Depressed?

I really wanted to do a post on depression, for I feel it is very important. I am going to tell you my story, and I have asked 3 other women to share theirs.

I want you all to know, that I am not pushing anit-depressants on anyone. I just wanted to bring this up, because if you are feeling any of these ways, and can't seem to shake free, there is help. Most people are fine and don't take med's and that is wonderful!

(THE FOLLOWING WAS A POST FROM THE YEAR 2008)

I have never thought I was depressed. I was not sad or down. I have a busy life. I teach around 20 piano students, and do photography on the side. The story I am going to relate took place in just this past October. I was swamped with photo shoots, as people wanted their pictures for Christmas cards done. I was doing 1-5 a week, plus piano lessons, pre-school, being a full time mom, cook, grocery shopper, wife, house cleaner ... I had a lot on my plate.

I started feeling very stressed. I thought it was just because I was stretched too thin. I kept telling myself and others "If I could just be a mom and nothing else, I would be fine."

Well, then I started yelling at my children for things that didn't matter. I have a boy who is nearly 4 and a girl that will be 2 in the summer. I did not grow up in a home with yelling, and this was so not like me. Again, I blamed it on all I was doing. I also started crying because of feeling so overwhelmed and guilty.

One day, I had no piano lessons, photo shoots, or school. I was SO looking forward to this day to just be a mom. Well, by 8:30 in the morning, I was done with it and had already yelled at my kids and spent the rest of the day crying - not being able to stop.

It was then that I realized that there may be something else going on.

Long story short, I went and saw a counselor and started taking Prozac. I had a really hard time with that. I didn't think I was depressed. I didn't want to be labeled as one with problems and on anti-depressants. I actually had my prescription for a week before I actually started taking it.

The difference, my friends, is night and day. I have never been so happy my whole life. Prozac has given me my life back ... and I don't even know how long it was gone. I am still as busy as ever, but I am happy. I sit and play with my kids. I smile when no one is around. My relationship with my husband is the best it's ever been.

I want people who are truly struggling with feelings like I was having, to stop and consider that perhaps there may be an imbalance, and that taking an anti-depressant is not the worst thing in the world. And, you don't have to be on it forever. There are even kinds that are safe to be on when you are pregnant and nursing.

~Natalie
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OK well I'm not sure what to say or where to begin but here goes.Depression runs on both sides of my family, well, my mom's dads side and my moms, moms side. I have been on and off of anti depressants for many years but I think this is my worst case. I got back on them before I had my third baby knowing I was scared and wasn't sure how I would react after she was here. I always got my postpartum about 6 months after the baby was born. I would yell and shake them and then hug them tight and cry. I didn't realize it was postpartum until I had my second child. I thought I was doing really well and started weaning myself off the anti depressants. Not too long after that my house was in shambles, I couldn't move myself away from the computer worrying about finances worrying if people were talking about me on the web and my kids were not getting fed or dressed. I don't think I showered for about 3-4 days at a time. I was starting to get violent and yell and scream and get physical with my children. It's funny how it didn't dawn on me to get back on the anti depressants. Anything would set me of, if any of my children touched something I didn't want them too or if they said something to me it was like a rocket just blasted off, I came unglued. I would grab them and yell at them and then throw them on the couch tell them not to move and then turn around to walk away and then felt like I wasn't done so I walked back to them and slapped them again. When I realized something was wrong and my children would run away from me the second they saw me I called my doctor and told her everything. I am back on the anti depressants and I haven't yelled or screamed or been physical with my kids for almost 2 weeks. They love me again. My house is slowly getting back in order but I physically and mentally don't do well with change which is why this diet thing is so hard to me and on me. I have to push myself everyday and make sure I think before I react. I can do that now. I will always battle depression and in the winter it is the worst, I also had seasonal adjustment disorder (sad) When there isn't enough sunlight then my body kind of shuts down. I don't get the vitamins that my body needs from the sun. I am hoping that my life can be normal well as normal as normal is. And that my story, I guess.
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I am glad to be able to share a little bit about my mental illness of depression. I hope this will make others appreciate how hard this disease really is either to live with or have someone in your family suffering with it.

