Reply #135: I have dealt with depression my entire life [View All]

[kineneb]

it is just now, when I am almost 50, that I finally am getting the kind of therapy I should have had long ago.

The ripples of suicide do come down through the generations: at 27, my great-grandmother poisoned herself, and my grandmother, age 4, had to call for the doctor. Imagine a 4-year old pushing a chair to the wall, so she could reach the hand-cranked phone, while watching her mother die. My grandmother was a loving person who always lived through others. After my grandfather died, she slipped into geriatric depression, which lasted 10 years until she died.

I seem to have inherited the tendency towards depression through my mother. My illness was triggered by (as I only recently discovered) emotional abuse/neglect when I was a very small child. I am fighting it yet again as I watch my husband slowly die.