Chronic Depression
or, Fighting the Dementors since birth
J.K. Rowling once said that she modeled the Dementors in her Harry Potter books on her own struggles with depression.
I’ve been fighting them my entire life.
Clinical depression runs in my family. My mother suffered, as did her father. Depression was part of the genetic legacy she bestowed upon my brothers and I.
When I was born in 1950, nobody knew anything about depression. Hell, in 1950, nobody knew squat about mental illness, other than the idea that people who had it needed to be locked up.
Throughout my childhood and on into my university years my depression and ADD were characterized as laziness, a lack of stick-to-it-iveness.
I was into my 30's, married and with two daughters before I met the doctor who said, “You’re depressed.” Moi? The life of the party? The one who always has a joke or a funny story? No way, José!
I left his office an hour later with a greater understanding of just what depression is and isn’t. Oh, yeah: and a prescription for the first of many antidepressants I would take over the next 38 years.
At first, I hated knowing that I’d probably have to take a pill for the rest of my life just to keep my head above water. I resented it. But as time went by and I researched depression, its causes and treatments, I started to resent things other than my Big D.
For example, why did the same doctor who prescribed my anti-depressant also put me on a blood pressure medication — that had depression as a side effect?
That was when I realized that (a) doctors don’t know everything and (b) no one was in a better position to monitor my own health than I was.
Once, I casually mentioned to my brother about having to be on medications for the rest of my life, he told me that it could be worse: he had undergone a full series of ECT (Electro Convulsive Therapy) — 3 times. ECT is what used to be called Electro Shock Treatment.
Finally, my father put the whole thing in perspective when he told me “Your mother used to say ‘If I didn’t have those [kids], I’d kill myself.’”
If that isn’t love, then I don’t know what love is.
I still fight what Winston Churchill called his “Black Dog.” I prefer to call it the Wolf. The Wolf howls inside my head from time to time, but she’s also a good friend, as I can always count on her to be there.
