My bout with depression
This is to all who are suffering from depression. I hope this success story in overcoming depression is of some help.
I had suffered from clinical medium-grade depression, about 25 years ago, so I am working from memory about what depression was like. However, I still suffer from moderate anxiety attacks, and moderate stress. During my stress attacks, I tend to panic, and lose faith. So even when one has overcoming depression, one has to deal with anxiety and stress afterwords.
About my depression. I had been fired from my research job, after 10 years of service. I has angry, and held my anger inside of me, and that led me slip into a depression. I lost faith in myself -- this when I returned to graduate school. I must have ben a rare doctoral student studying for comprehensive exams while under a clinical depression. Sometimes I found myself talking to myself out loud, walking down a street, drawing stares from passerby.
My school (Queen's University, Canada) has a good medical faculty, so I had plenty of access to psychiatric services. First, I had a student MD, who gave me medicine and had weekly meetings with me. But she said I needed more help. So she sent me to a very senior psychiatrist. He heard my tale, and asked me what my major projects and goals where in life. I told him what my goals were, and he said "Don't waste my time. I have real hard-luck patients to deal with. Just go out and fulfill your goals".
After that one meeting, I just realized that I have to fulfill my goals. To rid my self of the depression, I just began to see the positive things in my life, and at that point I made a firm commitment to fulfill my gools. My goals were, and still are, to do good in the world.
So this is my advice. Just see what is good inside of you -- do this each day -- and go out and do positive things. Whether it is giving a person a hug, donating food at the local food bank, or whatever -- just do good. And at the end of each day, catalogue what good you have done. And tell yourself that these good deeds, that you have done, is postive thing. Nobody can ever take your good deeds from you.
For example, three years ago (and this is long after my depression was over), I joined a church. I am active in ministry projects -- the most inportant one is to introduce a food bank collection depot in our church, to supplement to city food bank. This is a complex exercize, but I find it fulfilling. Another, and more mundane example: I do a lot of walking, and during my walks I pick up litter (I always carry a bag). So at the end of the day, I reflect on the litter I picked up.
For those who are suffering. Tell yourself that you are a positive force in life -- to yourself and to others. It is difficult to rid oneself of anger, the anger and negativity that leads to depression. When problems confront me, I find the anger returning into me. So I have learned to control it through spritual introspection, and by forgiving others, and by doing positive things. Postive things deflect and overcome anger.
One final point. As I say in my profile, I have had stress problems. I started using excersize videos in the early 1990s (mostly Cathe), and I find regular exercise helps reduce stress. I had strange chest pains, and I found that exercise (and church) made the mysterious chest pains go away. I never have experienced any pain in the last three years.
. That is way to long for me so I wasn't feeling any good.(you know that my husband is deploy for 8 moths) .. I did still workout every day but in the middle of the workout I was feeling seek of my stomach and that's not me at all..and after that I wanted to seat and watch tv or not really on the mood of cooking or cleaning.. really sad