Depression takes many forms and comes at different times. One thing that I took a while to learn was that depression also has many reasons. I thought that ‘real depression’ would only apply to people that had lost everything, or had everything go wrong, or had no prospects. It took me a while to realise that everything could seem fine but I could still feel depressed – and that this was normal. Sometimes even the fact that you theoretically have so much going for you can exacerbate the feeling of depression, making you feel even more out of touch.
My first step to dealing with these bouts of depression was to realise that I’m not unusual or abnormal for feeling depressed when other people aren’t. It’s perfectly acceptable to feel differently from other people, and to feel sad, or scared, or uneasy, at something that other people seem to take as normal. Accepting my feelings as normal has been a good way for me to move on from them.
I’ve been fighting depression since I was 14. No matter how many reasons I could give for it, it never went away when the reasons went away.
Thousands of dollars of therapy and medication later, I’m only one forgotten anti-depressant from not getting out of bed in the morning.
I know what you mean.
Depression is so common and yet still so marginalizing. I think coders are prone to it. Hopefully a decent one stop shop of advice for people in our profession will make a difference. This is a fair starting point for link harvesting:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/18/1357256&tid=191&tid=95&tid=4
I set a reminder on my mobile phone so that I remember to take my medication and then I’m usually taking it at about the same time each day too. That’s if I go and do it immediately 🙂