I started getting intense migraines this semester. When I finally couldn’t function, I gave up on my natural remedies and trekked to Student Health Services. I was prescribed an antidepressant for my pains, but I was hesitant to take it at first because one line on the warning label explained that it could inspire suicidal thoughts.
Depression, self-harming and suicide are topics I generally avoid thinking about, much less talking about, but it’s becoming harder to avoid. I realized it was a topic I couldn’t keep repressing because, whether I liked it or not, it’s a topic that’s been silently dictating my life. It’s the reason I don’t drink, do drugs or even sleep too much because subconsciously I’m afraid that I will spiral out of control. But I’m determined to tell others about what I’ve gone through with the hope that it might help just one person.
In middle school I hung out with the ‘Rocker Kids.’ I thought they were weird like me, but now I realize that hanging out with the outsiders made me yearn to fit in even more. To them, I wasn’t messed up enough ‘-‘- talk about a great peer group ‘-‘- so I soon became addicted to being depressed. It’s kind of like the scene in Mean Girls in which everyone is bitching about some physical feature; except in this version Lindsay Lohan’s character would say something much darker.
It wasn’t until I was 13 and forced to attend an empowerment camp that I really saw what I was doing to myself. I came home and tried to help my friends, but I wasn’t depressed enough for them anymore and I soon found myself deserted. Where would my life have gone if I stayed with a group of people who expected everyone else to fill their emptiness and bail them out instead of doing it themselves? I realized I was holding onto depression because of what it was giving me ‘-‘- a connection to someone. But as soon as I let go of those cancerous people, the void quickly filled with people who truly cared about me.
I can’t help but look back and realize how different I am now, but I’m still afraid that the old me will pop up. I think it’s because when you are so afraid of the harm you could do, you forget how incredible a person you really are. We put on this armor thinking it will keep everything out, pretending that there’s nothing in us that could possibly be the reason why we live in fear, but we realize that we actually have control of what we were afraid of, which makes us stronger than our armor.
Life is about giving thanks for both the good things that make you smile and the bad things that make you stronger. I’ve decided to give that part of my life a more empowering meaning than to just try to hide it. If it weren’t for that dark period in my life, I would have never found my passion for helping people realize the resources that they’ve always had ‘-‘- and that is enough to keep me alive.
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So you went to the doctor because of migraines, and the doctor prescribed an anti-depressant? How did that translate into an epiphany about adolescent depression? With all due respect, this sounds more like attention-seeking than depression.<p/>Tricyclic antidepressants, such as amitriptyline, nortriptyline, and protriptyline, are commonly prescribed to treat migraines because they help to increase serotonin levels. Just because the doctor gave them to you doesn’t by itself mean that you are suffering from depression. <p/>I would be careful diving headlong into clinical self-diagnoses, especially when doing so might cause more harm than good — like imagining that one can be “addicted to being depressed.” Your experience sounds like that of a typical teenager, nothing more.
I had terrible migraines my first semester at BU, but I figured it was the food. Not so! I ended up getting migraine surgery and without it I would never have been able to finish school. Good job getting help!