Women get depression

Famous last words…. I vowed that I was not going to pay for a newspaper online…. what’s the point? After all there’s so much that’s freely available. But here I am eating humble pie, I have a confession to make last week I subscribed to the Times and now I can simply say, when you truly value something you will pay for it! I have wallowed this morning in the luxurious prose. Ok Ok I’ll stop here… this is not meant as an endorsement merely a thought that I wanted to share.

Here is a wonderful excerpt from Lucy Fry’s description of her journey with depression through childhood.

In fact it is more like a summer thunderstorm (an analogy a seven-year-old might understand). Heat builds and it is too much. There is nowhere for it to go and something must be done. Nature takes its course and it is neither pretty nor peaceful.

But there follows the rich, distinctive smell that usually hangs in the air after rain. It bounces off pavements and sinks into the skin, a poignant reminder of what has gone before, and what, under the same circumstances of heat and high pressure, will surely come again. Just be prepared. Then cover your head and hope. Hold on to those you love, and know that this too will pass.

Diagnosis is not a cure, nor can it stop the depression. But for me it has at least marked the beginning of a long journey towards a point of acceptance. Yet I still wish that this journey had begun sooner, believing that an earlier diagnosis would have meant fewer years spent hating and blaming myself. Instead, I might have sought the proper treatment and learnt earlier to manage my condition without shame. What’s more, I might have understood that there are positive aspects to some mental illness, that although I can hardly believe it when I am floundering in the lowest depths of mental hell, the capacity for feeling extends both ways.

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Source: TheTimes