I appreciate your making this public statement about an intensely private situation.  I’ve been writing a blog about my own experiences with depression since the beginning of the year on the web-site for Esperanza magazine, http://www.hopetocopel.org.  I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to get my thoughts “out there.”

This is a link to one of my favorites: http://www.hopetocope.com/blog/post/Lay-down-your-burdens.aspx

I’ll will be grateful to receive any comments that you can make on this or other posts.

Michael

Great post. I do whatever I can, and talk to whomever I can, about it – if only to try and get the whole “mental illness” thing, in all it’s many layers, a bit more ‘normalized’. Thanks for sharing your story. 

I wanted to thank you for putting up this post.  I’ve been depressed since I was 16, and at about 23, it came to a point where I attempted suicide.  Luckily, I have some good friends and they made sure I got the immediate care I needed.  At that time, I was on anti-depressants, and had been for about 3 years. 

I got to a point in my life where I just couldn’t cope with it anymore, I didn’t feel like the pain was worth the joy.  After the attempt, I decided to change my whole life.  I moved back home for a while, took myself off anti-depressants, stopped smoking weed, and cut back on my heavy drinking. 

I think sometimes it’s really hard for young, creative people to find a place where they feel like they belong and can contribute something to the world.  I’m 26 now, and although I do go through occasional blue periods, I’ve remained stable for the past 3 years.  I no longer drink, do drugs and I eat, sleep, exercise, and meditate to keep myself stable. 

I often wonder, when I see people my age going out to party, how many of them are actually enjoying themselves, and how many of them are looking for the escape hatch. 

The silence around depression is still present in my life – I’ve never spoken about it with my father or sister, although my mother knows some of it.  I like the idea of being able to speak about depression openly, but I know that it would cause such concern among my family members that I would constantly be checked in with, etc.  And I like my freedom.