I wasn't going to reply to this thread for several reasons but there's a few things here that need to be said, at the risk of sparking another heated exchange. Most of you who know me know my situation too, and though I am now far from the teenage years of angst and confusion/adjustment/finding my place in the world, the feelings you describe are universal and don't catagorically fit necessarily to that specific age bracket - if it did it would be considered more a 'phase' of development than an actual clinically diagnosed illness.
Since the age of 13 or thereabouts I have been on medication for depression. It's not a case of waking out of it, and anyone who's had depression knows its not as simple as having a few bad days that everyone else experiences then 'snaps out of.' How you view things certainly goes a long way towards self-help as medication will only do so much, but having supportive people around you is far more beneficial than people telling you, as was so elloquently said, to cheer up and smell the coffee or however that was put earlier. That really irritated me on a personal level I have to say.
But as if. Who chooses to live like that? Without hope, without reason, or a sense of purpose, to the point where food is tasteless, you dont even notice the passing days/years/seasons or care, you move and breathe and talk because you have to, because it's expected, but there's no point to it, nothing driving you, no reason to look forward or back or just be in the moment, there's nothing... it's a hollow, lonely, haunting existence.
And anyone at all who says they know what you're going through is a bare-faced liar. That's like saying 'I know how you feel' when a loved one dies. No one can ever KNOW how YOU feel, they can relate but they dont know as each life, each circumstance, each person are unique and their own.
Helping yourself out of depression is a very long arduous continous process and really if you dont find something to cling to to keep you focussed or going its painfully easy to do stupid things to make it worse. It ****** me to tears to hear people look at depression and its effects like its a choice not an affliction. Real depression is biochemically enduced. In my case as much circumstantial as it was medical. I have over the course of 15 years taken a whole heap of pills and sought councellors and therapists and specialists and hasd tests and so forth to correct the imbalances in my serotonin levels but in the end it wasn't so much medication that has brought me out of this latest phase of it, it was faced with my mother's mortality which gave me a sense of purpose. That's not to say I am free of the shackles of it, I dont think it will ever go. It always feels like a dark cloud hanging over my head where I cant see it but I know its there, and some days its thick enough to physically weigh me down but most of the time its just lingering. Like a threat. Maybe its to remind me of my lowest points so I dont ever go back. But how you see yourself and how you see the world and where you see yourself in it goes a HUGE way to working your way through the illness. And I say 'illness' not choice because that's what it is. Some people like to live melodramatic lives and some arent happy unless they are 'miserable' but if what you're going through doesnt feel normal to you and its not a conscious state you've talked yourself into then chances are you should seek help from whatever avenue seems approriate to you. Depression in its many forms is far more widely accepted now than it was ten years ago, twenty years ago. The way we live plays a huge part in the global epidemic. But think about it, if people thesedays actually stopped to help each other through difficult times (in an idealistic view of the world) rather than judge them maybe we really could cure it...
Nice idea right?