What it is like
I'm deliberately stealing the subject line of a post by Dooce because I'm so glad she alerted the world to this excellent article by a reporter in New Orleans who realized he was suffering from serious depression and needed medication, but only after his life had almost completely fallen apart. He was one of many people, including me earlier on, and my mother-in-law now, who didn't quite believe in depression as a serious illness that can and was skeptical of antidepressants, perhaps feeling that taking medicine was a copout and was simply bypassing "real issues" that could be sorted out only by talk therapy. I myself always figured that depression was a natural result of temporarily difficult circumstances in your life, that you should buck up and keep plodding and you'd eventually feel better, etc., etc. I too was an on-and-off sufferer starting at age 15; that episode I attributed to RHI (Raging Hormonal Imbalance, i.e., being smack in the middle of pube...