Depression is one of the most common new age maladies. All of us, at one point or the other, has been down in the dumps. And it's not surprising to know that man has been plagued by depression since time immemorial. Various remedies have also existed for curing the blues. This illness is also known as melancholia and is characterized by a triad of symptoms: sadness of mood, poverty of ideas and psychomotor retardation.
Let me tell you about an incident that happened in 2003. I was doing a three-year nurse’s course through Bombay Hospital. I was in my second year and we had a lot of pressure from our professors, staff nurses, head nurses and colleagues to perform better, to work harder and to take on more responsibilities. Now I don’t work well under pressure. And I couldn’t handle it when a person who you had looked after for weeks suddenly passes away.
Also, there was the fear and responsibility of another person’s life. I always considered myself a strong person but I never once fooled myself that I could look after myself, so the added responsibility of someone else was too much. And there was also the restricted environment I was living in at that time. All this, added up, caused me to get depressed. I started getting thoughts of committing suicide. And this went on for almost 8 months.
We had living quarters on the 13 th floor and I used to look down and wonder how it would feel if I could just jump off. I used to look at the fan and go “what if…?” I didn’t speak about this to anyone and as a result I started losing weight, I couldn’t sleep very easily, I started experiencing various aches and pains all over the body, I used to complain about headaches and giddiness, I used to get tired on doing very little physical work, a feeling of listlessness used to perpetually surround me, I used to snap very often at my friends and I used to get irritated at small incidents.
I also started forgetting things that happened the day before and that started to scare me. My principal advised me to go meet a counselor but I didn’t. I had already decided to leave my training and I did.
Slowly, I rebuilt my spirit….
And somehow I worked into building myself up as a person. I didn’t see a therapist nor did I take any medication. I worked through it on my own. I started to cry often just to take out all the things that had made me upset. Because I realized that after I had cried I felt more at peace with myself.
Also, I made sure that I put myself in places where there were always people around me. I started going out for parties or maybe just a cup of coffee with my friends. I did confide in them [though at first I was a bit ashamed to do so] and that made all the difference – just to talk to somebody and let it out.
I also started to take an extra effort to do things that made me happy and gave me a feeling of accomplishment. I realized that no one could help me but me. I decided to complete my graduation and I joined the Bachelor of Mass Media course. Today, I am in my TYBMM and am much better though there are times when I still do feel depressed but nothing that lasts for more than a day.
It took a supreme effort to actually get out of that stage when one day you feel really sorry for yourself and then the next you feel absolutely nothing. But I guess the biggest hurdle was yet to come and that was living with the knowledge that, at one point of time, I had thought so little of myself, that I was willing to lose out on life completely.
I know that if it hadn’t been for my self-will or self-preservation, I wouldn’t have come out of that dark phase of my life. I used to have this feeling of being a whole different person and that was scary. I didn’t want to change. I wanted to go back to being the happy-go-lucky, carefree person I was before. So I decided to help myself. And I am today a much better, stronger person than I was before. Depending on the way you look at it, depression can either make you or break you. And people should work to let it be the former. Let depression make you, make you into a better whole
new person.