situation like this, the right treatment is not easy to find. I thought just entering the process would be a 'quick fix' for what he was experiencing. Turns out it was the tipping point. I don't regret supporting it, because like I say, it makes sense to seek help, and I of course did not want him to do anything drastic. He's a gun collector now, and I don't fear he'll do anything to harm himself with them. They are a shield I think because he is afraid and wants to protect himself, but his confusion is coming from who the enemy really is. Hopefully he will either process and reach out to channels more suited to provide the help he needs, or this process will continue on until he reaches some sort of more "awakened" balance. But certainly, the more I tried to guide the process, the more he rebelled from that. Just my experience.

[Not Applicable]

The two people my husband trusts are me and his mother. There's no one else that he is close to in a meaningful way that he could talk to, and I am the one he trusts the most, and that is a bit affected by the MLC in certain aspects. In fact, perhaps that is part of the reason for his depression, because when you start treating the one who you trust more than anyone like $h!te, you start to perceive you are destroying your own support network.

At one point when I was seeking an intervention on something I talked to his younger sister who I have made aware of the MLC, but she is a lot younger than him and so he doesn't regard her as anything more than his little sister in a sense that he is not going to take advice from her so that went nowhere. His mother is uneducated and although I have talked to her about the MLC thing, there's no way she is equipped to have this conversation.

He's gotten defensive about me saying it is MLC. However, we have discussed other quite sensitive medical aspects of what is going on with him and he was OK with that, which makes me think that he might be open to discussing depression. I told him he seemed depressed at one point and he did not get defensive, just said he wasn't depressed very calmly, but it was clear there was something, he just seemed at a loss for words to explain what it was. He has complained to me about being under a lot of stress right now. I think that is what he views his problem as. But he has told me he has no feelings for anyone. When he has memory lapses I call him on it.

I'd say my longterm relationship potential with my husband into the future is a lot more firm than that of most LBSs. I think I can safely say probably the only times my husband says he wants to divorce are in situations where he is acting defensive when he perceives I am unhappy with the current situation or I outright tell him I am. When not on the defensive, he is declaring that we will be together forever, if I want it. In fact, pre-MLC he would sometimes say he wanted to leave me simply when he got angry about something at me. His annoyance reached a level he claimed he wanted to leave. I don't even feel that I could annoy him into wanting divorce anymore. It's truly a fearful defensive mechanism these days. I don't regard this as a situation where my marriage may or may not survive. It will. I think he may be more afraid it won't than me. It's a matter of getting through a difficult temporary period where he is basically unable to act like a husband. But the most important part of our relationship that we agreed upon as he was slipping away into his tunnel is that we help eachother solve problems. So that's why I still feel that it isn't a risk to my relationship with him if I bring up depression. It might even be a relief to him that I am worrying about him than feeling depressed myself. As I said, this is not about my relationship with him because I feel it is secure in the long run. I really am concerned about him as himself.

I think the best thing for me to do is to wait for him to bring up something that would allow me to open the conversation naturally. I'm not trying to get him to a psychiatrist for a fix to his problems. He's a doctor himself and that's the thing. He's not going to go to his family physician who might notice something wrong or whatever. He IS his own family physician. He's MY doctor, so I am used to him looking after my health and worrying about it so I don't think it is a stretch for me to turn it around. He's around his doctor colleagues all the time but he's not going to be showing them the side of himself that they would realize what is going on to intervene and they aren't psychiatrists. I don't want to diagnose him but I want him to realize these are possible symptoms of depression (he's an internist, so he doesn't know a lot about psychiatry) and if he feels hopeless enough I can just say you shouldn't be afraid to get some help for it if you want to do so. Also, he might want to travel to the city to see a doctor and he would need a cover story and someone to take care of him especially if he has to take drugs that will knock him out of it for a few days, and I could help him by going along and pretending I am the one going to see a doctor for any made up problem.

It's either me or no one.

[Velika]

I have read that some men won't accept the term "depression" because it sounds like melancholy or sadness.

One approach that someone offered me was to ask how he was feeling, lots of open ended questions, then perhaps introduce some symptoms of depression, still without mentioning the word depression.

I feel you have such a handle on this.