(This article could be triggering as I’m sharing my candid experiences of depression, including suicidal ideation and my experiences with psychosis.)
My intention of writing this article is to share my past experience of suffering with long term, treatment resistant depression. I wish to shed some light on what this experience feels like on a day to day basis, to show how I learned to manage and cope with my depression so I could keep myself safe, especially on the toughest days where I had lost all hope.
Finally, I’d like this article to inspire hope in anyone who is struggling through treatment resistant depression. My wish is that in sharing my authentic experience, it will give other sufferers who are stuck in that hopeless space, proof that there is eventually light at the end of the dark tunnel.
In the first half of my thirties I struggled through a long episode of Bipolar Two depression. I had suffered from depression in my early twenties but this episode felt a lot worse. It started off with a stay in the psychiatric ward in Tallaght Hospital in my late twenties after losing my Nanna and the breakdown of a long term relationship with my daughters father .
Unfortunately the hospital stay made me feel a lot worse. What followed for me was a six year struggle coping with deep depression, trying everything I could to get better. It is hard to think about that time in my life now. I always promised myself if I somehow managed to recover I would share my story in order to inspire hope in anyone stuck in that awful space of long term, treatment resistant depression.
Everyday was a struggle to get through and survive. I had intense psychosomatic symptoms which made me feel like there was a big dead weight rock stuck inside my chest tightly crushing every part of my true self and keeping it deeply hidden away. I could literally feel this like a real physical entity stuck inside me. I knew on some level that it was deeply repressed trauma and my mind had taken over and completely shut down to protect me.
However, I was in constant turmoil, as no matter what I did I couldn’t access any of my trauma or emotions. They felt solidly frozen inside me and no matter how hard I tried to recover my feelings, I was shut down . No amount of medication or therapy was able to help and this caused me great anxiety.
I was anxiously hyper fixated on these symptoms and couldn’t focus on anything else .As a result I felt exhausted with no motivation, like a dead zombie person walking around,trying to survive and in a constant state of turmoil that I couldn’t stop.
I told myself scary stories about these psychosomatic symptoms and the delusions around them became cemented in my mind as my reality.
I felt God (my idea of a benevolent supportive force in my life) had abandoned me because I could see proof everywhere that other people with depression could recover. If I was doing everything in my power to recover and still not getting anywhere, then that must mean I am not supposed to recover.
I felt I was too sick for the treatment to ever work. My thoughts were always really negative and frightening like: I’m stuck feeling like this forever there is no way this feeling could ever improve or shift as it feels immense and rock solid.
It was these constant spiraling thoughts that I was trapped in, that made me feel desperate as there was no way of escaping the pain I was in.
At my very worst I became devoured in paranoid delusions. My idea of God started to rapidly shift into negative delusions around being programmed in a simulation where I had no control over my life and was totally trapped. I even started believing really scary things such as maybe a demon is doing this to me or maybe there’s a curse on me.
Endless internet searches for answers, did nothing to improve these delusions and in fact made them become more solidified as real in my mind. Looking to the internet for answers was probably the worst thing I could have done. I was in such a vulnerable place and felt so desperate I unfortunately became addicted to searching for answers and help on the internet.
I was led to many different websites and people over the years of my treatment resistant depression, which confirmed my delusions and the people running them were only all too happy to take large amounts of money from me promising to magically cure me with ‘distant energy healing’, lift curses, perform reiki, ‘reprogramme my codes in the simulation’, ‘remove the energetic implants in my brain’… I could go on and on and on here but I think you get the picture.
Writing these things down now, they all seem bizarre, outlandish and completely ridiculous, however at the time I was hooked so deeply into these delusions, it was as if I was brainwashed into a large internet run cult.
As a result of this I feel I got sicker and sicker, deeper into depression and psychosis and was getting into so much financial debt everyday. I was also starting to have daily hallucinations and thought bad spirits were around me all the time. I could see different lights, colours and images of things like spiders, demons and dragon people that weren’t really there but felt very real and terrifying to me. In the past I had believed in benevolent guardian angels looking after me but now these angels had turned into dark entities I thought were attacking me.
I didn’t tell anyone about these as I didn’t know they were hallucinations. I thought they were real and I didn’t have the language or context to explain to anyone what was happening to me as I was so deep in those delusions and in my own world and displaying a fake, convincing , coping mask to the world.
