Mood, and Medium-Sized Changes · 7:27pm Dec 13th, 2016
ECT has failed. 
It worked wonders while it was happening, but a week after my last treatment I began to slip. Now a little over a month later, I'm right back where I started. 
I am now embarking on about seven different medications at once to see what happens. One of these is lithium, which is likely to help me. Keep your hooves crossed, fillies and colts. 
Now, what's next? Oh, right.
The story and blog purge is complete. 
I completed it a couple of days ago but was unable to post a blog entry (Fimfiction would not let me post anything here), and that lasted all day long. It appears to have fixed itself now. So, what follows is a summary of the stuff I did.
Cathartic picture is cathartic.
I've removed five stories from Fimfiction to Google Docs, plus added a sixth that I had deleted from Fimfiction a long time ago. There are links to all six stories in my initial blog post, and this information is also visible on my user page.
I've deleted a small number of blog entries (around 10%), and removed a little bit of personal information. I took down a few pictures (including a couple which cost me a friendship or two), and added back a slew of missing images (mostly from Fimfiction changing the story image file system). In the process of doing that, I discovered that if you read through my blog entries, you can tell from my dwindling silliness precisely where the depression began to overwhelm me! It was only a few months after I joined Fimfiction. 
I've revamped my user page. Instead of listing stories by rating, I have two showcases: one for five of my favorite stories, and another for five of the more popular non-favorites. (I've been juggling these for a couple of days but I think I'm finally settled.) After this, I list and blurb all of my remaining fics. But you can see this with your eyes, so why am I describing it? 
I'm not sure what I'll be working on next. I have to wait for my mood to improve before I have any idea. But I want to resume working on the Android game, update my two incomplete fics, and start work on another large story (the one I mentioned I had "inspiration" for in a previous blog entry).
Hopefully updates will be soon. 
I'm really sorry it didn't solve your problem, but I'll keep my fingers crossed for the drugs and hope you'll get better soon
In case you haven't seen them, Inquisitor M had a nice series of posts on his experience with anti-depression medication. Here's a link to the first entry in the series: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/681196/through-the-looking-glass
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I made a post there just now. I actually tried ketamine infusions myself this Spring, but they didn't help. It helped a little at first, but the effects wore off after a couple of weeks.
What a bizarre experience, though.
Have you tried tDCS? Because in my experience, even the most primitive homemade devices work wonders.
Lithium, however... Somewhere, people still use it? Seriously?...
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tCDS is less effective than ECT and does roughly the same thing, so nopony would recommend it at this point—but I can't do tCDS anyway because of the facial implant (the wires in my right cheek that buzz).
Lithium sees very wide use. It's a WHO Essential Medicine, and it's a first course of treatment for bipolar disorder. It's also widely used to treat depression that doesn't respond to other treatments, and it lowers the suicide rate in the general populous (seen when drinking water has a high lithium level, which has prompted scientists to push for the level of Li in drinking water to be raised slightly, but considering people think fluoride is a form of mind control that ain't ever happening). Most people try lithium before trying ECT (ECT is much more invasive). When you take lithium you need to do some blood tests because of potential side effects, but these are rarely a problem when properly managed.
Lithium was the active ingredient in 7up, just as cocaine was the active ingredient in Coca-Cola.
Seriously, that was the whole point behind the creation of 7up, and it lasted much longer than cocaine: they didn't have to remove it until 1948.
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Is that an inert piece of metal or something powered? If it’s inert, I find it difficult to imagine tDCS would interact with it at all, because the voltages and currents involved are very low. (The device I made ran on 9 volts and I typically used it at 1.2mA. Compared to the 100-450 volts of ECT at 0.8-1A, that’s practically nothing.) The difference between tDCS and ECT in particular is your life doesn’t stop for tDCS. It’s something you can do every day.
Around here, SSRIs are first course of treatment for bipolar disorder, while lithium is virtually forgotten because of all the side effects. Even tricyclics have fallen completely out of use.
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Strong tricyclic antidepressants are rarely used, yes. The side effects are too terrible. MAOI's, too. But lithium is the most successful (and generally one of the most common, natch) treatment for bipolar disorder pretty much everywhere in the world, unless it's a more minor form of bipolar like cyclothymia.
EDIT: You can't do tCDS with a magnetic implant. It's like an MRI, it would rip it out of my bucking face (or maybe cause burns or something). Every doctor I've worked with agrees on it. Er, and it is powered, but I don't think that's the main issue. But yeah there's a battery pack and everything.
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That would be physically impossible to pull off with regulated 9v 1.2mA of direct current. Numbers:
Let us assume a coil of 10 turns, 30cm of conductive wire, wound with a radius of 1cm, and stretched out to 0.5cm. Actually, let’s maximize the possibility to rip it out of your face and squeeze it down it 0.1cm, although it would be difficult to wind 30cm worth of wire so thinly. When fed at 1.2mA, it would produce 0.150796 Gauss worth of magnetic field. That’s… actually, that’s lower than Earth’s magnetic field. You can play around with coil parameters, but you won’t be able to get it that much higher with 1.2mA.
For comparison, an MRI runs magnets anywhere between 0.5 and 3 Tesla. 1 Tesla == 10000 Gauss.
I could do a similar calculation for heating assuming all the electricity fed through your head magically gets applied directly to whatever piece of metal that’s in it in the places that maximize its potential to heat up, but remembering how I calculated the correct width of a PCB track to keep the heating down, it would result in a similarly laughable value of ~0.001 degrees, I just can’t say for sure how many zeros after decimal point that would be. It depends on the size and shape more than anything else.
Either we’re talking about entirely different things, or you’re just assuming everything that applies to ECT also applies to tDCS, which is not true.
Actually that’s the main issue, breaking something that is implanted is a problem, and you don’t say what exactly it is, or how sensitive it could be to electric current running through it where it doesn't want one.
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I'm pretty sure the doctors said it was because I'm not MRI safe, so maybe they were running a heavier current—but it's likely they misspoke or didn't bother to be accurate.
If you say so, I trust you.
sadface:(
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I'm still fightin'
Well, it sucks to hear that, Trick, but I'm encouraged that there are still options available. Still, talk about a major bummer :( I was hoping it would stick for at least a few months.
I'm sure it feels good to have things cleaned up a bit fimfiction-wise. Gonna go read Colors, which I never got the chance to originally.