I’m Jennifer Smith, and I’m thrilled to be writing for Coping with Depression at HealthyPlace. I was diagnosed with major depression in January 2017. This came as a result of a near suicide attempt which required inpatient psychiatric care. I had struggled with depressive episodes throughout my life, but this was a much more severe event. Up until this point, I had been adept at attributing my depression to simple moodiness or just being tired. I had adopted routines and methods of hiding my depression from others, and the result s of that nearly cost me my life. I am currently on medication and in therapy, and I am learning how to cope with my depression in healthy ways rather than ignore it.

I’m Tiffanie Verbeke and I am the new co-author of Coping with Depression. I’m a freshly-graduated Interpersonal Communication Studies major, coffee addict, avid runner, and music enthusiast. I also pretend to be a good painter (which is an excellent coping mechanism). I have learned and experienced many challenging, wonderful things in my lifetime, but one of my most significant adventures has been learning about my brain. I was officially diagnosed in college with severe depression, anxiety, and mixed state bipolar disorder—a lovely combination of barriers to achieving optimal mental health.

For the longest time, I thought I was just a sensitive, moody girl who had been battered by bad luck. I didn’t think I was depressed because reasons to be sad were always around. Throughout my 20s, I experienced a handful of family tragedies, lots of death, and my fair share of broken relationships. When a psychiatrist said that I had depression and anxiety, I felt I had earned my Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) diagnosis the way one earns a graduate degree. I had a masters in sadness. I figured I would always listen to Elliott Smith and read Virginia Woolf's novels. Depression was in my bones. Instead, not long after I began treatment for depression, I discovered that my feelings were symptoms of an illness, not personality traits. Happiness had been inside of me all along.

I’m Liz Smith and I'm the new author on the Coping with Depression blog. I have depression, I’m 33, and I live in Leeds, a city in the north of England. It wasn't until my mid-20s that I was officially diagnosed with depression, but it was clear I was suffering well before then. Most of the time, I felt pretty desolate – lonely, misunderstood, and like there was nowhere I fit in. At university, everyone else seemed to be having a great time, but being around lots of confident, able people only magnified my insecurities.

It’s hard for me to believe, but my time writing for the Coping with Depression blog has come to an end. I started this journey because I believed that we can help one another by sharing our stories and our experiences about depression. Today, I’m more convinced of that than ever.

After just over a year of blogging for HealthyPlace, it's time for me to move on from co-writing Coping With Depression. I've written dozens of blog posts, spoken on the HealthyPlace YouTube channel, and had hundreds of conversations with you. With each post I've written, I've grown as a writer and survivor of depression.

Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Depression For as long as I can remember, I've seen myself and the world around me a little differently than the average person. There was a lot of negativity and fear inside me. It wasn't until my early 20s that I realized that anxiety and depression were a big part of this type of warped perspective. At the age of 28, I was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder. For years I fought my diagnosis, not believing that it could apply to me.

I can't believe it's been a year since I started writing the Coping with Depression blog for HealthyPlace.com. I've written over fifty blogs and recorded a dozen videos for the HealthyPlace YouTube channel. It's been a journey, and I thank you for riding along with me, but it's time to say so long.

My name is Erin, I’m 29-years-old, and depression is as much a part of me as my bones and organs. I’ve felt depressed my entire life, but until I finally reached out for help at the age of sixteen, I didn’t realize that I had an illness at all. I thought life was just extremely painful but that I felt pain deeper than most. I felt like I was terrible at coping with things everyone else found to be so easy. I felt bad and wrong and hopeless.

Depression Won’t Define Me Back some thirty-five years ago when I was a child, the word depression wasn’t readily used as a diagnosis, rather, it was used to describe a point-in-time state of being. "I’m depressed because I have no friends." While this use of the word is obviously still valid, depression, in all its varied forms, has come to mean so much more. Back in those days, we’d call it a bout-of-the-blues or feeling down-and-out to which our mothers would emphatically state, "snap out of it… stop feeling sorry for yourself!" My Mom didn’t realize (though, who could blame her) that this prolonged, repetitive, inescapable, inexplicable "mood" that plagued me was actually an illness.