Thanks to this summer being one of the hottest and driest on record here in New Zealand, my summer SAD has been especially horrible to deal with this year. The worst thing is, I’ve been back at university for almost a month and it’s still going… summer and the SAD. It’s making things a wee bit difficult, but I can say that, without a doubt, this is preferable to the thirteen years I spent in various states of depression not only in summer, but in autumn, winter and spring as well.
I was four when it started. It was the death of my grandmother, who also happened to be the first teacher I had, that triggered it. I was there. I watched her fall. I don’t remember anything what happened after she fell, but it must have been buried deep within my noggin somewhere, because that’s when I started changing. My grandmother was one of the most important people in my life at that point, and in a moment, she was gone.
I started school less than a year after her passing. The few years I had spent with her before starting school meant that I was pretty advanced for my age. This worked against me when I started displaying “behavioural problems” at school. I would “fly off the handle” for silly reasons, like being bored after finishing a task while the rest of the class were still going or being interrupted by another student while I was focusing on something.
My teachers and other “education professionals” thought I might have been autistic (which is offensive to autistic kids, but that’s a whole other story). I went for testing. Yes, I was a gifted child, but nope, no autism. No duh. My parents would have picked up on that long before I started school. So, if it wasn’t autism, what was it? I think I always knew what it was. I just didn’t have the skills to articulate it at that point.
It took a long time for anyone to make a proper diagnosis. Back then, children with clinical depression just wasn’t a thing. It was almost as if the psychologists of the time figured that only people who had the resources to articulate feelings of depression were capable of actually having depression. But I had it, and it frustrated the ever-loving shit out of me that I didn’t know how to tell anyone. So I acted out.
It wasn’t until I was 12 and starting high school that I started getting proper help. And by proper help, I mean I was put on Paroxetine (an anti-depressant that isn’t meant to be given to anyone under the age of 18!) and I went to a few counselling appointments. It wasn’t really helping, but at least my problem was being recognised and the outbursts had stopped.
My mum had to fight for me to be seen by someone who could actually make a difference. It wasn’t until we moved from my hometown of Whangarei down to the Waikato that it happened. I was miserable at my new school, and following the suicide of one of the few friends I had made at said school, I lost my shit. The school counsellor, who is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, knew I needed something more than a daily pill and sporadic counselling.
She got me a referal to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service. My psychologist’s name was Jason. He’s a graduate of the very university I am studying at now, and I am convinced that he is a magician. I started seeing him when I was sixteen, and by the age of seventeen, I was officially cleared of clinical double depression (I had both major depressive disorder and dysthymia). It took him a year to do what everyone else had been trying to do in twelve. And I could have been “fixed” earlier.
I still experience depression, obviously, but with what I learnt with Jason’s help means I don’t let it ruin my life. I gave up on a lot of things during the thirteen years before I was cleared, including high school1. I don’t even know HOW to give up now. And knowing that things DO get better when I am down over the summer helps a lot.
I just wish summer would bugger the hell off now.
- I didn’t graduate. I plan on writing about this at some point.