Depression, unlike what some think, is not a luxury. Neither is it about feeling sad or down in the dumps. It’s a feeling of helplessness interspersed and enhanced by bouts of anxiety and self-doubt.
I always thought of myself as someone who is confident and sure of myself, but I began to experience emotions ranging from extreme loneliness to heightened panic. I blew up a bubble around me and shut people out. I cried myself to sleep every night. And even my sleep was troubled.
Confident senior African American female therapist discusses something during a support group meeting.
Bad dreams, profuse sweating and waking up with a start punctuated my slumber. Deep inside, I knew I was ignoring the elephant in the room. I was scared of being judged, I had no outlet for what I was going through, and slowly, anger consumed me. I contemplated suicide almost every waking moment and just could not rid myself of the feeling.
It took me six years of battling myself to confront the matter. Fortunately, I recognised that somewhere inside me was still a glimmer that wanted the old cheerful me back. My parents forced me to visit a psychiatrist, but that did not go down well with me and I got on the war path with them.
A year ago, when I was interning away from home, I reached out to a psychologist through a friend. I kept it under wraps and nobody knew about my counselling sessions. When I had to move back home for another internship, I decided to come clean about needing help. I was put in touch with psychiatrist Dr V Ponni Muralidharan in Coimbatore. She prescribed a dose of medication complemented by sessions with Karthikeyan Shanmugam, an engineer-turned-psychologist.
- Phrases such as ‘get over it’, ‘stop brooding’, ‘don’t over-think things,’ only made me feel cornered.
- When plain speaking and well-meant advice of near and dear ones did not help, reaching out to a third party did.
- Seeking help from a professional counsellor freed me, as I could pour my heart out without being judged.
Initially, I was averse to taking medicines for what I thought was more a problem of the mind than body, but my therapist assured me that depression is to be looked at like common cold or fever, which could affect anyone. Karthikeyan explained, “The amygdala in the brain gets trained to spontaneously experience a certain emotion in the wake of an external stimulus, and it is the individual’s duty to spot this negative pattern and teach the brain to think and feel otherwise.” Taking medication did not mean that I was mad. It is just that, where plain talking was not enough to tell my brain that I should look at things some other way, medicines would work better.
Dr Ponni made me realise that reaching out for help was something to be lauded and not judged. Like Albus Dumbledore says, “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the light.”
In this series, we will be featuring first-person accounts of people who have accepted, acknowledged, and sought help for their mental-health problems
