To Cure Depression: A Mother's Touch
The mornings are the part I remember most clearly. I would peel myself out of bed in the cold, already worn out from another night of barely sleeping, which had become the pattern rather than the exception. I'd get dressed, start the drive to work, and sometimes watch a car full of friends roll past my house on their way to do something fun. I had stopped wanting any part of that a while back. Work and class were the only two places I let myself go, and I kept my grades and performance up the whole time, even as the rest of me kept sinking.
What got to me the worst was losing interest in people. Family, friends: I hadn't really seen any of them in a long stretch. The strange thing is that I wanted to. Some part of me wanted to show up at things, be in rooms with people I cared about. But I was too tired and too far inside myself to do it. Whatever had settled over my mind felt heavy and dark, and the despair that came with it was not something I could simply decide my way out of.
One morning around eleven the whole thing finally gave way. People say you sometimes have to break under your own pain before anything changes, and that is more or less what happened to me. All the effort I'd been spending to look steady and fine ran out at once. I folded myself into a corner of my office and cried. A coworker came by, but he had no idea what to say or how to help, so I asked him to leave me alone. Then I left work and went to see my doctor, who wrote me a prescription for sleeping pills and sent me over to the hospital for some tests.
Physically, everything came back clean. I was in good health by every measurement they could run. The label they gave me was depression, which in plain language meant a long, awful stretch of pain. I had never really filed it under mental illness before, and now I was being set up with a psychiatrist to deal with it.
The psychiatrist told me I likely had a chemical imbalance in my brain. He went through my symptoms and signed off on a mix of antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication, and something to help me sleep, all meant to push my body chemistry back where it belonged. But there was something flat in his eyes while he did it, a kind of hollow quality that made the room feel emptier instead of safer. The whole appointment left me uneasy, and some instinct kept telling me this wasn't the thing that would actually pull me out.
So I went home and shut the door on everyone. The only person I let near me was my mother, and only to bring food. I would sit there crying, and she would sit with me, and often she'd cry too. Sometimes she just held my hand and started telling me a story. That became the routine for days. Story after story: her own life, my childhood, whatever came to her. I'd eat whatever she had cooked and listen. Her voice was easy to relax into, and she never let go of my hand.
After a few days of this I noticed I was turning a corner. Thoughts about my own life started arriving in a more hopeful shape. The time with my mother had loosened something in me and reached a place deep in my brain that was apparently capable of producing the very chemicals the psychiatrist wanted to hand me in a bottle. I didn't need the prescription. What I needed was her, and the plain fact of her being close and loving me. The thing at the bottom of my pain turned out to be a hunger for ordinary human contact, and that is what finally answered it.
That intense three or four day stretch with her, during one of the lowest points I've ever hit, was the hinge. From there I started watching films that moved me and holding onto messages that lifted me up. Slowly the rest came back. I'm healthier and happier now, my friends and family are part of my life again, and I actually enjoy my work and my days. What I've come to believe is that all of us can get through what's in front of us, as long as we train ourselves to look at life through its good parts and the things we're grateful to have. -Anonymous Contributor