Depression is Serious

Why are So Many People struggling with Depression?

There are many forms of depression which come from many causes.

In my experience, the type of depression that affects so many people at the moment, comes from being stressed for too long.

• We lose our self-confidence, we lose our way and eventually we lose ourselves. Feeling utterly useless (powerless) to put right what is making us feel so bad.
• When this happens, our bodies can no longer stand the pain we are putting ourselves through and chemical changes start to happen within us.
• These changes start to make it hard to function normally. We become ill with many different ailments and once our body finally finds the way to stop us causing it pain, it will continue.
• If this happens you end up with Psychosomatic illnesses. This is serious and very real, and the only solution is to stop what is causing the pain.
• Even then it is not the end of the story, just the beginning.

If your body cannot find a way to stop the pain it will carry on causing illnesses until it can.

Added to the already thoroughly negative beliefs and internal chatter we are going through at this time. We can then be mistaken as hypochondriacs.

It is not surprising that with all this going on we find it hard to achieve anything at all. This then reinforces our feelings and belief that we are useless and so the cycle continues.

Once depression takes hold there are chemical changes in the body that stop people feeling "normal." Laughing and being happy is no longer a norm, it is a face worn to cover the misery and shame of feeling so low, useless and undeserving.

When the depression is at this stage it is very hard to live a normal life and the sufferer  often feels like they don't belong. This form of depression can also occur without all the reasons I give above. For these people i cannot explain their troubled lives, so when I saw this ladies post I had to ask if  could use it here. 

The Truth About Depression. 

This was a post on Facebook that Really explains living with Depression.

I asked for permission to share it here.

This man's wife agreed as she hopes it will help people understand how depression feels from within.

"This is a long one but, if you have just an ounce of compassion, please read and share. Yesterday, we had to say goodbye to the most wonderful man - my beloved husband, Richard Layton. During the service, a very dear friend, Rich Sparey, spoke. He explained, in his own words, all about Richard’s battle with mental illness from a personal perspective. Following the service, I was asked by numerous people to share those words in the hope that just one more person might gain a greater understanding of the turmoil mental illness brings; here they are:

Being Richard

Rich Layton was a hugely kind, loving man. Not many people in their third decade of marriage can boast such a humorous, loving and intimate friendship as Rich and Louise. As a father he loved his children dearly and very importantly was able to show it. Their house can boast countless laughs and smiles. Rich could make a whole room laugh and spot a single person feeling sad and find the time to bring some sunshine to their life, no matter how busy he was. Every person here has been touched by his love and spirit, yet in spite of all of this we have still ended up being here for him today.

This may not be one of the most conventional ways to discuss something that leaves so many questions, but when you are dealing with an illness as savage as the one that Rich fought, convention can sometimes be part of the problem.

I certainly don`t have any answers, and when someone has died in this way the questions left behind are endless and unanswerable. But I really wanted to take this opportunity through the feelings of my own struggle, and my conversations with Rich to try to explain how he felt, how hard he worked against it, and how it is to live life in a state of mental torture – which he so often did.

The word depression when said slowly does nothing to explain the turmoil and constant anxiety this illness brings. It conjures up visions of a grey December day, with a cold thick fog with very little happening underneath. The reality is more like a severe weather depression with destructive gales, storms within the storm, and an occasional calm lull or even sunny spell mixed in.

You are all here because on one degree or another you loved Rich. It would be hard to imagine someone who didn`t love such a kind, caring, generous man.

I did however know one person that didn`t like Rich. In fact, there were parts of his character they hated with a passion. Nothing he did was good enough and he mentally harassed him constantly, never letting his brain be at peace. It’s so hard to explain, but that person was Rich himself. It`s so so hard to love someone when you hate yourself, but Rich had a beautiful enough spirit to show huge love to Louise, George and Lily, to nurture them and bring happiness even when his mind was in turmoil and could not rest.

At our lowest points we both stopped shaving, doing teeth, and washing. This wasn`t because we felt a bit tired or lazy or couldn`t be bothered. It was because we were too scared to look in the mirror and stare at the frightened stranger looking back. Gazing into those terrified eyes to try to find answers to who we had become and understand the endless sorrow was some days just too much.

To suffer depression as badly as Rich did, it is nearly impossible for that feeling to come without overwhelming anxiety. Another word for anxiety is fear. Just imagine living for decades in near constant fear. Fear of never being good enough, fear of failure, fear of losing this very fight. It is truly exhausting. To feel so lonely, it feels like a physical pain, because you don`t think anyone understands you or is like you.

Rich knew how much he was loved, but his own self-loathing caused this desperate loneliness. Your mind is screaming for help, but when the phone rings you are too scared to answer it or when someone comes up the drive, you run off and make yourself busy, because you don`t want them to see what you think you have become.

This illness is progressive and slowly eats away at your sense of real. It destroys your confidence to act, erodes your thought process and rots away your ability to use logic, and leaves your head full to the point you feel it will physically burst with no way of relieving the pressure, which in turn causes more corrosive thoughts. We have both questioned our own sanity.

“You have got a beautiful wife and children, what`s wrong with you, just concentrate on that” is a phrase we have both heard. But not being the person, you think you should be for these immediate loved ones is nearly more of a burden. There were times I nearly resented this overwhelming love, as it was all that was holding me here and all I desperately wanted was for the constant noise in my head to stop, and it wouldn`t. Rich told me he`d felt the same. I`m not here to lecture on depression, but I just wanted to try to help people see the daily pain Rich was in.

I`ve already heard today “If only he could of seen all of these people here for him, he wouldn`t of done it “, and it`s hard to understand, but the Rich you are here for so so did not want this happen.

The thoughts of other people`s lives being better if he wasn`t here to drag them down is far from a selfish one, Rich didn`t have a selfish bone in him. Rich was a brave, brave man. He fought this illness so hard for decades, a lot of the time in silence. Just stop to think how hard that would be.

All he wanted was for the pain to stop. He knew how it could stop but he had the courage to face these thoughts down possibly thousands of times in the years he suffered. Thousands of times he won that battle, just once he lost it.

I`m praying now that the torture has stopped for him and I`ve never met a braver man who fought so hard for this not to happen.

If this horrific disease was called an undetectable brain tumour and not just depression it would be easier to understand, but it`s not. Suicide nearly always causes some degree of judgement.

I just didn`t want today to pass with Rich being judged in his absence, he truly was a beautiful, courageous, unselfish man.

Please share far and wide if you think these words may help just one person to understand a little more about mental illness"

I am deeply grateful for this lady sharing these words

they say what I never could explain

with such love and compassion.