The following is a series of monologues inspired by over thirty interviews conducted in fall 2007.

Nineteen-year-old female college student

Born in Asia and has been living in U.S.A for 4 years.

During my adolescent period I now am able to diagnose myself as having depression. Growing up in China I had what anyone would define as a happy normal childhood. Parents that took care of me, plenty to eat no visible problems. Once I hit middle school I started to get into a kinda slump that became a really huge slump. The slump that prevents you from being able to let anything have an effect on you, besides how shitty you feel. I know when you become a teenager your brain and your body starts to change, sometimes making you feel imbalanced but I know that it wasn’t just my body, it was the world I was living in. Growing up in China at the time that I did was just crazy. I went to an all girls catholic school where, for whatever superficial teenage reasons, I was always labeled the black sheep. I felt so limited in what I could do or even what I could think. Every aspect of my life was dictated by these sets of social rules. Stick to traditional culture, but embrace western consumerism. You’re are this age so you have to do this or want that, but never encouraged to feel anything. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was so confused because I love my country and culture so much but it is hard for me to embrace it as a whole because of this new capitalistic material side. I felt a huge gap between my peers and me because they all seemed to go along with new system with ease. They bought the clothes and talked on the phones and never questioned anything. All I had was questions, which made me feel so isolated from my culture, my people. Depressed? I never had a doctor tell me that’s what I had but I still have the breaks in the wall from where I banged my head up against it.

After a couple of months of feeling this awful I knew that I had to do something about it. It sounds kind of funny but getting depression actually motivated me to find a way to cure myself. I felt hopeless but I knew I wasn’t helpless, I knew the source of my misery: my country. From then on it was like my direct light at the end of the tunnel. A one-way plane ticket to my happiness: America. I know it sounds kind of funny because America is the birthplace of capitalism, materialism, greed, crime etc. but America had always meant something very different to me. It represented choice, freedom, and opportunity. Unlike China, people in the states are free to pursue their knowledge or even encouraged to question things. I knew that if I could just get to America I would be okay. I applied to so many schools and all my friends and family knew that I literally couldn’t wait to get out of there. My parent’s didn’t really know my entire situation, I mean with the depression and all. I always had a really good relationship with my parents and I didn’t want to spoil that. I had no need to rebel against them so I just kept quiet. Staying in my room all day like most urban chinse teenagers. They figured I was chatting on the phone or on my computer. When I got my acceptance letter for school in the states I was a little bit scared of leaving home but by that time I was so depressed I had no choice but to leave. My depression overrode all my emotions, including fear.

Although my life in the states is not perfect, I have never felt like I did during those teenage years. I’ve since labeled that time as me being depressed even if I fully didn’t admit it to myself at the time it was happening. I believe that everyone has some sort of depression at some point in their lives but not everyone expresses it. I think the problem with our society now is that we have removed ourselves too far from the physical ness of life; we are too much in our heads. Like how we abuse medication. Well, I guess a world that’s already unbalanced uses unbalanced means to balance ourselves. Meds can lead to a cure and I guess that’s a good thing but what’s a cure? A cure is socially based. I think the problem is that depression is such a personal issue and we made it too public, my experience wasn’t pleasant but it lead me to where I am today and it was something I needed to go through on my own. I would say what I had was mild depression. It wasn’t traumatizing.

Twenty-year-old female

I don’t believe in depression as a clinical diagnosis. How can someone else begin to categorize my feelings? People need to be told what’s wrong with them in order to feel like an insider in this society. I feel like a social fluke because I can feel comfortable in my depression or knowing that there is a part of my emotional brain that is not definable.

My mom said I was smiling as I came out of the womb, and even now I wake up most everyday feeling happy. Alone, between my warm bed sheets you couldn’t find a bigger optimist. It’s once I have to interact in this world I begin to feel isolated and what most people would label as depressed. My isolation is the most common reason for me to feel depressed. I am constantly listening and observing in this world. Being adopted, I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider in my family, always kind of hanging back creating whole worlds inside my head. Growing up we moved a round a lot forcing me to constantly change and adapt to fit the in with the crowd I was with. I think this trait has carried in to my adulthood, as I am constantly aware of my surroundings, the people in those surroundings, and how all of this affects me. Feelings, that’s my problem. I feel things just too fucking much. My constant struggle seems to be deciding what’s worse: being the smiling idiot or the aware cynic, doing what’s right or what makes me happy.

