Let's Get Real About Depression

This is a sponsored post by me on behalf of Lifescript.com about a subject that is very near and dear to my heart.

It's time to be honest, let's get real about depression.

I think that most of us go through a bout of depression at least once in our lives whether mild, severe or somewhere in between. There are so many depression causes that may ignite from a bad breakup, losing your job, a natural disaster, a friendship that ends, the death of someone close, among of number of things that bring about sadness and zap our motivation as humans. While I was never formally diagnosed as having depression, I know I have suffered from it for many years throughout my life, and it can be easy for it to creep back up now and then. It is, after all, certainly not the norm for a woman in her teens and early 20's to weigh in at nearly 400 lbs due to so much stress and emotional eating, always feel sick and in pain, and rarely desire to go out due to a severe lack of confidence, right?

My experience with depression unfortunately really started in my tween and teen years due to a not-so-great family life. Around that time, I finally started really becoming aware of just how sick my father was from bipolar disorder that he often refused to medicate and how much my mother's health was suffering from lack of motivation and depression herself. Times throughout my teens only got worse for a long time including mental episodes from my father where he tried to strangle me and then had so many strokes he could barely function to where my mother became so ill she became bed-ridden and started taking her frustration out on me through verbal and emotional abuse. It was quite difficult, and painful, to experience my mother transforming from the role model and hero I once saw her as to a shell of her former self that no longer cared about anything.

Let's Get Real About Depression

While I understood why my mother turned into the person she did, it didn't make being more of a parent to my own parents than they were to me, when I perhaps needed them most, as a teenager any easier, nor did all the talking down to me help.  So I dove deeper into depression, eating more junk, moving less and less, struggling with the motivation to go to school, not wanting to go out and gaining more weight while locking myself into a social box. While I never attempted suicide, I'd be lying if I said it never crossed my mind, especially when for many years I feared being bipolar like my father.

Luckily, through everything one silver cloud did form. I met the boyfriend who helped me see what my family life was doing to me and that if I didn't quickly get out and build a better life for myself, I'd end up like my mother and likely soon dead. Needless to say, that wasn't the life I pictured for myself, so with his help I left the situation when I was 23 and now at nearly 28, have since lost a lot of weight, actually have self-confidence and worth and am for the first time in my life, truly happy.

 One of the first pictures of myself where I knew that the smile wasn't fake and that I really was happy.

As I mentioned before, even though my life and lookout has improved by leaps and bounds, old habits do die hard and I can feel the depression sometimes creeping back in after a string of bad luck, etc. I love that the internet has grown so much today that there are now several resources to help me work through the depression and realize I'm not alone. One of my favorite sites to visit when I start feeling depressed is the Lifescript.com Depression Health Center.

Lifescript.com provides medical information, tips and advice that are all written by professional health writers, experts and physicians. I love the variety of depression articles that help me identify when I am starting to deal with depression again so I can try to nip it in the bud. Plus, they remind me to apply positive lifestyle changes and stories from fellow depression sufferers that I can identify with. I find that with these tools, it helps me recover much faster and continue to live my life the way I really want to.

Visit www.lifescript.com for useful information on Depression and other prevalent medical conditions related to women’s health. Want to read more articles related to depression? Here are 3 from Lifescript.com that I really enjoyed reading: Depression Symptoms (some aren't always so obvious to us), Recipes that can help boost your mood, and Patient Stories.

Lifescript’s Depression Health Center features tips, quizzes, recipes and articles – all by professional health writers, experts and physicians – covering postpartum depression, seasonal affective disorder, bipolar disorder, how to boost your mood with exercise and more. Please visit the Lifescript Health Center on depression for more information.

And to check out this free website, click here!

This is a sponsored post by me on behalf of Lifescript.com.

 Topic: Let's Get Real About Depression