Depression Understood Forums

This is my first time posting anything on here so here it goes. I have faced depression problems ever since I was a junior in high school. I am now a freshman in college. So I have been dealing with depression for almost 3 years now. You can say that I am pretty good at hiding how I feel. I ended up telling my friends a year after it all started. My parents ended up finding out a year after my friends did. They were shocked to say the least. They had no idea that I had ever felt such pain before. To be able to go to college away from home it took a lot of convincing. Here I am 3 hours away from home. It was great at first, actually being on my own. Then the pain started to kick in. In high school my depression was never ending. Countless times locking myself in my room balling my eyes out or just going for a long drive. Once I got to college it changed a bit. It started to go away for the beginning of the first semester. At the end of that semester it slowly started to come back. Beginning of second semester it kept coming. Here I am now half way through this semester feeling worse than I did in high school. I can't really explain why I first started to get depressed because to be quite honest I really have no idea. But its a constant feeling of being worthless and helpless. Feeling as if life would be better for a bunch of people if you were just not around anymore. The only reason keeping me alive is my family. When my dad found out about me being depressed, he also found out that I had suicidal thoughts. He told me that if I were to ever kill myself him and my family would be devastated. To be c completely honest that is the only thing keeping me alive. My family. Knowing that they would be like that is the only reason why I am still alive today. The past couple of weeks have been really rough. I have decided to go back home this coming up semester and go to school in town. To be closer to my family and see if it helps me in anyway. I haven't decided if I am going to tell my parents that I am still dealing with depression or not because I don't want them to know how low I feel about myself. It's the worst feeling in the world knowing that you just want to end your life everyday but cant because you need to fight yourself to stay alive for your family.

I think there are worse feelings isanyonethere.

I too, use the same ploy but I don't believe there is any shame in it. At the heart of it, I do believe we must live for ourselves. But I also believe it is an honourable thing to live for your parents as well. It is a sign of our Love and Gratitude. After all, it's quite possible that many times our parents have been willing to live their lives for us.

So I know your struggling. I know your low. But you don't need to bring your self further down for wanting to care for your parents emotional well being. On the contrary. I hope you will begin to view it as a triumph. It's one (of which I'm sure there are others) of your positive attributes.

I too use my family and my husband as my reason to continue. At this point that's all I have to hang on to. I try to keep myself busy to avoid my all of my negative thoughts, but right now I dont have a job and I graduated from college last month so all I have is time to myself to sit with all my thoughts and I'm feeling really low but trying to stay positive as much as I can muster. Good luck with everything.