Tag: Warriors

Dear Depression, how does medication help control you?

Medication; antidepressants to be specific; help your brain produce the chemicals that it is lacking like Neuropenephrin and Serotonin. Since I lack both of those, I take Sertraline (Zoloft), along with a low dose of Aripiprazole (Abilify). There are so many different points of view when it comes to taking medication for depression.

The first one I always hear is people think that the medication will “heal” you, or “fix” you. I can tell you right now, that is won’t. No medication can do that for you, it isn’t magic like my mom says. I have been through five different medications for my depression, some of them even made my depression worse because I started to gain 20 pounds over time. I felt so hopeless after going through so many and none of them working. Now I am on a fantastic medication. Everyone’s bodies are different and react differently to certain medications. What works for me won’t necessarily work for you. What mine helps me with, is simply having that motivation to get up out of bed in the morning and go do something. Whether it is to go to school, go to the gym before school, ride my bike, paint, etc. It just gives you a little push to allow yourself to enjoy the things you love doing again. You’ll still get sad some days, but that won’t go away because it isn’t magic. But it really gives me a big boost.

The second one I also always hear is people think that they don’t NEED medication for their depression. I mainly hear this from my stubborn male friends that struggle but “don’t want to rely on medication to make them happy for the rest of their lives.” Even some females that think they can’t struggle in life. They think they have to be perfect and strong for their family and friends. in my opinion, I do think it is needed because for me at least, I don’t think I would be here if it wasn’t for my medication and counseling to help me because I was just stuck in this deep, dark, black hole and that was scary. Nobody should ever have to get to that point or advance past that point in their lives. It is a real disease and it shouldn’t be embarrassing to get help for that. You need to know that you are loved and you need to be happy and enjoy life as much as you possibly can. You deserve that. ❤

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“Medicine 02” by Taki Steve under (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Dear Depression, why us?

I always wonder when my brain started becoming imbalanced. When you are diagnosed with depression, what causes it is a chemical imbalance, a lack of either Serotonin or Neuropenephrin in your brain, or even both. I myself lack both and I have what is called “Situational Depression.” What that means is, because of the life experiences that I have gone through, my brain has not adapted to them. It happened over time, but I was so in denial.

I always wonder, if the traumatic experiences I have been through didn’t happen to me, would I still have developed depression? Why did I even have to get depression? Why can I not just be like superwoman, be a warrior and just not worry so much about so many different things? Why did those events HAVE to happen to me? I know I am not the only one that goes through this, and I know those people dealing with Situational Depression ask the same things– so, why us? Even people with genetic depression or seasonal depression more than likely ask similar questions. No matter what type of depression we have, the mean question is; why do we have to be burdened with depression? Why us?

Depression makes my day-to-day life a constant battle. I am always anxious about something, or I am always crying about something. Although, I believe that if I didn’t have depression, and if all of those experiences never happened to me, then I would not be the person I am today. I know depression can make us “difficult” compared to others who make it out to be like they live the perfect lives. That is not always the case, everybody has some sort of struggle, no matter what they say. Maybe some people aren’t diagnosed with depression, but we are never alone. We are who we are and I believe that we are made how we are and our whole life is planned out before we are even born. I believe what we go through is inevitable, so make the most of it. We are all unique in our own ways and there is always going to be someone out there that sees your worth. You just need to see your own worth as well. (:

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“Alone” by Lee Haywood under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.