Because I am a very outgoing, happy and silly person, a lot of people are shocked when they find out that I have suffered major depression for most of my life. I am now in my 41st year and thank God every day for the miracle of modern medicine and physicians who care and help people like me who are so extremely challenged with mental illness.
As I look way back into my childhood, I can see signs of depression from about the time I was in 6th grade. My grandfather passed away when I was 12 years old. I remember feeling sad, and remember that feeling going on for a lot longer than perhaps should have been normal. I became somewhat obsessed with death and dying, almost wishing that I would die because I hated myself so deeply. I was a very tall girl for my age with a size 11 foot who played the tenor saxophone in the band and was a complete nerd. I remember hating myself as early as then, when life should have been all about fun and giggles!

I argued a lot with my mom and dad when I was a teenager. I mean, most teenagers do, but it was really, really bad. I even got into physical fistfights with my father and because of my height and weight, could give him a run for his money. I hated myself because I thought I was a 'bad' person. I lied more than I should have, I used foul language, spent too much money on frivolous things and had a compulsion of stealing things from anyone I could. I was a very impulsive person, a trait I have carried with me my entire life, a trait I have hated myself for almost to this very day.

In college, I seemed to pull some of myself together although the thieving continued. I met a young man a few years older than I and we got married. 15 months later our daughter was born. I was 23 years old and had one more year of college to complete my teaching certificate before I could feel like a grown-up.
I remember feeling very depressed after my daughter's birth with crying episodes that did not stop and with fits of anger at my mother-in-law for no apparent reason. My two best friends had both been taking anti-depressant medication and they encouraged me to look into taking it as well. I remember taking it for a few months, feeling better and then just moving on, graduating from college and starting my grown-up life as a schoolteacher.
The first year of teaching public school was horrible and I found myself crying again for non-stop periods of time. My husband was a very daft, passive individual so I always felt like I was carrying the weight of being the head of the household making major decisions, caring for a young one year old child and teaching public school. I remember the emotional roller-coaster I was on but also remembered thinking that I could survive without any medication or talk therapy. How wrong I was!
Towards the end of my third year of teaching year-round middle school classes, (spring 1994) I completely went off the deep end I guess you could say. I ended up forsaking my career, giving up my teaching license, leaving my husband, losing my church membership and waking away from hundreds of friends in the small town I lived in. I managed to stay sane enough to take my 3 and a half year old daughter with me to my parents home 90 miles away where I holed up in their basement crying for days and days and days without knowing exactly why. It was then when I hit rock bottom that I decided I needed professional help, and started seeing a psychiatrist.
Depression was hovering all along, but I couldn’t let it get to me. I was too busy teaching school, raising a one-year old, wearing the proverbial pants in the family and being pulled at in every direction by several people. It felt like depression was light years away, when it was really just crouching in a back room of my mind, getting ready to pounce. I was devastated. I sank. And sank. And sank. The psychiatrist prescribed medication that truly helped me out of the darkness and I became the vivacious, life-loving person I once was.
Fast forward to the spring of 2008. My husband of six years was very difficult to live with and to please. Our marriage had been close to crumbling time and time again and I was looking at another divorce with a two-year-old little boy I was blessed with. One of the things my husband was very adamant about was saving money to the point he asked me to wean off of the anti-depressive medication I was taking to scale back on expenses. Biggest mistake I could have made, believe me! I ended up having another terrible melt down like I did in 1994, but this time I ended up trying to figure out how to use my husband's rifle to take my life. Fortunately he was able to wrestle it away from me and took me to the emergency room as I babbled on and on in the car about what a miserable failure I was. I couldn't stop crying and the familiar feelings of hating myself were engulfing me like a black force pulling me down. Because of the severity of my episode, the psychiatric evaluators in the emergency room recommended I receive in-patient care and was admitted to the Neuropsychiatric Institute that day.
I stayed for a total of eight days. I was now a person who had been to the “funny farm” and lived to tell about it. It was eight days of ups, downs, sideways and upside downs that forced me to look at my illness with more maturity. I had hours upon hours of therapy and group classes which I took fastidious notes in so that I could regain my mental health. After all, I had a two-year-old son to take care of for a very long time and he needed me. Hell, I NEEDED ME!
Now, nine months later, a steady dose of Cymbalta every day and weekly therapy sessions later, I am finally feeling, dare I say, stabilized. The obsessive-compulsive and very impulsive behavior I have struggled with my entire life seems to be taking a break, and I don’t always wake up in despair, covering my head with the blankets for another day.
I am living proof that depression can be treated and that life really is worth living. I have had to undergo several emotional roller-coasters to finally come to the conclusion that depression is part of my life and who I am, and that it can be treated. Much like a friend of mine who has diabetes, I must take medicine every single day to keep me from coming apart at the seams emotionally like she takes her insulin to stay balanced. I look back and can see that 1994 was a stormy time of not knowing what was going on, not understanding behaviors, obsessive worry, and just slowly falling apart.

