There are a lot of personal pages here in cybereality that deal with accounts of depression. Some of them are the pages of friends of mine.

I, too, suffer from depression, though not anywhere near as serious as these friends and many of the others you may have seen online. I suffer from a form of chronic depression known as dysthymia.

Dysthymia is described as a low to moderate level of depression persisting for at least two years, and often longer. Its symptoms are not as severe as those of major depression, but are more enduring and resistant to treatment. Some people with this disorder also experience major depression episodes during the course of their depression.

I take no prescription medications. I see no therapists, though I did in college. This page will not detail my many suicide attempts, since there have been none. But you will read about my own voyage on the sometimes turbulent, sometimes stagnant, waters of depression.

The time is early 1985. I'm a student at Penn State's main campus at University Park. Things haven't been exactly wonderful on many fronts. I feel listless, out of touch with reality... I don't feel alive.

A dear friend, whom I've sadly lost contact with entirely, talks to me one day about counseling. She tells me about the university's free counseling services and suggests I make an appointment. It helped her out a lot, she says.

Depression... The word meant little to me at the time. But I thought about her words, and took a serious look at things. I looked at my writings from the past year. During '84, I'd written several very depressing poems, a short story about a suicide, even a term paper on the subject, justifying it as being a person's right.

Had I given thought to doing the deed? Yes, several times. But there was one thing that prevented me from doing it. And one thing only. It wasn't family. It wasn't friends. It wasn't that "someone special." There was no "someone special." That was a large part of the reason for my depression.

No, the one thing that prevented my untimely demise was a book. A book I was writing. My goal in life was (and still is) to become a published novelist. The fact that I had this manuscript saved my life.

Not that I didn't sometimes fantasize about sitting in the middle of the floor with a lighter in one hand, tearing pages out of the binder with the other...

But I looked at the things I'd written over the past year, including my diary, since '84 was one of the two years I kept a daily journal. I'd written a lot about suicide in it. And I thought about how I'd felt during that year.

Typically, I'd get into a "funk" that would last a few weeks. Then I'd be back to my version of normal, which (I came to realize) was still a state of depression. But during the fall of '84, I'd gone into a really long episode. It lasted months. And it really frightened me, once I realized the severity of it.

A visit home during that period. While shopping at the local mall, I bump into an old friend I haven't seen in years. I'm thrilled to see her. We chat for a few minutes, then she suddenly says, "Geez... Why are you so depressed?"

And I tell her I'm not. In fact, I'm really happy to be seeing her. But in my head, I'm suddenly scared. If I think I'm thrilled, and she thinks I'm depressed, then something is seriously screwed up.

It was that depressive period that caused me to talk to my friend Missy about depression in the first place, which led to me going through a free ten-week therapy session.

I didn't really want to go through with these sessions. I didn't know what to make of them and, more importantly, I didn't know what they'd make of me. But I went.

It must be said that, during the sessions, and for a long time after I was done with them, I didn't really feel that I'd gotten much out of them. In fact, it took years before I fully appreciated what went on in that office.

The psychologist told me, eventually, that I was suffering from chronic depression. Naturally, my question was, "Can it be cured?"

The answer, to my shock, was, "Probably not." He told me that I'd had this for quite some time, probably since I was a child. And when it got to this stage (which I don't recall ever being defined), he said it was bound to be with me for the rest of my life. He assured me, however, that he felt that together we could lessen its impact on my life.

We met for one-hour sessions, once a week. I often wished they were longer, because it took me a while to really open up and get rolling. By the end of the ten sessions, I didn't feel that anything was really accomplished. But since I couldn't afford to actually pay for further sessions, we ended things there.

In the ensuing years, I've learned how to deal better with my depression. I realize that I'll probably never experience a "normal" day, free from depression entirely. But I've learned to spot the warning signs of nasty bouts early. This isn't to say that I always succeed in warding them off, but I'm generally able to minimize the effects.

I've gone for a year or more at a time without an episode of major depression in the dysthymia. I don't take anti-depressants, which pleases me immensely. My condition isn't that debilitating. But it can really mess up my life, if I'm not careful.

So I'm careful. I try to be constantly in touch with what I'm thinking and feeling, how I'm reacting to things. And when I see myself slipping, I make a concerted effort to control it. I can't explain how I do that... I just do. And I take St. Johns Wort. This herb has been shown to be just as effective (if not moreso) for mild and moderate depression as those expensive, side-effect-ridden prescription anti-depressants.

There are plenty of other pages out there that can tell you about the specifics of depression. They can dazzle you with information on anti-depressants and quote statistics telling you how awful depression is and how many people have it and so on and so forth. These are good resources, easy to find, helpful to those unfamiliar with depression. I won't try to reproduce any of those resources here.

All I will do is try to impart to one and all the fact that even depression that isn't really serious... really is serious.

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