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I can't handle my depression cycles

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Ericcy

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Hello. I've been diagnosed with depression, except it goes like this:
I will be depressed for a one month minimum, feel okay for six days to a week, and then be depressed for a month again. I'm really, really upset with myself for giving the hope that maybe my antidepressants worked this time. I can feel the one month depression coming on me right now. It wasn't triggered by anything: it's just been six days since I've been depressed.
I can't handle it anymore. Either I'm scared of being normal for a week because I know it's gonna end or I give myself false hope and fall even harder. I don't know if there is hope for me anymore. I can't be consistenly normal and I've never been like that since I was 13. I don't want to die. I want to live a life where I can feel normal, and I know it's just out of reach for me, and I'm trying so hard to get myself to just end it. No more gestures, no more being afraid of how others will react, just be gone because I will spend 2/3 of my life suffering.
 
Just for clarification. What does being normal entail for you? During the normal week are there really no signs of depression? Depression doesn't have to be continuous, it has ups and downs also.
 
Aloha @Ericcy

I’m not much help, as I’ve yet to work out how in blazes to handle my depression, either... but this caught my eye;

since I was 13.
I will be depressed for a one month minimum, feel okay for six days to a week, and then be depressed for a month again
^^^This just screeeeams hormonal induced depression, which runs in my family in the form of antepartum depression. My OB almost throttled me after my son was born & “Oh wow! I don’t want to kill myself anymore!” :D fell out of my mouth.... and I got read the riot act on how if I had come to her? She could have helped with that. Not as easily as if I weren’t preggers ((which would mean balancing out my hormones until the psych effects were gone, regardless of what my blood levels were, we’d be aiming for how I felt... although -of course- we’d do weekly blood draws to get my thyroid and other levels checked over the course of the month “just to make sure” it wasn’t as simple as hypo/hyper thyroid is.... and to get a 6 week baseline on chart.)) but even whilst pregnant there were tweaks and meds that could make things easier.

For all I know you may have been or are working closely with an OB/Gyn or Endocrinologist... but I didn’t learn until my son was born than hormonal depression was even a “thing” (it was just normal pregnancy in my family to be suicidal and half mad for 6 months, and then to feel magically all better as soon as they’re born), and didn’t learn until I went to university how vastly differently hormone induced depression is handled than most forms of depression (for one thing, antidepressants rarely have much or any effect on it, and for another, it doesn’t matter if your hormones are in the “normal” range, when nudging them just a bit -still in normal range- can yank people out of darkness and into the light, like they’re on a catapult).

So just in case as a teenager you were blown off as being a normal moody depressed teen... &/or trauma at the same time has complicated matters... and no one made the link between onset of regular month long depression + 1 week off, & puberty? Just wanted to drop a line to make an appointment with an OB/Gyn for a vastly different treatment option.
 
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