318. Living with Treatment Resistant Depression

Depression is predicted to be the second most common illness in the United States by 2010. Clinical depression – not situational depression – affects some 15 million adults a year. That’s a lot of people suffering with chronic symptoms, many of whom wish they had a terminal disease instead.

Ten to thirty percent of those diagnosed with clinical depression fall into the category of treatment resistant depression. For these poor souls, taking an antidepressant or going to psychological counseling (psychotherapy) may not help much if at all, and symptoms may improve only to keep coming back.

I’m not about to list all the options for treatment resistant depression but to suggest one way of living with it. Accept your condition as if you had diabetes, Crohn’s disease, or paralysis from the waist down, experiencing ups and downs perhaps for the rest of your life. Once you give up on finding a cure, you can experience peace amidst your great sorrow.

About Patrick Day

In 2010, I escaped from four long years of deep, dark depression. This blog shares lessons I learned from those years as depicted in my autobiography - How I Escaped from Depression - as well as other insights about depression and anxiety that only come from someone who has gone through it. When you have a heart attack, you become an expert in heart attacks. When you have diabetes, you become an expert in that condition. As such, I am an expert in depression, with a four-year experiential degree and graduate studies in how to live a life going forward that keeps the ever-lurking Depression at a healthy distance.

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