I have Persistent Depressive Disorder (PDD), previously known as Dysthymia. But forget the name. The name is useful for tagging those who also have the condition and for just referring to it in discussions of whatever nature. But like "sun" or "car", it is its real meaning that is more important than its name. Its name has changed from the DSM-IV to the DSM-V, but nothing else about it has. So, what is its real meaning?
The primary aim of this blog is to answer that question. The secondary aims of this blog are to informally advocate for PDD "sufferers" through raising awareness of PDD's nature and the various guises of its impact, as well as to give PDD "sufferers" a place where they know that they are understood and are not alone in their experience.
I use quotation marks around the word "sufferer(s)" because I am one but my current approach to beating PDD is to do precisely the opposite: to no longer villainise it; to quit trying to live around or without it and to truly live with it, through it, in it. I accept a lot of other facets of myself. PDD is one as well and by not accepting that, by not accepting it, I am not accepting myself. What kind of way is that to spend a life?
Since PDD's name is only important insofar as identifying a real phenomenon that remains unchanged irrespective of what we call it, and since what I am doing now is subsuming it into my thinking, into my understanding of myself - and reframing the situation not as a separate "me" that is "suffering" from a separate "it", but as simply me, monad, gestalt - giving it a new name that does not elicit so much aversion, such a rejecting reaction as "Persistent Depressive Disorder" does, seems appropriate. Naturally "P-Diddy" has occurred to me as an option. Of course, while I, monad, gestalt am other than the sum of my parts, there are parts nonetheless, one of which is PDD, hereafter referred to as Inextricabilis, or Billi, for short.
