Depression.

I am not very comfortable talking about depression, mostly because I thought that it is a 'phase' that you suffer through, and then you carry on as before.  Something that happens to you, and then you get over it and carry on with your life.  Unfortunately I found out the difficult way that this is not how it works.  Well, for me is doesn't.

I don't know when or even why or how I started getting depressed.  It was just something that I realized one day.  I found it too much of an effort to keep up the front of a happy person, and I realized that self-confidence was something seriously lacking in my life.  I had to check and recheck everything I did, and even then I did not always realize the mistakes I made.

Lots of different things added to this morass of depression I find myself in, and thinking back, I cannot think of anything I could have done to change my situation.  There were just too many things going wrong in too many aspects of my life at the same time, and I did not know which to focus on and try to do something about first, so I did the minimum on all of them, and it was not nearly enough.

Thoughts of committing suicide entered my mind, and stayed there.  I always considered myself as too weak a person to actually do something like that, but suddenly I started seeing it as one of the better options I had.  After a few weeks I took my wife's pistol and sat outside under a tree, cocking it and putting it into my mouth, daring myself to pull the trigger.

This happened a few times before I went to see a psychologist.  A few sessions later I realized that she had no clue of how to help me, so I went to see a psychiatrist, who booked me into a psychiatric hospital for two weeks.  For two weeks I saw the psychiatrist and a psychologist every day, and started drinking pills to help handle the depression.  For two weeks I was removed from all stress, with no cares at all, and I started feeling positive about life again.

After a week at home, I drank all the pills I had left for the next three weeks the night before I had to start working again.  I was booked into hospital because I was unable to control my limbs, and stayed there for a week, under strict observation.  As if I would commit suicide there, when I have no cares, no worries.

My pills were changed, and I had to see another psychologist every two weeks.  Everybody was treating me like an invalid, and for a few weeks, I was nearly back to my old self.  Problem solved, I am out of this 'depression phase', and can now carry on with my life, drinking my pills for a few months before telling the psychiatrist that I do not need them anymore.  I am done with that phase of my life.

I went back to the psychiatrist after six months for my follow-up.  He immediately prescribed stronger pills.  After two months I returned to him again, and he added even more pills, because I am even more depressed than before.  Luckily I do not have access to the pistol anymore, but I have already started thinking of other ways to commit suicide.  I do not want to suffer much, I do not want to endure a lot of pain, I just want to end my life.

One of the things I have realized, is that I will try to commit suicide when I have the chance.  It is if I despise myself for not going through with it when I had the chance before.  Even when I enjoy myself, when I feel satisfied with myself, I realize that I am looking for a way to commit suicide, and wondering if I will have the courage to do it this time.

Depression is not a phase in a person's life, it is not something that can be cured quickly, it is not something that strike you out of the blue one day.  It is something that gradually invade your life, something that does not attack you, but moves in and changes you so slowly that you only realize it is there when it is ruling your life.

While in hospital, I saw quite a lot of people suffering from depression.  The sad part, for me, is that you hardly ever see it when a person is part of a group.  Not in a group, but part of it.  Depression is a disease of lonely people, of people that live alone between other people, people that cannot depend on the support of others.  I've seen children afraid of any help, because it always come at a great price.  Men in high positions, not prepared to carry all the responsibility alone anymore, because nobody else is prepared to do it.

Depression can only get better when circumstances change.  A person can learn to handle stressful situations better, but will get depressed again if circumstances does not change.  You can also get depressed again if other stressful situations become part of your life, before the current stressful situations are dealt with.

Depression, as I have to emphasize, cannot be completely cured by the patient, the psychiatrist, the psychologist or a bunch of pills.  It can only be cured with the help and support of a group of people.  Depression is not a sickness brought on by hardship, by loss of work, by accident, by your diet, by your skin-color or your sexual preference.  Any or all of these can contribute, but it is never the cause of depression. 

Depression is caused by the knowledge, deep inside yourself, that you are all alone, with nobody to help you, and you are not up to the task.  Whether this is true or not does not matter, and it can only depart completely when you know that it is not true at all.  And unfortunately we need the people close to us, to prove, through word and deed, for quite a long time, that this is true, before we change our minds and accept this truth.

I have not been convinced.