A Neighborhood Girl's Experience of Depression

Depression has a way of pulling your energy, your motivation, and your general sense of the world down with it, which is why getting treatment and finding a support group early matters so much. The severity doesn't really change the advice. Mild or severe, the point is the same: don't give up. Ways out of that state do exist. And there's a second benefit people rarely mention. Once you've come through it yourself, you understand the experience well enough to recognize it in someone you love and actually help them.

I want to describe a girl I knew. She carried depression for years before anyone named it correctly. Her relatives trace the beginning to the day her mother died by suicide, when the girl was still very young. Back then her behavior got filed under childhood, nothing more. People who noticed something off about her simply chalked it up to her age and moved on.

Because no one understood what was actually happening, she grew up without any help, and the sadness followed her. She got through high school. She passed every exam, even while she was often exhausted, flat, and occasionally acting in ways that struck others as strange. That was the pattern until a single afternoon made the situation impossible to ignore.

She was close to home when a friend assumed she'd stepped away to a restroom in a nearby building. After a while the friend realized far too much time had passed and started to worry. She searched the next building over and found nothing. She told people in the neighborhood that the girl had vanished, and a group of them began looking, with no luck.

The girl, meanwhile, had drifted through the area and walked into a stranger's apartment while the resident was in the bathroom. She found a bedroom, lay down, and fell asleep, worn out past the point of caution. The owner came out to discover an unfamiliar young woman asleep in her bed, which understandably frightened her. The neighbors who'd spent the afternoon searching eventually tracked her to that apartment. When she woke she was groggy and disoriented, unsure of where she was or how she'd gotten there. The others smoothed it over, explaining that she was a college student buckling under stress, and maybe that accounted for the odd entry.

She was taken to a hospital, diagnosed with a form of clinical depression, and started on medication that worked for her. A few more unusual episodes followed, but she steadily improved. Later she joined a large organization that supports other people dealing with depressive symptoms. Looking back, she can now name what she'd been living with: a sadness that set in when she was small, invisible to everyone around her. These days she speaks with real gratitude about having it under control and about building a life that works, through serious effort in her studies and at her job.

Plenty of people now look to her as an example. She talks openly about how her path through depression turned into success at school and in her career. She also believes her mother's suicide might have been prevented with an early intervention, and that conviction shapes the advice she gives families: get help for the people you love sooner rather than later, so proper medical care and counseling can do their work. She's careful to point out that depression has many triggers, each needing its own kind of attention, and that losing a parent is only one of them.

Her routine now includes regular exercise, better food, her medication, and therapy, all of it aimed at staying in contact with her emotions. She talks about her problems candidly with people she trusts before those problems have a chance to balloon. She keeps positive people near her, the kind who remind her of her worth. That is how one girl in my neighborhood came to terms with a depression no one had diagnosed, and found her way through it with therapy, medication, and a life she chose on purpose.

-Anonymous Contributor