Furthermore, I am also assuming that you or someone close to you has already received a diagnosis of depression, or suspects that you (or they) do in fact have depression.
I also feel that you've made your way to this blog because you are researching treatment for depression.
I, myself, suffer from depression, and have for years. I have been treated in the past with the help of antidepressants and therapy. I haven't always sought treatment when I needed it, mostly because of the cost and because I felt like somehow admitting that I needed help made me weak. Of course that's total BS. I'm grateful now that I have the means to seek treatment, though I find that I am impatient in that results are rarely quick to be seen or felt.
I am also very frustrated about my limited access to care. I, like many others, had to wait over a month just to get an initial consultation with a trained professional psychiatrist. When you're depressed, it takes a long enough time to simply pick up the phone to make the appointment, so being told that you have to continue to feel miserable while you wait even longer can be devastating to some people.
And even after I have established a relationship with a psychiatrist, I am lucky to be able to get 15 minutes of his time every six weeks. So I arm myself with research, so that when I do have my time with the doctor, I make those minutes count.
Although there are a lot of what could be called "authority websites" out there, like the CDC, the Mayo Clinic, even WebMD and Wikipedia, I often find that the information I need is never available all in one place. I frequently need to visit multiple sites and synthesize the information so that it makes sense to me and I can even hope to apply it to my own situation.
So, since I am conducting the research anyway, and it doesn't take that much more effort on my part to blog about it, I thought that there are likely a lot of other people like me out there, sitting in front of their keyboards and computer screens, looking for treatment for their depression.
I am by no means cured. And I accept that I may never be. Even though I've tried a number of different medications with very little success so far, there may be one that will work. It may also turn out that I have the type of treatment resistant depression for which medicine is no help. But for now, looking into internet resources for depression and information about depression keeps me motivated. When there's not much I'm excited about in life, I've got to hang on to the few things that keep me going.
So I hope that the information on this blog is helpful to you. I am not a health professional or a doctor. I'm simply a lay person who suffers from depression and still hopes (most days) that eventually things will get better. If there is a topic you would like me to cover on this blog in a post, then please leave a comment and I'll take the suggestions for future content.
Thanks and feel better!
-Colleen Belle
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