During the time that I was taking an antibiotic for my prostatitis symptoms, I had to stay off of a medication / supplement I was using for depression, due to potential interactions between the two. I noticed that while my depression wasn't gone, it wasn't really getting worse this time around. Previously, it had gotten worse over the few weeks that I was not taking this supplement. That's quite a positive change.
There were some down days, but I got through them. I will say that I'm still very short-tempered, and that's something I have to actively work upon. Something I didn't know was that someone closely related to me was also very short-tempered, so there may be some genetic component to this behavioral pattern (not using this as an excuse - any behavior can be consciously overcome by someone with a sound mind).
After completing the antibiotic, I gave it a couple of days' time before I started using the supplement again, but this time at a lower dose than previously. So far, I'm holding pretty steady. This is probably the first sign of actual progress that I've seen in years, because I previously did not do well when trying to decrease the dose.
I can likely attribute this to a few things: meditation (which I'm using to grab control of how I handle stressors), completing the floors in my residency floor (removal of a stressor), slightly increased sleep (which is essential for improving very any health problem), and improvement of my urologic problems (which I think may have been having an adverse effect on me as well, as I used to feel the symptoms quite a lot during the course of a day). If I can teach myself to accept the negative things in life with more grace, I think that would improve my mental health tremendously, because those have been triggers for my worst episodes.
So I will continue doing the things that are in my control in order to bolster my progress even further. Maybe I'll actually be able to beat this thing this time around. I've had 3 major episodes of depression while cruising through prolonged periods of dysthymia, and I'm hoping that I can avoid a fourth, and be a little bit happier overall.
