One Year On
How I’ve dealt with my first year since being diagnosed with depression
A man walks into a doctor’s office and says “doctor, doctor, I think I have depression.”
That was me, a year ago today. I didn’t get a punchline, but I did get a prescription. It helped.
Amazing how easy it is to break the last year down into a few simple sentences, isn’t it? Thirty-six words there, and it tells my story. Misses out a lot of the nuance, of course, but gets to the heart of the story. I had a problem, I told the doctor what was wrong with me, he gave me some medicine and I’m better now.
Except it’s more than that. With any health issue, especially mental health, it’s always more than that. For a start, I didn’t just walk into a doctor’s office on a whim as I happened to be passing by. I didn’t casually decide that what was up with me could be summed up in that single word ‘depression’. I didn’t just take the medicine and suddenly everything got better. Mental health is never a matter of ‘I just did this and it was fine’, no matter how much we might hope and wish for it to be. If you’re here looking for that one weird trick that will make you happy, then sorry, I don’t even have any snake oil to sell you.
