Depression is a sickness that needs to be acknowledged. You need not have to be ashamed. Do you know why so many fail to seek for help is that their pride or shame stood in their way to be healed. Unfortunately, this is this feeling of shame that hinder one from being healed.
If you are constantly feeling lousy, well-meaning friends might tell you to “snap out of it” or even start to get irritated by your mood. Your depression will worsened because of this negativity and you wonder why you can’t just “snap out of it”. You may then feel and think that there’s something wrong with you because it should be easy and it’s just “not right” that you feel "moody" all the times. Well, it’s not right and there is something wrong with you.
You have a medical ailment and you need treatment in the same way as any other patient. If you had a cold for six months would you ignore it and hope it would pass? No, you would self treat yourself with anything you could find and maybe see a doctor to find out if there’s an underlying reason for it to last so long.
Depression is sadness that lasts much longer. Everyone is sad at some point in their lives but depression is more than that. It is a feeling that you can’t bring yourself up from the bottom. In the end you quit trying. People start to avoid you. You feel worse. You need to find professional help to address this issue like what you do if you had a very bad lingering cold. You could try herbal remedies – there are some in your pharmacy – or you could see your doctor. There may be an underlying physical cause for your depression.
If your regular doctor cannot solve this they may refer you for counselling. Don’t be embarrassed to go for counselling but do make sure you are comfortable with your counsellor. If not, look for another one. Do not stop counseling session just because you are not comfortable with your first choice of practitioner. In your daily life you will find that you get on with some people and disagree with others. You cannot afford to have a personality clash with your counselor. On the other hand you must be sure that it is a personality clash and not just that you don’t agree with what they are saying. A general rule is to go with your gut feelings. If you like the person and seemed to get on well in the first couple of sessions then stick with it because they might just have touched on the root cause of your problem.
In some instances, facing up to depression may be difficult because you have bear with it so long that you can tell whether it is depression or not. If you have grown accustomed with depression it is possible not to realise that you are actually depressed because you have no concept of how normal people should feel. At times you may feel angry or feel like going to the middle of an empty field and start screaming. You may feel anxious, have trouble sleeping or even sleep too much. You may think that your family would be better off without you (and actually believe that to be true) and may have considered running away or suicide. Most of times you are thinking about death (yours or someone else’s) and not giving yourself permission to be happy just in case…… (or even “I must enjoy this now in case………..”). If you have any feeling listed above then you have to seek help. Even if it is just a friend or family member to start with, they may advise and encourage you to seek professional help and treatments.
Once you have acknowledged that you have depression please remember that it is a medical illness and can be cured. You don’t have to feel this way for ever. Nobody actually thinks of you the way you think they do. Talk to someone today. Look and accept help and you will find that there is a different way of seeing life.
