Depression and Me - How Depression Has Affected My Life

Living with Depression

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A Bit About Me

Dennis - Living with Depression First, let me provide some hard facts about myself. I am male, 38 years old, married 11 years with no kids - but our cat and parakeets come close. My wife and I live in rural New England, and I've been here all my life. I work in the information services department of a small company. Believe it or not, I'm active in community theater as well.

Although I had my first debilitating bout of depression in 1996 at the age of 32, in retrospect I've been at least mildly depressed all my life. So I know the subject of depression quite well.

One of the keys to my recovery was seeing a website with a list of depression symptoms. So I know the power of the Web in helping to save lives ... and want to put it to good use. At that time, there was a lot of clinical-style information about depression on the Web, but not much about its personal impact. So I wanted my site to express the personal nature of this illness, so as to support those who have it and help explain it to those who don't.

There are lots of people like me out there, people who are either depressed, or getting there, and who simply don't realize that an illness is causing them to feel the way they do. I hope that by relating my own story and talking to them in their own terms, I can get them on the road to recovery.

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My wife has been as helpful as one could expect under the circumstances; she hasn't had it easy. She came very close to losing me a few times, so she became protective. Most of the rest of my family lives far away and hasn't been affected much. My friends ... well, most of them have drifted away. They find me difficult to deal with and would rather not be bothered. This hasn't been easy for me but there's nothing I can do about it. It's also very common, as I've found out, and quite tragic, as the alienation can make depression worse.

So that's another angle I try to cover ... explaining depression to the non-depressed, so that, hopefully, other depressed people won't find themselves alienated from their friends.

What I want to do, in short, is to provide what wasn't available to me and my friends and family at the time we needed it - a resource which helps everyone to understand the hideous illness we call depression, in a personal way.

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