Depression (updated 2-28-25)

If you have never suffered from depression, you do not know what it is like. You may know someone who suffers from depression, in that case, you only know the person. Without suffering yourself, you do not know the suffering of depression. 

Depression normally starts with a traumatic experience; something that works against everything you have experienced and have been taught, both  academically and spiritually. The act or process of finding a reason or reasons for the traumatic experience cannot be fulfilled because there is no reason on earth for or against the experience. Your unsatisfied emotions cause you to become indifferent to everything and everyone. Your emotions and feelings fade away  and nothing has meaning. The ability to discern or judge what is true or false, right or wrong is gone. You become a being without love and without a soul. 

I lived for almost 10 years with depression. I saw almost every doctor and psychiatrist in the San Diego/LA area. The drugs they gave me only masked the symptoms to the people around me. There is no cure, but you can learn to live with it. I don't know why or how but after about 10 years I started to become human again. It was probably the two friends I had in San Diego that didn't give up on me. They didn't like the things I did and said but they did try to understand. It probably had a lot to do with the things my Mother said to me, though she was far away in Chicago, she didn't give up on me either. 

There is no cure for depression, once it gets inside you, it is there forever. All I can do is be cogent of it and understand my change of emotions and feelings. I must constantly remember to suppress the cold and darkness of depression because if I let down my guard, it will rise to the surface.  

Understanding, even just a little bit, makes a deep and lasting impression on a man suffering from depression. When you put a victim of depression down, you give the daemons more power, they rise to the surface, causing the pain and suffering to begin all over again.