Anything that was supposed to help me such as mindfulness or yoga made me feel much worse, as when they didn’t work, it reinforced the ideas in me that I was too sick or damaged to recover. (Please note that now I feel better mindfulness works amazing as a tool for my continued wellbeing.)
I felt so trapped inside myself and the psychosomatic symptoms that were with me all of the time felt like a form of torture. It was never ending, endless constant battle to get through each moment of the day always wanting a way to escape , to afraid to give up and die but also too afraid to to be alive and stuck like this.
I began to pretend to my family and doctors that I was doing better than I was, as I was afraid of being rejected, if they really knew how unwell I felt inside. This came from a huge sense of shame of being a burden and not wanting to cause my family or friends any stress anymore. So, I put on a mask at social events that I absolutely had to attend and isolated the rest of the time. This was exhausting.
It is hard to remember this time in my life. It was how my life felt for a number of years. All the years blur into one another and I just know that as it went on and on, I was losing hope all the time of ever recovering.
No matter how bad I felt, there was a voice inside me telling me I should never give up. I held onto any shred of hope I could find. I constantly kept the thought of my daughter close to me. I tried desperatley to keep alight any tiny ember of the dreams I had. I tried my best to survive each day. It took a lot of strength and patience to keep going. I stumbled a lot on the way, suffering on and off with suicidal ideation for years.
There is a stigma attached to people who struggle with suicidal ideation but I feel that comes from a misunderstanding of the condition. If you’ve never experienced the turmoil of being in that space, then it is easy to judge as selfish .
From my own experience it doesn’t feel that way at all. It feels like you are in such a desperate place with no hope of ever getting better that you can’t imagine living another moment like that, however you are also terrified to die. The pain is like being in a zombie like state and you are not yourself at all. You feel so far away from your true self and it feels impossible that you will ever recover.
As a result you feel that you are a total burden to everyone around you. You’re expected to go on about your day and to do all the things you need to do as a human in this world to survive but you can barely get out of bed in the morning without the feeling of terror and sheer panic.
That is the true experience of suicidal ideation. Its rarely spoken candidly about and the issue is so prevelant in Ireland . It is a huge pandemic and its shoved under the carpet in shame. The cycle of stigma and misunderstanding is perpetuated while hundreds of families struggle with their grief in silence. This is why, although I find it extremely difficult to be open and talk about my experiences I feel like it necessary to share my story to raise awareness and understanding and create a safer space where we can normalise these experiences and save lives.
Fortunately for me I kept going and trying new ways of getting better and decided I would never give up. I fought through the darkest times and managed to recover. I told myself that If I ever managed to get better I would do my best to help others in the same position and be a voice of hope. I really mean it when I say that if I can go through what I went thorough and now be in a place in life where I am well enough and thriving than ANYONE CAN!! Please never give up on yourself.
These are some of the ways I coped day by day and managed to survive when I was in depressions deepest grip.
Here are some ways I learned how to cope with my depression and stay safe.
Please try and see what works for you so you can stay here and one day when you’re feeling better you can start making your dreams come true. No matter what, that’s what everyone deserves.
HOW I MANAGED TO COPE AND STAY SAFE.
Every morning my mantra was ‘One day at a time, one moment at at a time, I am going to make it through this day. I had to simplify my whole life to doing everything in my power to survive each day in the best way I could.
Having this simple intention helped me let go of the guilt I felt for not being able to work towards my bigger goals.
In this way I learned to accept and not fight against what I was experiencing. After a while I realized any kind of inner resistance or desire to magically heal and cure myself was actually doing the total opposite. It was adding a whole layer of turmoil and anxiety to what I was going through. I had to learn to accept my condition as it was . This was the most difficult thing to do. But its the only way I could begin to get better. By stopping resisting where I was in my life at that moment I freed up energy to actually take productive small steps each day to recover. I broke the cycle of judgement and shame which was keeping me trapped in my depression and psychosis and reached out to a lot of different places for support and help including:
Pieta House
My GP and psychiatric team
The Samaritans
The VCS (Low Cost Counselling Service)
***Please seek out services in your geographic location by Google search or linking in with your family Doctor. ***
The medical systems are in no way perfect but despite this I found the support I needed by reaching out over and over to different places until I found what worked for me and was affordable for me.
Reaching out over and over again for help is the key to why I eventually recovered. SO there is absolutely no shame in seeking help.
I read a lot of personal stories where people got better to keep my hope alive.