I know I seem kind of harsh but I don’t see depression as something real. People talk about depression like it’s an illness, something you have to suffer through. Evenness in people, life, emotions, isn’t the reality. We are constantly moving-left right up down- how can we expect ourselves to always be happy? Emotions are too complex for that. Like asking me these stupid questions, trying to get me to define my emotional state on a nice white piece of paper, just not possible.

For me the best way to move through this life is to throw away the boxes. Fuck the labels-love, hate, boyfriend, best friend, very best friend, throw it all away. I used to spend so much time pretending to be these characters for other people and putting all this energy into acting a certain way when no one is really listening. We live by this code of conduct in terms of what our emotions are supposed to make us feel like. Happiness=good, sad=bad, it’s all so superficial. We’re not focusing on what’s really going on. Why we feel a certain way or how we came to feel it. We don’t give ourselves the time to recognize sadness so how could we truly know what it means to be happy? My depression and happiness stems from the same root. It’s all up to me to recognize how I feel. Everything’s a choice. It’s you’re choice to celebrate your life or your choice to hate it.

22 Year-old Male

I can physically feel it coming on. The tension in the shoulders that sends a message to my brain making me feel stressed, irritated, sad or…um… well what do you want me to say that I get depressed? I do not know what that means. But I do know that I’ve been in therapy since I can remember.

It all started when I was a little kid and like most of us, mom and dad sat me down one day to tell me our family was breaking up. The court assigned me to a therapist to “help me deal with it”. Unfortunately, the therapist was more interested in following the court-mandated rules for therapy than in really investing in my well being. Needless to say, my first encounter with therapy proved more traumatic than helpful and causing me have a terrible opinion of modern psychology to this day.

When I got to college I was no more lost, oblivious, and confused as the average freshman yet as the weeks went by I knew there was something terribly wrong going on inside me. I can’t really explain what it is was like to you but I knew that I had to do something or I was not going to make it. Although my therapy in the past had pretty much been a theatricol performance to show the court and my parents that I was alright, I didn’t know where else to really turn, so I found a psychologist in town who agreed to see me. The result is the freakishly, addictive yet well-adjusted man you see before you.

Like everything else in our culture, therapy has definitely become a fad. I knew this going in to it and refused to indulge in the fact that this sharply dressed woman who sat before me was instantly going to cure me. She was simply an objective person who allowed me to throw away my social censors and spill my guts to. So I talked. I talked and talked and talked until I didn’t have anything left to say. Once our conversation topics moved to the weather I began to get pissed. How was this in any way helping? Yet as our sessions passed I began to realize her purpose. She wasn’t a magic eight ball, slipping me deep and meaningful clues within the subtext of our conversations yet; she served as a mirror allowing me to reflect my own ideas, emotions, and issues, onto myself. She never gave me answers, only questions and as our work progressed I began to build on those questions with even bigger ones. The progress we’ve made cannot be condensed to this conversation but I let’s just say I remain a faithful costumer.

Twenty four-year old female nurse

I’m always the one that’s happy. My friends, family, co-workers all know me as the one that’s always smiling. When I’m not smiling people don’t ask what’s wrong with me, they worry about what’s wrong with them. My senior year of high school there was a brief period where I was a bit out of sync. I was going through lots of changes and just so anxious about my future. My friends weren’t meeting my expectations, which may be a result of the very high expectations I set for people. It always seems to get me into trouble. Anyway, all this anxiety was floating around inside my brain and needed to get out. It took the form of depression and I just couldn’t seem to stop crying.

My parents took me to see a psychologist who immediately diagnosed me with depression and suggested a mix of medication and therapy. Honestly I was so relieved when he told me I was depressed. It felt comforting to have this doctor in front of me to tell me what my disease was and show me the cure. Well I started taking the anit-depressants and within a day felt relief. I know it must have been mental, no pill could fix you that fast but I honestly don’t care, I felt better and that’s all that matters.

I think depression is like cancer, we don’t know what actually causes it but there are factors that can make certain people prone to it. At my job I basically have to see people at their worst. I am surrounded by people who are hurting and that can defiantly take it’s toll on you no matter how much you try to act professional. When people hear about what I do their immediate reactions are something like “Oh that’s so depressing!” I guess people just have a hard time understanding why I’ve chosen to do what I do. I’ve seen some pretty awful stuff but I’ve always seen some of the most incredible miracles in that hospital. How do I deal? I just try to be honest with myself. I cry when I’m sad, not in front of patients, but sometimes when I’m driving home I just start screaming and wailing out of control. You’ve got to let it out or you’ll just explode.

