Meghan

…when I was a junior, something just clicked and I just became very irritable and everything just seemed to bother me and I just had a negative outlook on life and just everything was hard for me to do. And I just approached things in such a negative way and I didn’t know what was going on and people were noticing that my personality had changed and I didn’t know what was going on, other people didn’t know what was going on, people thought that I was just being rude or kind of arrogant and it wasn’t until later that I discovered that I did have depression and it’s been a long journey but I progressed and it got to the point where I dealt with that for about a year, just like, just didn’t feel like myself and struggled with daily things, but it was manageable and bearable and I got through that, but I never really reached out for help and I never really put too much thought to it. I just kind of thought that my life was speeding up and things were changing and that’s just how it was, that was what was going on. So within the next year and a half it just progressed and got more serious to the point where I, I felt ashamed of the way that I had really secluded myself from others and I was not as outgoing as I had been. I didn’t feel really welcome in my school environment and I just and it was just all in my head. It was not that anything had ever happened to me it was just all of a sudden something in my, something in my mind just decided to go wacky and it, it really started to become a problem my senior year in high school.

And it was just all in my head. It was not that anything had ever happened to me it was just all of a sudden something in my, something in my mind just decided to go wacky and….it, it really started to become a problem my senior year in high school and I, that was about a year and a half into the start of it all and I had such a negative outlook on life like I had said. I, it was hard for me to wake up and just approach the day-to-day things.

So the last three months of high school were very terrible in the sense that I, I was just always so sad and I wasn’t doing well academically, I didn’t finish great. I just couldn’t really take anything seriously and I couldn’t devote myself to anything because I couldn’t focus, my mind was just always racing with thoughts that I couldn’t control.

I was doing my homework and stuff and working and I could see all these people around me just having so much fun, like they were doing their work but they were laughing with people and they were talking. And I was in a, like cafeteria and I just remember like a week or so after I moved, I was looking around and I just couldn’t even remember the last time that I had laughed or just enjoyed being in a social environment, because at that point just everything was just so abrasive to my senses like, I just didn’t even want to be around anybody because I didn’t feel comfortable with where I was and what I was doing and I just was so ashamed that I hadn’t realized what was going on with myself sooner.

Well I kind of am more calm about things. Like, if I am stressed out about something I, I mean easier said than done, but I just kind of make myself realize that it’s going to be okay. Like I mean, there were points in that first semester of college where that I thought that I was not going to live through an exam. Like there was an exam and I was so stressed out about it and so anxious and just sick to my stomach just leading up to that exam and during that exam. Like I mean that I was acting in such a way that I thought that it was a life or death situation and I am just so happy that [laughter]., that is not the case anymore, because I mean that was the case with day to day activities, like I would be so anxious like academically and socially because I wasn’t myself and yeah, it just was not good [laughter].

I, immediately when I was like, in my counseling sessions I made it very clear that I just wanted to get help with medication. And, [Clears throat] excuse me, it was kind of an odd thing to like, really make clear because that can seem kind of like with the wrong thing in mind or at least that’s what I think. But it’s just because that I knew that talking about it wasn’t going to help and that’s not what I wanted to do. I just wanted to, I just wanted to have my potential with my semester and get on track. So I, I made it very clear I wanted medication and it, through the university health services it was very hard to go about getting medication and that’s kind of unfortunate in my opinion, because not always is it that counseling is going to help people.

And I didn’t want to have counseling. I didn’t want to be in a support group. I didn’t really want to talk about what was going on because nothing even triggered what was going one with me. Like it not like I had a traumatic thing that initially started it and then built up and I just couldn’t even put my finger on what was going on, so. I, immediately when I was like in my counseling sessions I made it very clear that I just wanted to get help with medication. And, [Clears throat] excuse me, it was kind of an odd thing to like really make clear because that can seem kind of like with the wrong thing in mind or at least that’s what I think. But it’s just because that I knew that talking about it wasn’t going to help and that’s not what I wanted to do. I just wanted to, I just wanted to have my potential with my semester and get on track. So I made it very clear I wanted medication and it, through the university health services it was very hard to go about getting medication and that’s kind of unfortunate in my opinion, because not always is it that counseling is going to help people. And I did end up trying out counseling because that’s just the process that they take, but I just think that in individual circumstances that I just really don’t think counseling helped me at all. And I think that they should evaluate. I don’t know.