Living with Depression

            There is no cure for clinical depression. It may surprise you to hear me, a clinical psychologist, say this. But I’m not saying this now as a psychologist. I’m saying it as someone who has lived, and struggled, with clinical depression for two decades. Depression doesn’t just “go away.” It waxes and wanes endlessly. It requires constant vigilance. When you’re lucky, depression can wane for months or even years. But when something challenging happens, like being laid off from a job you love for example, it can rear its ugly head again, reminding you that you still have it, still have to struggle against it, still have to manage it. Putting my shrink hat back on for a moment, I need to say that this does NOT mean that depression is not treatable. I know both as a psychologist and as a psychology patient that it is very treatable. It’s just not curable. Not when you have the recurrent (more than one episode) type as I and most people living with depression do. No, depression is not like syphilis, cured with a single shot of penicillin; it’s more like diabetes, something you will carry for the rest of your life, something you’ll have to manage or it will manage you. If you take your insulin, eat a proper diet, and exercise, you may go on for a long time with no ill effects from your diabetes. But if you ignore that you have it, eating whatever you like while lying on the couch all day, diabetes will eventually catch up with you and cause you great pain and even death. Depression is like that. On days like today, I need to remember to take my medicine (both literal and figurative), get some exercise, find something that gives me joy, and try to be productive. Because I know if I don’t, the depression will catch up to me and finally overtake me. There is no cure for clinical depression. But I thank God (and my therapist and the makers of Welbutrin) that I am learning to live with it and thriving in spite of it.