Anonymous Story #2

I estimate my depression started in sixth grade around the time of my first breakdown/existential crisis. I didn’t know what it was at the time, I thought it was normal to feel sad all the time, to feel like I didn’t know why I was here, to feel like there was no point in living at all, especially since I never believed in God and had no faith like that to really hold onto.

I started therapy soon after the whole ordeal triggering that breakdown. I wasn’t diagnosed with depression and therapy seemed to help for the most part until I started refusing to go toward the end of seventh grade.
I didn’t have any more major episodes until the summer after my freshman year when I attempted suicide because I was getting death threats and my friends all stopped talking to me after a pretty bad break-up with my girlfriend. I was asleep for three days and violently purged for a few days after. Nobody knew until long after the incident so I didn’t get any help at the time.
Winter break of my sophomore year I started cutting regularly for the first time. It got progressively worse but I didn’t feel the need to get any help until I started talking to a friend again for the first time since we broke up and found that she was addicted to cutting. Her self-harm was much worse than mine and she knew she needed help and that helped me realize I needed help too, if nothing else than to make sure it didn’t as bad as her.
It took me a couple weeks to get up the courage to ask my mom to take me to get admitted to a psychiatric ward at the hospital nearby but once I did I was admitted as an in-patient for all of spring break and for the first time was diagnosed with depression and was put on a low dose of Zolaft.
I got out of the hospital and Zolaft helped somewhat, but a side effect was an aggressive nausea that kept me from eating. At the time I didn’t feel like Zolaft was changing my depression at all so I decided to go off it for a few days. My appetite returned but my depression that was still pretty bad on the medication got much worse and I became extremely suicidal and started cutting again.

Because I was still on a waiting list for a psychiatrist and there was no way to change my medication, I had two choices: stay off my meds and stay suicidal but be able to eat or to go back on my meds, still be slightly depressed but not suicidal and not be able to eat. I decided the latter was the lesser of two evils and went back on my meds.
I am currently still on the waiting list for a psychiatrist, on my meds, eating once a day only because I force myself, not because I am at all hungry, and I keep a razor under my pillow because I get very anxious without one even if I’m not cutting, but I have some desire to live which at this point is the most important.