It must’ve been a few years ago now that I suffered my first depressive episode and it wasn’t just a feeling of sadness but emptiness as I’m sure many of you readers will know well. I felt ill, but not sick. I didn’t feel myself, I had little motivation, little purpose or little reasoning for doing the simplest of tasks.
Now at this time I was on holiday with my family in Spain staying in a small house we were renting, so I had a lot of time to myself to rest, listen to music and do whatever I was feeling and I truly believe that this moment of tiredness (that we all occur) was met with the fact that I didn’t have to do anything or go anywhere, that started the darker and more depressive thoughts flowing around in my head.
Recent situations such as my grandma battling cancer throughout the past year and my mother having surgery less then a month ago to remove a brain tumour meant that there was plenty to think about, and while my mood was generally low I started to think about how unfair this year had been to me and my family, whether my mums tumour would affect her negatively (as it did with her becoming clinically deaf in one ear), whether the tumour would grow back, whether my grandma was going to make it through this tough time and what I what do without her. All of these thoughts turned from depressive to anxious ones, and there is a reason why people are more concerned about anxiety and depression then other mental illnesses and that’s because they work hand in hand with each other to create a much more overpowering affect on the brain and the overall mood.
Once we returned from our holiday it was just in time for me to go back to secondary school, somewhere that involves long sessions of work and not enough time to see and laugh with your friends. These days felt even longer for me as I was out the front door at 7 to catch the bus and wasn’t back at home till at least 4:30 in the evening, throughout the winter I hardly saw my house when it wasn’t pitch black, these long bus journeys filled with time for my thoughts to drag me down mixed in with the fact that I hated education gave me plenty of excuses for me to give up and fall even further down the black hole I felt I was stuck in at the time. From this point I never really got any worse until my GCSE period around a year later which is explained in one of the other posts.
But really what this start to my story really reflects is how easy it can be for people or even teenagers ‘who come from a normal family household and background’ to fall into a depressive state and for their overall mood to drop dramatically. These depressive states can be caused by external factors such as family situations or social fallouts, but can also be caused by physiological changes such as fluctuations in hormones and therefore serotonin levels, limiting the amount of happiness they feel on a daily basis.
Mental Health Helpline 