Dear Stepan Palvas:

Wow! Thank you for your kind words and appreciation, (as you can see, it made me go Wow!)

You shared that every day, you still take the SSRI anti-depressant Escitalopram (also used to reduce anxiety), plus the SARI anti-depressant Trazadone (also used to reduce anxiety and to induce sleep), and that you never took the benzodiazepine you were once prescribed with.

You also shared that you no longer suffer from back pain, stiff shoulders, cramps, or liver problems, all these pains and problems ended when you ended your athletic path.

In regard to your daily schedule, you wake up at 6 am, prepare for high school, attend school, typically until 2:15 pm, go home by public transport, arrive home, watch YouTube a lot or do your homework/ research, play with pets, or “join the typical family debate”, rarely, you chat online for hours, talking about serious topics like faith, problems, meaning, etc., sometimes you do household chores.

My analysis today:

2020: “My parents raised me well…  Generally, we don’t talk much together… I don’t feel that bond like I love them… I don’t have some sort of deep relationship with them” – I now think that the extent of your bonding with your parents, the extent and depth of your communication with your parents- from an early age- is inversely proportional to the extent and depth of your personal thoughts.

Said in other words, there was a gap between you and your parents, an acute gap, an acute literal and figurative silence, a superficiality. In your own head, you made up for that silence and superficiality by having an overly noisy brain that thinks in great depth about anything and everything.

March 2020: “I don’t feel around them like I have that emotional support…  we get along, but it’s not exactly that. Of course, I’m aware that I’m actually lucky for what I have. There are children who are, for example, in divorced families or are beaten at home” – as a younger child you needed much more from your parents than to get along. They didn’t beat you, no violence… but alas, a child needs so much more than the absence of negatives (such as violence). A child needs the presence of the positives, primarily bonding and emotional support.

Previously: “When I am ok, I am optimistic, passionate, confident, and so on. But when things go down the hill…  I can be impatient, impulsive, and feel bad” – when things go well for you, you don’t need emotional support, so you are optimistic, etc. But when things don’t go well, you need emotional support and you become desperate for it, impatient, impulsive. Because you grew up lacking adequate emotional support, you were not able to … store emotional support within you. So now, when things go downhill, you don’t have within you a reservoir of support to draw from.

Previously: “I’m empty. It’s like I’m missing something” – missing a reservoir of emotional support to draw from.

March 13, 2022: “Maybe you can imagine me as a machine that instead of slowing down, keeps searching, thinking, solving, analyzing, moving, shifting, changing, breaking and self-repairing. And If I do slow down, I want to die. Because I know that If I won’t keep the pace, I will start slowing down, bit by bit, questioning why I do this, why not end it” – if you keep the noise in your head going and going (searching, thinking, solving, etc.), you don’t hear that acute silence with which you grew up, that acute absence of bonding and emotional support. That acute silence is so disturbing that you want to get rid of it any which way.

“Every previous experience of depression led to the conclusion, that suicide is the way out. And remembrance is just that. Skipping the being-depressed part, straight to the solution. That’s the switch. I can have a good mood, feeling alright, but then it hits. I find myself wanting to jump under the subway, train, car, from window/cliff, overdose… I am traveling home, reading a book, and then it hits…I am eating, and it hits…  It comes without warning” – you want to get rid of that acute silence immediately, before you hear it for too long.

npr. org/ orphans’ lonely beginnings reveal how parents shape a child’s brain: “Parents do a lot more than make sure a child has food and shelter, researchers say. They play a critical role in brain development. More than a decade of research on children raised in institutions shows that ‘neglect is awful for the brain,’ says Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. Without someone who is a reliable source of attention, affection and stimulation, he says, ‘the wiring of the brain goes awry.’ The result can be long-term mental and emotional problems.

“A lot of what scientists know about parental bonding and the brain comes from studies of children who spent time in Romanian orphanages during the 1980s and 1990s… as a group, neglected or abandoned children tend to have abnormal circuitry in areas of the brain involved in parental bonding“.

But there is hope, because a brain that was shaped without adequate bonding, without the reservoir of emotional support that I mentioned, “has a remarkable ability to rewire itself and compensate for things that go wrong during development, including some problems caused by neglect“, the article says.

In summary, it’s clear to me that you suffered an acute emotional neglect growing up, an absence of enough of that emotional bonding and support that every baby and child needs, and that lack led to your persistent, long-term experience of emptiness and depression.

Please feel free to respond whenever you feel like it, no rush.

anita