Finding Your Marbles
A Mental Health Survival Guide

“You have depression.”

I can still hear my doctor’s words. I had been to see him because I knew something was wrong. I was tired, my moods were all over the map and I just couldn’t seem to focus on anything. After asking me a few questions, he gave me a depression screening test, and the results came back; I had “moderate to severe major depressive disorder.”

The words were like lead weights.

“Major Depressive Disorder.”

I felt like a freak.

Being diagnosed with depression was one of the lowest points in my life. My mood and my self-esteem, already low to begin with, sunk even further. The writing was on the wall. No matter what I said, or did, I couldn’t avoid it; I had depression.

It took me over 2 years of going to therapy and taking medication to recover from depression. And along the way, I made a lot of painful mistakes. However, the worst mistake I made was when I treated my diagnosis of depression as a negative label; a label that I was crazy or worse.

If you are reading this article, and you, or someone that you know, has recently been diagnosed with depression, I hope that my words will help convince you. Being diagnosed with depression isn’t the end of the world. In this article, I hope to share with you the advice that I myself should have taken when I got my diagnosis. It would have saved me a lot of pain.

Don’t Be Afraid

If you have just been diagnosed with depression, read those words again.

Don’t be afraid.

I know you’re probably scared out of your wits right now. That’s ok. I was scared to death when my doctor diagnosed me. It’s pretty scary to hear that you’ve got depression, but try to remember this; your diagnosis is the first step in your recovery.

I know that sounds like an empty promise, and you probably think that your recovery is so far off in the future that it seems impossible. I felt exactly the same way. I didn’t think that I would ever feel better. But I was wrong. You can recover. Depression can be treated. Remember that you were very strong and you took an important first step by going for a diagnosis, and you can use that same strength to get through this. Help is available.

Talk to Somebody

It is very important to talk to somebody after you have been diagnosed with depression. Hopefully your doctor took the time to talk to you after your diagnosis, but even if he did, you still need to speak to someone about how you feel. You need to know that someone else understands what you are going through.

Not long ago, I wrote a series called Telling Other People About Your Mental Illness, that covers some of the tough issues and decisions that you will face if you want to talk to someone else about depression.

If you aren’t comfortable with talking to someone else in person, there are a couple of other ways that you can talk about your feelings in an anonymous setting. You can try an online forum, such as the depression forum at About.com, or, if forums aren’t your thing, About has a very good chatroom as well. Both allow anonymous logins. If you would rather talk to another person, but remain anonymous, you can try calling your local crisis/support center. (the numbers are usually inside the front page of your telephone book)

Or, if you like, you can send me an email through the contact page on this site. It’s completely private and I will try to respond to you as quickly as I can.

If you are nervous about contacting another person, another way that you can express your feelings and ask some questions is in writing. Try writing down how you feel, or write down any questions that you are asking. Or, even write a letter to yourself. Nobody ever has to see what you write, so try to be honest and try to get it all out.

Whether you decide to talk to another person, or you decide to write your feelings down in a journal, it is important to express your feelings. Being diagnosed with depression will trigger some very intense emotions in you, and you will need to release those emotions in a safe way. I made the mistake of keeping everything bottled up, and it only caused me a lot of pain later.

Get Information

Your doctor may have provided you with some info on depression such as the National Institute for Mental Health booklet, “Depression,” which you can also get here. Understanding depression is one of the keys to beating it, and you owe it to yourself to get informed on depression and how it is treated.

For some other good resources on depression, About.com has an exceptional resource page. About.com was the first depression site that I visited I after my diagnosis, and in my opinion it is the best depression resource on the Web.

Another great resource is Deborah Gray’s blog, My Depression Connection. Deborah is the creator of Wing of Madness, which was one of the first depression sites on the web, and it’s still one of the best.

Next Steps

Now that you have been diagnosed with depression, you have a lot of decisions to make and questions to ask. Will you start therapy? Do you have to go on medication? Are the medications safe? How will this affect your life?

I can’t answer these questions, but I hope that I can help with a few:

Therapy

If you have been diagnosed with moderate or severe depression, it is likely that you will need to go into some type of therapy. Your doctor may even recommend therapy if you suffer from mild depression, depending on your individual case.

I have written a series of articles on therapy, covering issues such as choosing a therapist, to what to do at your first therapy appointment, leaving your therapist and other important topics. If your doctor has recommended that you should try therapy, you might want to take a look at that series.

Medication

Your doctor may have given you a prescription for antidepressants. These are powerful drugs, and there’s a lot of stuff that you’ll need to know about them, such as their side effects, how long it takes for them to work, how they work and what they are doing to your brain. There are way too many different medications to list here, but there is a great (and really funny) resource at Crazy Meds! The Good, The Bad and The Funny of Neurological Medications. If Crazy Meds are not your style, The Physicians’ Desk Reference is the standard reference used by doctors. But it’s not as much fun as Crazy Meds.

How will Depression Affect my Life?

This is the million dollar question. Now that you are “officially” depressed, you are probably wondering how your diagnosis will affect your life. The only person who can answer that question is you. A diagnosis is only information. You can treat your diagnosis as a negative label (like I did) or you can treat it as information that you can now use to help yourself feel better.

I chose to treat my diagnosis as a negative label, and I spent the first 2 years of my recovery from depression in denial. I went through the motions of therapy, and I took the medications, but I kept my depression secret from everyone, and told people that I was “just tired.”

Looking back on that now, I know that I made a big mistake by thinking of my diagnosis as a label, and it led me to make several bad decisions that prolonged my suffering unnecessarily.

I was fortunate enough that after 2 years of shame and denial, I decided to start looking at my depression not as something that I am, but as something that I needed to overcome. So I began to think in terms of recovery instead of survival. I started setting goals for my recovery and I began to try to think more positively about my situation. Eventually, after a lot of work, I recovered from depression.

If you want to avoid the trap that I fell into, begin by trying to think of your diagnosis not as a label but as information. Then use that information to plan your recovery.

By this, I don’t mean that you need to put together a treatment plan, or build a detailed recovery schedule, but you can use your diagnosis as the first step in setting some positive goals for yourself. Try to set goals such as: “I want to be able to have a conversation with a stranger without feeling like I said something stupid afterwards,” (I’m still working on that one) or “I want to be able to laugh at funny movies.” Make them simple, and make them things that you want to do.

Once you start setting positive goals, you begin to shift your focus away from the negative thought “I am crazy,” to the positive thought “depression is just an illness.”

This is going to be hard to do at first, which is why it is important to start expressing your feelings, either by talking to another person, or by writing your feelings down, as soon as possible after your diagnosis. Also, try not to delay the start of your treatment. Beginning therapy can be an intimidating process, but try taking a look at my therapy series and maybe it will help you.

And above all, don’t be afraid. I know how scared you are right now, and when I was diagnosed with depression, I was pretty scared too. I still get scared sometimes when I tell people that I used to have depression, because a small part of me is still convinced that they will think that I am crazy. Just remember that other people have gone through the same thing that you are going through right now, and you can get through it.

Finally, if you have recently been diagnosed with depression, and you are still reading this article, after you finish reading it, take some time and treat yourself. Go out for your favorite meal, or go and watch a funny movie. Take a long walk, or spend an afternoon doing your favorite things. You deserve it.

Depression Health Mental Health therapy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Depression, Health, Mental Health. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your site.

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