Part 1: Life After Depression–or what I wish I’d known

Depression is the ugly black hole that no one understands until they’ve been there and that no one thinks there is any hope for once they are.

It is brutal and dark and insidious. It creeps in and suffocates the life out of you.  It makes you think that you are the only one that suffers, that life will never be the same again, and that peace is never possible.

Monday night, as Facebook and Twitter lit up with the news of actor Robin Williams death, I sat in sadness. Sad that another life was lost. Sad that the only time people want to talk about mental illness is right after the death of someone who has struggled with it. Sad that a brilliant mind wasn’t able to find enough hope to survive. Sad that once again, death seems to have won.

So far on this blog I have mainly been lighthearted. My theory has been, “I’m new to this thing so I need to keep it fun until my readers get to know me.” Besides with a title like Domestically Impaired, who wants anything serious? But the truth is, I understand depression. We were bedfellows once. We lived together for an awfully long time.

I tell people that the only thing worse than one clinically depressed person in a house is TWO people that are clinically depressed in a house. One is horrible. Two is unfathomable.

Yet, that was our life. Both my husband and I were clinically depressed at the same time. It affected me first, shortly after our son was born. My husband’s came a bit later and lasted longer. Between the two of us it lasted over a decade.

We were sick. We were wounded. We had no hope. At one point he was suicidal. I just wanted to run away. We call that time in our lives the “Great Depression.” If you have heard me speak you probably have heard at least one story from those days. I tell them a lot.  It is sort of what I do. The flip side of the funny Claudine who makes people laugh is the serious Claudine, the one who can tell you stories that will make you cry.

There are a lot of theories about what causes depression. Some say biology, some say it is psychological, others spiritual or possibly due to social issues. One doctor explained it to us as the brain’s physical reaction to an emotional trigger such as trauma, stress, substance abuse, physical pain, grief, etc. Scientific definitions use words like neurotransmitters and serotonin. I could explain in detail, but the truth is, when you are in the middle of it you don’t care what caused it…you just want it to go away.

Whatever its reason, when it happened to us it was very real and unlike anything we had ever experienced. My husband was dealing with chronic, uncontrollable pain, I was struggling with what I know now was postpartum depression. (I actually lived through days where I was worried I’d hurt my son.)

That was over twenty years ago when no one was talking about mental illness. There weren’t commercials on television for drugs or hospitals to help, and a typical question from friends was “Can’t you just snap out of it?”

Being depressed back then was sort of like the unpardonable sin. It just wasn’t supposed to happen — especially if you were a Christian.  Instead you felt shame and guilt and failure.

If someone had cancer, our church would set up meals and write encouraging notes. We would pray for the person, support them and cheer every good report.

Not so when we were in the midst of our depression. Instead of meals and notes we were greeted with deafening silence. And with the exception of a few close friends, we were pretty much left alone.

In hindsight, I understand that most people simply didn’t know anything was wrong. If they did suspect it, they didn’t know what to say to us. After all, depression isn’t something you can see — most often there are no physical signs that are evident. How do you even begin to talk to someone about that? How do you even bring it up?

But for us, the silence felt like betrayal. We believed that our friends and our church had forgotten us. Some days we believed God had forgotten us too.

That was another surprise…my depression made me doubt my relationship with Christ. How could someone who had loved Jesus her entire life be struggling with such emotional distress? Wasn’t loving Him enough? Why didn’t He just rescue us?

Those were tough questions and there were no easy answers. It took us years to be well and whole again.

I’ve avoided writing about this on the blog because I am no expert. I’m not a psychiatrist or physician. All I can offer is a wholly incomplete and far-too-simplistic list of things that helped us during our struggle with this monster — things I wish I had known sooner. I’m sure I’m forgetting something important, but this will do for a beginning.

THINGS I WISH WE HAD KNOWN OR DONE SOONER:

