Response

Depression is very difficult to diagnose and maybe even more difficult to treat. Some people respond well to therapy, some people need antidepressants, and some people need a bit of both. For some it develops after a life changing event and others it seems to develop for no reason at all. What’s more, for some people it’s a disease with physical and chemical sighs in the brain of its existence, for others it’s simply a mood that comes and goes with the season or different situations. Antidepressants even work on people who show no signs of having it in the brain. It’s true that depression isn’t very well understood and it’s unknown why many medicines that aren’t even antidepressants seem to work sometimes to treat it. The United States is one of the worst countries in the world for depression, but why do other countries report less of it?

                I was diagnosed with depression at an insanely early age: 10. I was even given antidepressants despite doctors being wary of prescribing it for anyone under the age of 18. Even more of a risk was the doctor not being sure if it was the type that develops with you as a small child or the type that just pops up in stressful situations. Something being both a disease and a normal and common mood complicates matters the most of all. It’s difficult to tell which you fall under because it can only be diagnosed by describing your symptoms, as many people who have it show no signs of it. There is no reliable enough physical test to make the diagnosis better. Do you really have a disease, or is this mood just more prominent in your personality?

                Adding weight to the idea that it can definitely be genetic  as well as a mood is the fact that besides me, several members of my family have been medicated for it including my maternal grandma, paternal grandpa, aunts on both sides, and many distant relatives. It affects everything from schoolwork, concentration, dealing with stressful situations and criticism, as well as relationships with family and friends. One of the things people with depression, be it disease or mood, have in common is an obsession with death, disease in general, and other morbid subjects. Another thing that tends to come along with depression is anxiety. When I was a child I would get up in the middle of the night to check to make sure the doors were locked as well as the windows. I flipped out when someone didn’t wear their seatbelt. In my mind, their death was imminent. Every stranger out on the street wanted to kidnap me. I was afraid to talk to people on the phone. Even ordering a pizza was a scary thing, as the guy taking the order might judge me by the stupid way I said I wanted extra cheese and no pepperoni. At the pool I was afraid I might drown before someone saw I was in distress and did something about it. Every possible worst case scenario worked itself out in my mind. I left a marble on the counter? My cat was going to get on the counter, decide it looked like food, and choke on it. How does a person like this live their life? It isn’t easy to focus on real problems when your head is full of imagined ones. Something else that ended up bothering me for awhile when I was little was that since my maternal grandpa was really old, he was nearly 50 years old before he had any kids, so when I was little my great aunts and uncles began dying off. It seemed like one died every other week. With death in the family becoming so normal I started thinking it was more likely than it really was that my family members would just drop dead unexpectedly. I didn’t understand that their advanced age and inability to take care of themselves caused cancer and diabetes. Is the depression itself worse or the thoughts and ideas it can inspire?

When I was a kid and young teenager I liked to read about the Black Death, the Titanic, the Holocaust and WWI, and anything that showed up on Unsolved Mysteries. The creepier and darker the segments were, the better. My grandmother has had her funeral planned since she was 16 (she wasn’t exactly suicidal, just really interested in how her funeral would be when the day came), and my grandpa wrote his own obituary, which we used when he died, like he asked us to. The only thing we had to do to it was add the date of his death, which he had left blank, besides some spelling errors.

What’s worrying is that sometimes doctors can’t even tell which type of depression you have. My aunt was diagnosed with seasonal depression just because she happened to finally go to the doctor and get help for it in winter. She was told to exercise despite the cold weather and do things that help her alleviate stress, such as taking a long hot bubble bath, finding something to scrapbook about and perhaps join a group of other scrapbookers, and since she was an elementary school office secretary, maybe even volunteer to be one of people who spend the evenings watching over the kindergarteners until their parents came to pick them up. What finally alerted the doctor that it was probably the time of depression that was a chemical imbalance was when summertime came and the depression hadn’t gone away at all. Why can it be so difficult sometimes to tell the two types apart?

Despite depression being around since humanity first evolved we barely understand it, as is true with most forms of mental illness. Depression also being classified as a mood complicates things more, and the two types have two different treatments and different things they do to the people who have them.