It is thought that there are a lot of reasons that people suffer debilitating depression. Plain and simple, depression is caused by chemicals mis-firing in the brain and it is treatable. I learned that my emotional melt down in 1994 which jump-started me into therapy was just the culmination of years of depression built on anxiety built on despair. It may take an event such as the birth of a child, the loss of a loved one or simply overloading yourself with too many irons in the fire to get you to the point of no return, but those events are not the causes of the disease.
Depression treatment does work! Look for help from a professional and begin getting your life back or help your family member get the help that they deserve. They actually do desire to feel better trust me. Depression hurts everyone. Depression can make you feel hopeless and unable to help. But by taking the primary step deciding to get treatment it can make all the difference in the world. It can save your life as it did mine. Medical care is simply the answer! Look for a professional to help.
Will I ever “get over” my depression? Will I ever be free of medications? Probably not. But the amount may decrease with time as I begin to fill in the holes of the floor beneath me—and carefully watch my step.
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A few years back, I had a lot of different and hard things going on in my life and it just got to be too much. My husband had many demands on his time and was not home much, my kids were having various health problems mixed with many injuries that required emergency room visits, my mother and sister were both struggling with depression (to the point of being suicidal), my home flooded (twice) and I had to move in with my in-laws for a month, and I had gotten in way over my head volunteering in my kids' classes. That is (sadly) the very brief version of what led up to my "emotional breakdown" and clinical depression. Fortunately, I knew what the signs of severe depression were and recognized them in myself. I was losing weight, unable to sleep, nauseated all the time, afraid of almost everything, not enjoying the things I normally do, crying all the time, and unable to cope with my life in general. I probably should have recognized the symptoms sooner but I was distracted with the circus that was my life. Until my mother and sister had struggled with depression, I really thought depression was a "choice" and that if you stayed busy and kept a positive attitude you could get through it. Now I know that depression is VERY REAL. It is a chemical imbalance that is an illness and is nearly impossible to overcome alone. When I reached my breaking point (feeling like I couldn't take care of my kids anymore and wanting to just hide away) I called a counselor and my doctor. The next day I began taking anti-depressants and went for my first session of counseling. For me, the medication helped a lot even though I was on a very low dose. That may not be the answer for others who struggle with depression. The counseling was a huge help and I truly believe everyone should go to counseling at least once or twice (depression or no ;0)). I learned that I needed to take care of myself first, before I could care fo r my family and that I couldn't, shouldn't, and wasn't expected to do it all. Learning to balance my life was a skill that took practice and is something that is always evolving. I also had to learn to say no. Now, when I start to feel down or overwhelmed I try to take a step back and look at my life. Typically, when I feel that way I am not taking care of me. It really is important for us to take time for us each and every day. I learned a lot from my struggle but the things that stand out the most are taking care of me and having balance in my life.
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A funny email I just read from my sister-in-law.
I am passing this on to you because it definitely works, and we could all use a little more calmness in our lives.
By following simple advice heard on the Dr. Phil show, you too can find inner peace. Dr Phil proclaimed, "The way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you have started and have never finished." So, I looked around my house to see all the things I started and hadn't finished and before leaving the house this morning, I finished a package of Oreos, the remainder of my old Prozac prescription, the rest of the cheesecake, some Doritos, and a box of chocolates.
You have no idea how good I feel right now.
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