Battling depression looks different for everyone, but here's how I learned to better cope with mine.
(This article was first published in Thrive Global)
Depression, for a fact, has become an
epidemic in today’s world. Adding more to this is the constant craving
for attention and validation we get from social media. The pressure is
on to gain acceptance from society. If you are not on social media, you
are probably not living, so they say.
It’s ironic because as an online
professional, I always believe and let my clients believe that, if your
business doesn’t have a social media or an online presence, then you
don’t have a business.
More and more people are getting
depressed because of the high expectations they set for themselves in
accordance with how society wants them to be. I have been diagnosed with
clinical depression in 2011. Since then I have always used the word
“battling with depression.” I would use it in the blogs that I wrote and
in the conversations I had with people.
At that time, for me to be able to
function as normally as I could, and just forget being depressed, was to
take anti-depressants as prescribed by doctors. And as a patient who
wanted to get better, I took it without knowing the side effects.
I recently watched a Ted talk How To
Stay Calm When You Know You’ll be Stressed by Daniel Levitin, where he
mentioned about how we don’t really bother to know the side effects for
every medication that we’re given. He said that for every 300 people
taking a certain drug, there would only 1 that would be cured. And out
of that 300 people, 15 of them would be suffering the side effects. This
became quite controversial when a lot of medical practitioners
disagreed with it. Accurate or not, we need to be more aware of the side
effects of every medication we take.
And because of this, not fully
understanding the side effects of antidepressants and becoming pregnant
in a time that wasn’t so convenient, I had no choice but to abruptly
stop the medication which led me to have suicidal thoughts and one
instance triggered me to commit suicide. Of course, it wasn’t
successful because here I am now, still standing.
To read more of the article : Read it on Thrive Global.
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