I don’t want to be disabled but I am. I have multiple disabilities. I don’t even know if I like the word disability. Dis-ability – it’s so negative. In the 1990s when I was growing up, you insulted another person by “dissing” them. When I hear the word disability, I feel that I’m being dissed [...]
Mental Illness and its Pain Pain is universal, varied, and subjective. An evolutionary deterrent and motivator, in some ways essential, in some ways utterly pointless. It can provide common ground, or be the most isolating of experiences. Everyone falls somewhere within its range. My pain came from depression. Not everyone experiences depression in this way; [...]
The first antidepressant side-effect to hit me was the yawning; it became a constant. I started to wonder if I'd ever be able to stop. “Don’t worry about it,” Duncan reassured me. “After the sleep deprivation you’ve been through, yawning all the time is perfectly reasonable. It’s your body’s way of giving in to the [...]
My first episode of depression happened over 10 years ago. I got very, very sick, and ended up in hospital following a suicide attempt. What was already a messy situation was even more complicated because at the time I was working as a nurse on an inpatient psychiatry unit at the major hospital in the [...]
I've been suffering from depression since my early twenties. I've been fighting with it, I've been angry at it for ruining my life, I've tried to embrace it as part of me, I've tried to accept it by actually accepting myself with the dark side and all. It hasn't been easy, that's for sure. From [...]
Hello, my name is John A Wilson and I struggled with severe depression and suicidal thoughts from 2008, at the age of 26, when I had just graduated as a part 1 architect but with not one vacancy for a job In my locality and unable to move because I was engaged at the time. [...]
“Depression.” It’s a word that's tossed around a lot these days, yet it isn’t fully understood. What most people don’t understand about being depressed is that there are different kinds of depression and different stages of it. We all get depressed. Our moods fluctuate. We’re only human. Some of us, however, can’t as easily control [...]
In 1990, when I was 15 years old I had my first depression. At first I was just a “grumpy teenager”, but soon it was clear to my parents that this was not “normal”. At that time people did not really speak about depression or mental health. Not in my village in the Netherlands, anyway. [...]
Depression is... Depression is more than being sad for an extended period of time. Depression is more than JUST a chemical imbalance of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. It is more than the failure of neurotransmitters to deliver information to nerve impulses. Depression is the amygdala part of the brain (that responds to emotional significance of [...]
Ever had one of those dreams, where you try to cry out for help but no-one could hear you? That's how I felt, no one could hear me calling out for help. My eyes filled with tears as I thought of my mother. I wondered if I'd ever see her again. I didn't remember what [...]
