I'm seeing a pattern here where people are posting really well and often but there's a tendency to apologise because you think that you're being selfish and that your illness doesn'tdeserve time and patience from either you or your loved ones. What is this? You're hiding your tears, you're locking yourselves in your rooms, you're not saying what's wrong with you to your husbands (spouses) ad you're not getting pissed when people tell you to "pull your socks up" "Man up", "Get over yourself" "Stop pitying yourself" and all the other put downs that spouses and friends and family can throw at you.
Get selfish! Turn it around in your head: would you threaten to take a hike if your husband started whinging and whining because he was coughing and spluttering from bronchitis and still insisted on smoking cigarettes?? It's frustrating and not smart but we don't threaten to split because we have been annoyed three days in a row by ill-advised behaviour. We marry for love and friendship and we get sick and we help each other over the illnesses that come along. We don't sign pre-nuptials that exclude future responsibility for depression or quadraplegia in a spouse!
We expect blind and/or deaf people to cope with the world and learn skills to get around their disabilities. There are adults, men and women, going blind right now who are having to deal with the depression and the need to learn skills to deal with a senior-life without sight or hearing. That's concrete, isn't it. "Hey, she's going blind, it's okay for her to be a "burden"." Well, there's no need to feel 'inferior' just because you are MDD and need more love and attention from your spouse and families. It is an illness. We are ill. We have remissions, we can get those remissions from medications: we are not cured (if we are chronic MDD-ers)and the pain and the suffering will come again. We are not to be kicked to the kerb because our spouses don't 'get it'! They must educate themselves about the condition. It's part of being married.
Okay. I will admit this. I was aware (diagnosed) of my illness-MDD in my mid-forties and I lived alone after the collapse of my marriage for a long time. When I was stabilised and 'ready' for a relationship I made sure that my more-than-a-few-dates girlfriends knew up front that I suffered from MDD and that I was still learning to cope with the thing. Nobody got into a lasting thing with me without knowing full well about my depressive nature.
Now, some of you have developed MDD AFTER you married and that can be a shock for your spouses but I still feel that they should be the ones to "man up" and understand what MDD is really all about. It's not the "blues", it's not self-pity, it's a chemical imbalance problem that doesn't get fixed like you fix the fan belt in your car.
I know that, for most of you, this is unsophisticated stuff here. But we get like children when we lose the seratonin and tumble into the abyss. We lose perspective and blame ourselves for being "bad". We apologise for being "bad". We are afraid to lose the love but we can't keep hiding and pretending; depression doesn't cooperate with us and let us off like we had a cold for 5 days sort-of-thing.
We deserve to be understood by our loved ones. Screw all that shame and guilt and embarrassment an all the other medieval emotions we conjure up to bash ourselves to death when we manifest depression.
Don't you expect to hold up your spouse when he falls? Don't you expect him to hold you up when you fall into depression? It's your right in a marriage to demand that very real and necessary aspect of love.
I'm prompted to write this diatribe because I see 99% of depressives on here are women and married women to boot and I would be ashamed to be the husband of a woman with depression and have the bad balls to say "Jeez
