Personal Medical Experiences: How I was Treated with Depression
This is how I felt when I lived with a depression so crippling, I couldn’t leave the house.
I was a very young teenager when I started to feel it. I was fine until the summer hit, when I wasn’t so busy anymore and that’s when I started the downward spiral into nothingness. I began to distance myself from my friends feeling as if they didn’t want me around and didn’t care about me. I was awake all night and slept all day. I knew I was going crazy.
There came the day I admitted I needed help. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was wearing myself thin, and the last bit of sanity I still had wasn’t going to continue to hold if I didn’t step up to someone and say that there was something wrong, and that I needed help. I called my mom and told her I was depressed and anxious, and that I desperately needed to talk to someone before I did something stupid.
We began our search for some place I could go to talk to someone. I didn’t want to go to a normal doctor. I didn’t feel they could serve me best. I wanted someone more suited for my needs. After much searching, we found a mental health clinic in my area my mom knew well, and she made a call.
They were so booked; I couldn’t get in to see a psychiatrist for a few months. I began treatment the next week however, going in to meet with a social worker who would manage my case. We filled out hordes of paperwork to insure that all of my symptoms were documented, that insurance coverage was known, and that I had admitted that something was wrong. A few days later, I had an appointment with a therapist to begin talking out the problems and issues surrounding why I began treatment there in the first place. Sessions lasted about an hour each time, and those became weekly occurrences when they knew I needed more help.
When I finally made it in to see the psychiatrist, I spent over two hours in his office talking. He asked me every question imaginable, getting deep into my mind, into places I didn’t think existed. He had discovered things about me and about what was going on that I had never known. By the end of this visit, I had my diagnosis, Clinical Depression. A prescription was written and I began taking Paxil that day.
The following months were very turbulent for me. It was a constant battle to survive, attend school and be as normal of a teen as possible. It was hard. It didn’t help either, that the very people that were supposed to help me, were switched around between clinics and jobs so often, I never saw the same person more than a few times, save for the psychiatrist. Telling your thoughts and feelings to a new therapist every few weeks became hard. You learned to trust one, and they were now gone and you had to begin trusting all over again.
Five years later, after several medications switches, and doctors’ office visits. I’m me again. I’m still taking a medication, but it’s now more for anxiety than anything, as it’s a constant struggle for me not to become anxious. I’m not in therapy anymore. My case is considered low end, as I rarely have problems, and function pretty well as a normal young adult. I’m attending college, working on a bachelor’s degree, living only at home during holidays and breaks.
Even with all the trouble I went through in the beginning, things aren’t looking so bad.