I kept a safety plan close by and when I felt my most desperate I made sure to reach out for support or to do anything at all on my safety plan which would serve as a distraction till those intense feelings passed,( examples: Coloring, drawing, a small walk, a bath, ) something really simple that feels safe. Other examples would be : calling someone you trust to talk to, going to nature (anywhere in nature), listening to music, reading, watching TV or movies, anything at all to distract you from your own thoughts when they are negative in nature.
DON’T BE ALONE WHEN FEELING SUICIDAL IDEATION IF POSSIBLE
I kept to a very simple daily routine and did small tiny things to keep my well being going even if I didn’t feel like it. I also made sure to show up for my two part time jobs no matter what. This actually was a huge thing that helped me to cope with my depression as it served as a great distraction for the turmoil I was in.
Thinking of my daughter everyday was a huge reason (maybe even the only reason I had for a while) to stay here and keep trying to look for ways that would help me slowly recover.
I kept little embers of my dreams alive, especially of finding my soulmate which I had always wished for (who I actually found during my deep depression and wer’e still together and very content and happy 7 years later!)
My dream of recovering and sharing my story to help others kept me going.
Knowing that even though I didn’t want to be alive like this, I certainly didn’t want to die either, so no matter what, I had to find ways to keep going . The belief I had that death would not actually be an escape as I didn’t know what death would be, this belief was actually one that kept me alive.
I tried to have hobbies to distract me. I chose to start face painting as a side gig and it became an excellent distraction plus a nice source of extra income and I built my confidence up and made friends. No matter how I was feeling I knew I had to show up for the kids parties I was working at. In that way it was a kind of therapy for me where I also earned some income. It gave me a sense of purpose and focus and I gained a fun skill along the way.
After a while, I realised how harmful the internet could be as it implanted harmful ideas in my vulnerable mind. Stay away from the internet or any person that tells you they have a magic cure for your depression .. in the long run this will make you much worse and spiral into financial debt.
-Anything to distract you from psychosomatic symptoms and break the cycle of hyper focusing on them. This is a vicious cycle, the only way to break free is to distract yourself in nice mindful activities. The thoughts tend to get worse for me when I actively try to stop them. Distracting myself in a nice mindful activity is the only thing that works to stop my psychosomatic symptoms from taking a hold of my ind and body.
Committing to therapy for long term and showing up every week no matter what! (I went to The Village Counselling Service for two years every single week. This was a huge contributing factor to my recovery . However it does take a lot of time and patience to see results.)
You must learn to know these voices of depression telling you to give up, you’re worthless, you’ll never get better, you’re a burden and separate them from your true self. They are the voices of the disease and illness of depression. They may seem very real in the moment you are going through them, but I can reassure you they are not true!
I did have to hit rock rock bottom before I started to really recover. Rock bottom for me manifested in addiction that I used to to self medicate and cope with my depression (which obviously made it much worse). I ended up reaching out to my kind Uncle when I was at my very lowest and he helped me to go to a lovely dual diagnosis holistic and medical rehab centre. I feel this is truly where I finally started my real recovery. It was a huge pause in my life where I could reset everything as I could take five weeks off of all the pressures of the life I was living and just a hundred percent focus on me and my recovery. I felt at the time that my Uncle had thrown me a life jacket when I was on the brink of drowning and will be forever grateful for his help and for the support and help from all the amazing staff at the rehab centre I stayed.
(More on my experience with self medicating addiction on another post coming soon)
In Conclusion:
Depression is an awful disease that feels insurmountable at times. DO anything in your power to survive each day and slowly your life will turn around and you can start creating your dreams again.
Never stop trying different ways to get better. Keep reaching out for support. Have patience, persevere, take small daily manageable steps and keep reaching out over and over for help so you can become empowered to help yourself and recover.
If you’re struggling please reach out now:
(Ireland)
Samaritans 116123
Pieta House : Text Help to 51444/call 1800247247
Your GP or local A and E departments if you’re in a crisis.
First of all, I want to say, I am so happy you are still here. You are loved, you are cherished. Please don’t forget that. Even on days when it feels like the world is heavy and the shadows are too long, remember there are people who care deeply about you. As Helen Keller once said, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” Take care, Nuezen 🙂❤️🩹
Thank you for sharing this piece. Depression is crippling and I believe that the only way we're evre going to get rid of the stigma and discrimination around it is by telling our stories. We need to know that we're not alone, that Depression is surmountable and that it does get better.