1. Tell someone.  This is hard, but you have to talk about it. Be honest about your needs and struggles. If you have addictions that are contributing to the depression, share those too. Let others in on your journey. My husband and I tried to hide it the entire first year it was happening. We thought we were the only ones battling this illness. As we began to talk about it we found others just like us who were struggling as well. It helped immensely to know we weren’t alone. In the process, we discovered that what was hidden could not be healed. Talking about it with a few trusted friends became our first step to getting well.
2. Seek medical help. Don’t try to do this alone. See your doctor. If possible find a physician who also understands nutritional issues. Have your thyroid checked and also your vitamin, mineral and hormone levels. Change your diet. Sometimes the simplest steps will make a huge difference. Understand that not all depression is caused from physical issues, but most depression will have physical consequences.  Support your body with the right things and if your doctor prescribes meds, take them.
3. Visit a counselor. I had one friend who suggested that I needed to talk to someone who didn’t expect anything from me. That was good advice. It was freeing to talk to someone who didn’t need my attention. If you can’t afford a counselor, visit a pastor, or ask about what is covered at your local health clinic. Ask for help. Some churches will pay for the first few visits of counseling if you attend their church.
4. Give yourself time to heal. It didn’t happen overnight, it took us years. (I know you don’t want to hear that.) Be patient with yourself. We found that there was an ebb and flow to our getting better. Usually it was two steps forward, one step back.  Sometimes we didn’t just step back, we slid back…then we would have to climb back over old ground that had already been covered before. The journey was different for both of us but the common denominator was time.
5. Recognize that your emotions are magnified. During depression everything feels bigger. Every hurt deeper. Every fear wider. It becomes difficult to see anyone else’s pain because yours is so huge. Every new pain becomes a layer of hurt that builds on the other. Eventually everything hurts. Life becomes distorted. During those years we thought our friends were rejecting us. The truth was that no one really knew anything was wrong. (Which takes you back to #1) Because of our layers of hurt, we misread what was really happening and isolated ourselves even more. It was like looking through a pair of glasses with a broken lens. Don’t believe every emotion you feel. Emotions are not the truth, they are feelings. Understand the difference and try to see your world through a different more realistic viewpoint.
6. Understand that you will have to fight. I don’t mean fighting in the physical sense with fists and kicks, but fighting in the spiritual sense addressing spirit, mind and body. During our depression I did what I could do physically to get healthy, but I also found that I needed to focus on the spiritual side as well. Were there lies I was listening to from the enemy? Were there examples of people struggling with depression in the Bible that I could learn from? Were there spiritual tools I could use that could make me mentally stronger while I fought what was physically happening to my body? (The answer was yes to all of these.) I had to recognize that part of getting well was addressing all parts of me. Learning to be proactive and “arm” myself was a key in defeating the darkness.
7. Focus on the needs of someone else. It is a given that if you are struggling with depression you are self-focused. You can’t help it…life is miserable. It is hard to see others when your pain is so raw. But the reality is that when you do something for someone else you feel better about yourself. I’m not talking about just taking care of people you already take care of. I did that daily. I’m referring to occasionally doing something new — something outside of what is normal. Focusing on the needs of another forced us to see outside our misery. People who have lost hope and feel purposeless can find it again when they respond to filling a need for someone else. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Visit a nursing home or senior center. Volunteer at a food bank (and yes, I understand that it takes energy to do this.) Mow your next door neighbor’s yard. Force yourself to do something that removes you from the place you want to stay.
8. Do one thing. Each day try to do one positive thing that will make you feel accomplished. Depression brings extreme fatigue — your body wants to rest and getting normal tasks accomplished is nearly impossible. I discovered that picking one thing from my far-too-much-stuff-to-do-list and focusing on it gave me freedom and permission to not worry about the rest.  If I could complete one thing I didn’t have to do more. Some days it was folding laundry. Another day it might be eating lunch with my son at school. It was usually not much, sometimes just taking out the trash, but it was more than I felt like accomplishing.  Learning to do one thing consistently allowed me to eventually move back into handling my life.
9. Choose Hope! Thankfully, one of the few things I learned early on was that I couldn’t change what was happening to me, but I could change how I reacted to it. Yes, I was struggling and no, I was not able to snap out of it, BUT…I didn’t have to believe that it was permanent.  Somewhere in those darkest of  days I discovered Psalms 71:14. It said, “As for me, I will ALWAYS have hope, I will praise You more and more.”  I decided that I would do that – I would choose hope. I didn’t really know what it meant but I wanted to try. My emotions were telling me that life could not get better. My relationship to Christ told me that redemption was possible. I can’t tell you how many times I would stand in front of the bathroom mirror, look myself in the eye and say, “I am choosing hope.” (It was over and over and over, almost daily…sometimes multiple times a day.) I was a follower of Christ before the depression started, in hindsight I can’t imagine what it would have been like to navigate this road without Him. Choosing hope was possible because I knew THE HOPE. Choosing hope became the basis for all the healing we eventually had. It sounds really simplistic now. But it was the best decision I made.

There is more I want to write, but for now it is enough – this blog post has already gotten far longer than normal. But I will write more AND…I will assure you over and over again that there can be life after depression…good, whole, happy life.

(Part Two coming soon. Visit www.claudinehenry.com under resources for depression/suicide hotlines and support numbers.)

Please comment. (But be respectful.) All of us have stories of friends and family that have struggled with this. Some of us are angry.  Some are sad. Most of us just want to be heard. Tell your story. We’re listening.