Help! I'm losing my mind to depression!

Dear reader,

Those dark, heavy days have caught up with me once more. A fat-grey bellied cloud follows me around and something sits heavy on my chest. I am struggling once again with day-to-day life. I still attend group therapy everyweek - in fact, I had a session this morning where I spent the hour sobbing fat tears, panting like a baby, trying to catch a breath. To be honest with you, I am at a cross-roads - where do I go from here? I take the maximum dosage of anti-depressants to help me daily, I have undergone CAT therapy, I have undergone CBT, counselling - call them what you like, but now I am trying group therapy and I am still in bits. Will I ever be able to exorcise this demon?

The answer to my own question is I do not know... but what I do know is that I have no choice but to try for as long as I exist (and I'm barely doing that just now, sleeping 18 hour days) I have to try. Where am I going with this - apart from releasing a bit of steam from the pressure cooker, I guess what I am trying to say is that even though things are hard just now (a bit of an understatement, try bloody-well impossible!), I guess in some ways therapy is a place for me to exist - exist in a different climate, to cocoon in a safe place to talk to other like-minded individuals, who offer shared anecdotes, jokes, their own woes and above all, the one thing a non-sufferer and most of society cannot offer you, EMPATHY. A shared understanding of the horrors that salvage your body and mind as this poison flows through your being.

Because, accept it as we must whether we like it or not, there are not many people in our working lives, personal lives or social lives who can understand this - they can try, but they are only human, after all, and become annoyed by us. We can seem, at times, self-indulgent (though why we would wish to indulge in mind-blowing pain, I do not know) we can test the patience of others, but, at the end of the day we are suffering. As the adage goes: just as a person suffers a sore leg and needs help, so too does a depressed person.

I am about to sign off and retreat to my bed on his gorgeous warm spring day - I can't choose life at the moment, because I have no choice. Depression has chosen me and subsequently, I am exhausted. I need my rest. What I want to say to all you out there is please get in touch if you wish to talk, because, although it may not seem it at the moment, talking and having some empathy from others has helped me slightly. Someone, I believe, saved my life today. How long for, I do not know. But as long as I exist, I will have to try and fight for my life.

Goodnight for now.