Dear Sister,
Let me try to break it down in a 6 minute read for you.
Depression is often called a mood indigo, but having the blues and being clinically depressed is not the same thing. The blues still play with light, depression is to be crushed by darkness. Still, in some respects it is just a heavier, modern friend of Melancholia (see illustration above by Dürer). So, it is also that wad that stops up precisely that most creative channel. It functions almost as a pause button - but then only if you manage to unclog the channel from time to time!
Illness always is a matter of incorrect proportions of light and darkness, and in anthroposophical medicine we link depression to the major organ systems, which would be considered as portals for cosmic light, giving us different colour pictures of false or fallen light and ominous shadow play.
Depression is an illness (mental or maybe not so mental - body work can often reach the parts mind-work cannot); your diagnosis of dysphoria (chronic depression) would sound in holistic ears like a state of soul you have let yourself slip into. Something spliced you in two and made you put your cosmic intelligence back in the bag, and now you live on your other diagnosis of gifted (high 130+) intelligence.
Here I think we’ve made the biggest oversight so far; I would put your giftedness at the root of your misery. If it is given in the sense of presented to you, offered as a tool, it came as a compensation for your autism. Nice work! If we stick to a neuro-cognitive analysis of your aetiology we would find a common synaptic-disposition which gives (positive!) high intelligence on the one hand, and autism (negative!) on the other. This is far too fragmented and subjective an approach for the holistic researcher. I have trouble finding anything scientific and systematic in modern psychiatrics….
Speaking from experience then, I know what clinical depression is myself, and also how to manage a chronic tendency to dysphoria. This could well be genetic , since our dad has similar issues, he really wishes he didn’t have (the autism on the other hand he does not recognise as a problem in himself - it doesn’t bother him or encumber his functioning in the world of numbers and casual contacts around structured sporting activities or organised cultural tours). I also have encountered many many people coping with their dysphoria, which admittedly is a day task requiring significant will-power and still needs a speck of inspiration to be executable at all. Some assistance, or support is a life-saver and pepper upper.
Why can’t you? Clearly you - very literally - don’t want to. Just like a druggie needs to hit rock bottom before he wants to rehabilitate. This bottom is not running out of gear one too many times, or an OD that came too close for comfort to being the final one. It is not financial ruin, or even the death of your loved ones, total social exile, or the schizotypical nightmares of a personal hell, you simply had better get used to pretty early on. This bottom, firstly, is different for everyone. But for a clairvoyant (someone who sees clearly and deeply beyond appearances) it always has the same “energy reading” of I WANT. Taking drugs is an “I don’t know and I don’t care” or even “I don’t want” (the avoidance of hurt and grief, or the self in general! which underlies all opiate prescriptions common in our societies).
Frost Giant
I mention again the true and fundamental importance of Step 3 in the 12 step AA programme. Go ahead, take a leap of faith. It might take a long time before you land “in” something and you might even find yourself in the flight of an albatross or a free-fall that has no jutting twigs to snag you or sudden cliff ledges to snap you. I am not asking you to believe in God. But I have appealed to the Thursian giant of your intellectual faculties to ask yourself to try. Working with the obstacles to faith can help you reach rock bottom….
This may all sound a bit topsy-turvy or paradoxical and needlessly complex. But unless you study spiritual science and adopt some new language, I cannot begin to explain it systematically. Your dry intellect would only hear (another) theory which (of course) you can only throw on the same heap of doctrine you have already (not insensibly) discarded.
Your high IQ has been much admired by society, your employers (the university) and not least of all our father. You have been running on it like Ready Break since you were two, skipping classes, graduating as valedictorian, then again with distinction, then promoted with two cum-laudes. Possibly he recognises the limitations you have, even if he has trouble acknowledging the autism (probably because you dump only traits onto this pathology you hate about yourself, but who doesn’t have confidence issues?).
For me it does not seem useful to treat your high IQ as a separate co-morbidity. I would call it a dominant signature for your autism, or compensatory state. The dysphoria is the decomposition state for that. The autism means to communicate something to you - if not to all of us and you are a chosen one to sacrifice your life in bringing it to us. We can bring that idea down a notch or two out of angelic spheres, and look at it more soberly in energetic-dynamic systems, but it won’t interest you either way, so I leave it at that.
There is an interesting approach to the flowers of Bach (preferably pronounced Batch, I just learned, to rhyme with match) which divides the inner flowers into “tracks” (communication-compensation-decompensation). (See, Krämer, "New Bach Flower Therapies". )This can be a very useful way of using these remedies and understanding how one state of mind leads to an entire complex of issues, which seem to exist as layers (or are uneqally dominant in the different roles one persona takes on).
For autism, as for any innate and pervasive mental disorder, including addiction (for which one is innately predisposed or not), we must first eliminate the external influences which cause negative emotional states. Next, we can treat each major state of mind as a separate case. I’d begin for you with the track Gentian-Willow-Rock Rose. I would be delighted to go into details on this, but once bitten…. Let me know if you ever might decide to take an interest in starting somewhere to help yourself - probably when you have more support systems in place; but to be realistic, probably never…
Gentian Healing Herbs
. . . to be continued . . .