A First Encounter With Depression
Carl figured out he was dealing with panic attacks and depression roughly five years back. By then he had sat across from more than ten doctors, none of whom managed to move the needle. Zoloft, Prozac, Effexor, a rotating list of prescriptions, and not one of them touched the thing. Trying to explain the state to anyone who hadn't lived inside it felt impossible, and the days stretched out into something closer to a nightmare than a life.
His introduction to depression came through someone else first. A girl who lived next door, the one he'd occasionally help with math problems and otherwise barely spoke to. He didn't know her life. What he learned, he learned too late, from an obituary in the paper that described a four-year fight with depression that ended when she took her own life.
The second time, it was his own mind doing the work. He and his mother had lost their housing and were living on food stamps, selling off used appliances to scrape together enough for dollar burritos at the Taco Bell down the street. Sleep wouldn't come. He stopped showing up to school, couldn't hold himself together at work, and started thinking of himself as a walking corpse, a body with a running commentary of negative thoughts picking at whatever self-worth he had left.
One doctor's visit stands out to him. His state was so low that day that he skipped a ten-step staircase for the handicapped elevator, and then stood in the way of a man in a wheelchair who should have gone first. He'd stopped caring about other people. Right before his appointment he was stewing over the fact that he had to pay a physician to treat what felt to him like a genuine disability, with no money and no job to cover it. A tired-looking man walked out of the office holding a box of Cymbalta, and Carl felt a flash of wanting to snatch the pills and hurl them out the window, pure spite, from a place he couldn't locate.
The psychiatrist met him with a flat, neutral manner that irritated him. The man went through the paperwork Carl had filled out and put him on a course of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the idea being that Carl could learn to catch his distorted thinking and swap it for something closer to the truth.
Carl understands now how badly this illness can tear through a person's life. He wants people to name depression before it gets too far, and he says plainly that suicide isn't the way out. The stigma puzzles him; he can't say why it clings to this condition the way it does. What he's sure of is that talking about it, actually saying the experience out loud, is part of how someone climbs back toward something steady.
He expects to recover. He thinks he'll come back around to the person he was before any of this started. A lot of that drive traces back to the girl from school, the one he hardly knew. Whenever suicide crosses his mind as an option, she's there, and the pull to find another way comes out of a kind of grief for someone he thinks could have been saved.
The person in this account is called "Carl" to keep his identity private.