Zinnia Moreno
/ Daily Bruin
Imagine you’re walking along, when all of a sudden you trip, fall and land in a ditch. You try to climb to get out, but your initial attempts are in vain. You just sink further. Before you know it, you’re at the bottom of a deep hole. You are alone and have no hope of coming out. You want to call out for help, but you don’t. You don’t know why, but you just feel like you can’t.
This is the best possible way I can describe my depression.
I didn’t learn about mental illness – depression in particular – until I took my uncle’s health class in my freshman year of high school. I’ll never forget how he described it.
He introduced depression as “the common cold” of mental illness simply because it is the most common one. As he went more in depth, he struggled to find the words to illustrate the disorder until he finally said, “It’s when you can’t find the joy in life anymore. Those little things that would normally make you happy each day, just don’t anymore.”
I let those words sink in. The rest of the class looked confused – but I wasn’t. I actually understood. I was beginning to realize what had been happening over the past two years of my life.
My depression began when I was in eighth grade. Life up until that point was, for the most part, normal and carefree: I had some friends, I got good grades, I was walking along.
Then I tripped.
It began slowly. At first, it was a few misunderstandings. I couldn’t understand how all my friends would be laughing and bubbly when I could barely force out a half-smile. I didn’t know why I couldn’t smile or be happy. I tried so hard – I tried to fake-smile and fake being happy, but I couldn’t do it.
It was frustrating. It seemed so easy; everyone else exuded happiness with seemingly no effort while I was having trouble simply faking a smile.
That frustration began to metastasize. I was an eighth-grade adolescent girl. I didn’t know what depression was. I didn’t know exactly how to express what I was feeling to others, mostly because I didn’t know what I was feeling. I was sad at times, happy at times, but just overall completely lost. So I did the only thing I thought I could do: try desperately to pretend like everything was OK.
When I entered high school as a freshman, it only became worse. I was constantly confused as to why I was the only one who seemed to feel like this. I remember being so angry with myself because I wasn’t happy. I’d think about all the other people much worse off than me – yet I was the one who couldn’t be happy.
By the middle of my freshman year, my frustration broke into self-hatred. I ended up taking it out on myself through self-injury. Cutting became a release for the inner battle that was constantly going on inside my head – desperately wanting to be happy and “normal” but not being able to achieve it.
For the life of me, I can’t remember what drew me to the idea of cutting. I just remember one day I started, and I couldn’t stop. It was addicting. Right after cutting, I felt a sense of delusional euphoria. But it was quickly followed by regret and shame, sinking me even further than I was before. However, I would continue to repeat this cycle in pursuit of a false sense of happiness. Deep down, I knew what I was doing was unhealthy and wrong, but it was all I had at the time.
For the next few years, my efforts to stop were a mixture of moderate successes and devastating failures. In the spring of my freshman year, I told a few of my friends about my self-injurious behavior. It wasn’t easy; in fact, it was one of the most difficult things I had to do. I told them in a moment of desperation, and at first, I was ashamed. But they were sympathetic and supportive, and telling them seemed to actually help.
They made me promise to stop, and I did for a while. For the first time in two years, I stopped sinking. I wasn’t moving up, but it was more progress than I had made alone. At the very least, I was stable.
Zinnia Moreno
/ Daily Bruin
And then I fell further. I’m not entirely sure why. It could’ve been the fact that this was the start of sophomore year – the beginning of Advanced Placement and honors classes – and I was neglecting my mental health more than ever before and instead focusing on school. Or because I was spending increasingly less time with the same friends that I had confided in. I could speculate for hours. At the time, I didn’t understand why, but I knew I was sinking again.
I thought about, heavily considered and very nearly did try to kill myself. It wasn’t something I wanted to do – rather, it was something I felt I had to do. I was suffering in a silent battle with no end in sight. I specifically remember using some sort of delusional “logic” to deduct that the only solution was to end it all.
But seeing as I’m here today – a student at UCLA writing this column – I didn’t make an attempt.
Two of the girls whom I had told in the spring noticed a change in my behavior around the time I was contemplating my death. They insisted that I get help, and later that day, I did. I did this because I truly didn’t want to kill myself. I wanted help and I wanted to be better, but I just needed an extra push.
Within one afternoon, I told my mom, went to a therapist, was diagnosed as “severely depressed with suicidal tendencies” and was put on an antidepressant in conjunction with therapy.
It took a couple years before I felt “normal” again. And even today – more than five years after that day – I still at times feel depressed and alone. However, this is not how I spend the majority of my time. The recovery from depression is an ongoing process, filled with ups and downs. I have been back to therapy and back on medication, but I’ve also had some of the best experiences of my life. I was accepted to UCLA, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and I’ve seen the sunrise over Half Dome in Yosemite National Park – just to name a few. I have learned to enjoy the good times as intensely as I can and take the not-so-good ones as a passing phase. Because there will be a next day, and there will be a better day.
Like the common cold, there isn’t a definite “cure” for depression. Even worse, depression is often treated just like a standard cold – as a nuisance, something you can just “get over.” Since no one had ever talked about it with me, that’s how I thought it was. Something you don’t talk about and needed to get over.
That was one of my biggest obstacles – this idea that I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t think depression was a big deal because it was never something that was discussed. And if it was, it was in the context that people with depression were “crazy.” Therein lies the greatest problem surrounding mental illness – stigma. Individuals are stigmatized based on their psychiatric label of depression. There’s this idea that having a mental illness means something is inherently wrong with the person, rather than the disorder is affecting them. But there is also perceived stigma by the person with depression. This includes the internalized frustrations that people hold against themselves. Stigma is the greatest roadblock that prevents those who need treatment from seeking it.
In my experience, I mostly dealt with perceived stigma. I knew that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t allow myself to admit it for the longest time because I was afraid of the social stigma I would face.
My depression went undiagnosed for about two years. I didn’t seek help because I felt I was alone and would be judged for being depressed. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was fear of stigma that stopped me from calling for help when I first became stuck in the hole. It was only after I overcame the stigma and finally discussed it with people I trusted that I became better.
And I’m not alone. According to a 2012 study, 44 percent of American college students report symptoms of depression. That means, on average in any given lecture hall on campus, almost half of the students have symptoms of depression – depressed mood, lower interest in activities or feelings of worthlessness. Depression – undiagnosed depression in particular – is one of the most prevalent risk factors for suicide. And suicide is currently sitting as the second leading cause of death among college-aged young adults (15-24 years old).
If someone is sick, we treat the illness. If someone’s stuck in a hole, we help pull them out of it. Why is it any different with depression?