37 Year-old Male

I’ve dealt with Anxiety my whole life. For as long as I can remember I’ve been coping with this disorder or at least learning how to live with it. Little did I know anxiety almost always tends to bring with it its best friend: depression. For me the two go hand and hand. My anxiety makes me feel depressed and vice versa. How do I cope? It’s a combination of things but really what it all comes down to is being self-aware. Being aware of the things in my life that I have control over and more importantly the things I can’t do a damn thing about.

Right now I’m going through a pretty awful divorce. It’s my second marriage but the same type of woman. Angry, sad, abusive…. I guess I didn’t learn my lesson the first time. Like all of us, my wife had her fair of share of problems. The real problem, I later discovered, was my reaction to her problems. In an effort to save our relationship, I began to make them my problems. Trying to heal her made it easy to avoid my own wants and needs and eventually led to my downfall. The tension between us became too much and I decided to mention divorce one morning over breakfast. Instead of the lovely tear-filled reunion I was secretly hoping to scare out of her, I was met with a causal “Yes, that’s a good idea”. Just like that, our marriage was over. I felt like one big failure. How did this happen? How come I couldn’t make this work? Why? Why do I always get myself into these situations? For a guy who’s trying to take control over his own life, I felt like I was doing a pretty shitty job.

My newly discovered depression is one link on my road to recovery. Therapy, medication, my dogs, just surrounding myself with things that encourage me to recognize the truth within myself is how I’m trying to live. People are so embarrassed when it comes to mental illness, like it’s something that you can wish away. I feel sorry for those people, because they are the ones that don’t really know themselves. I know I’m going through a rough time with my divorce and all but my anxietydepression comes from a much deeper element that’s inside myself. It’s a part of me. This part of me is expressing itself more and more each day. My faith lies in my ability to be vulnerable for recovery.

56 year-old, Male

Depression? I think of it as a chronic state of hopelessness, a more long-term condition rather than just a mood. I was depressed most of my life, unfortunately I was too drunk to realize it.

My drinking really got out of control around my late 20’s. I got fired from this job that I really liked and I thought I was really good at. Everyone around me was so on track with their lives and careers, especially my wife. I felt like I had just been drifting since college, not really finding my place. I had really low self-esteem and had this internal turmoil building up inside of me. Although I knew alcohol was a depressant, it seemed to be the only thing that helped. I’ve always been an alcoholic, I was born with this disease, but losing that job made me feel really emasculated and eventually triggered my disease.

During those years my wife would nag at me to go talk to someone about my problems, like a therapist. The thought of exposing myself or making myself vulnerable to anyone made me cringe. I just wanted to crawl inside that bottle and shut off the world. Looking back at those years I think I was acting like a fucking baby. I was feeling so sorry for myself preventing me to face the reality of my life. The disease really feed on my hopeless state of mind.

After my wife started packing her suitcases for the 5^th time I realized I had to get help. Once I stopped drinking my depression almost immediately disappeared. Now, I get my fix from meetings, which I am just as addicted to as the bottle. I’m always going to be an alcoholic that doesn’t go away but luckily the depression has. Sometimes I get a little depressed when I think about how I can never have a drink again: some wine with my wife, champagne to celebrate etc. yeah, I guess that’s kinda depressing. But then I think about drinking again, ya know “just to take the edge off”….. now that’s terror.

Fourteen-year old Female

To me, depression is just a sadness that you can’t get rid of. A deeper feeling than sadness. I don’t think depression comes from inside you, I mean I don’t think it’s passed down into your genes or anything. People can control whether or not they’re depressed. If you can spot it before it happens so you won’t be so surprised, that would help you deal with it when it does happen. There are certain people that are more likely to get it. I think it all depends on what your life is. If you have more money, a good family you will have more confidence and it’s less likely you’ll get depressed.

A few years ago my friend was depressed. She didn’t tell me she was or anything but I just knew. Her dad moved away and she was so unhappy and couldn’t get excited about anything. I helped her by telling her the positive things that came out of her dad moving away. She started to feel better and now she feels good.

People need to find their own ways to be happy. Some people play sports some people take anti-depressants. It’s nobody’s business but that persons. As long as they’re making themselves happy.