Depression, Part II

Pariah – A Personal Story of Treatment
by George A. Miu

In my last post, I wrote about how I feel depression is a human calculation that needs to be resolved. Unfortunately, modern society is ill-equipped to handle the rigorous arithmetic that this human calculation entails. In my own experience with depression, the greater vast majority of my friends harped on and on about how my “Trigger” was trivial and therefore not a legitimate cause of my internal commotion. Expressions such as “drama queen”, “attention seeker” and “nobody cares” circulated, which (one can imagine) did not sit particularly well with me. That was okay, I told myself. All of my friends are mere products of a system that disregards depression, and most were not suited to hypothesize about its causes and symptoms.

A month into the whole fiasco, and people began to avoid me. Soon enough, nobody would listen to my litany of concerns, except for a couple of homeless chaps that roamed the nearby intersections. Driven to desperation, I acted in the only way that I thought would yield improvement – I went into therapy.

For weeks, my therapist and I painstakingly combed through my past and present, scoping out the minutest details in an over-arching process of learning and understanding. Medication was brought up, but not directly recommended by any of the involved parties, and I was not inclined to ask for it, despite its elevated chances of success. My task, as I saw it, was to gain the skills necessary to combat depression in the future, and to undo the effects of the initial trauma that had kept me at its precipice for so long.

Improvement, as a goal, will only ever come gradually. There are no “a-ha” moments, no simple instances of the mind reversing its condition instantaneously. For a while, depression may even get worse during treatment. The only thing that matters is that your vision of the future is corrected, and you are capable of living life as you once did. To me, counseling and force of will were natural solutions, while medication was artificial.

Most importantly, nobody can beat depression without help; some may suppress it for a while, but it invariably returns. I won my mental war because help came at the right moment, from the right people and in all the right ways, not because I am somehow special.

A year later, I have made progress on all fronts – academic, professional, social, emotional – to beyond pre-depression levels. By all accounts, I’m doing better than ever. Still, most of my old friends never came back. Society considers any affliction of the mind to be highly embarrassing. Thus, individuals do not fully understand depression. Consequently, people laugh at it. What they do not know is that therapy helps the multiple aspects of the individual – addresses far more than just their depression. Hence, people emerge from the darkness with abilities they did not previously possess. This is the ultimate vindictive reward of a post-depression life: you, the “drama queen” or “attention seeker”, get the last laugh.