I am a 19 year-old university student with everything going for me, I am doing very well at my degree in a very good university, I have a very supportive family who love me, I have a wonderful boyfriend who loves me and puts up with a ■■■■ of a lot, I have a bright future and my dream job lined up for me after I graduate and I have a group of lovely friends. However, I still suddenly developed severe depression a few months ago now. Looking back it has always been there but I have never addressed it and have always managed to put it back to the back of my mind. I'm still not completely sure about the reasons behind it but I know its partially down to bullying through school and lots of issues trusting people as I have been let down a lot in the past.
I finally went to see a doctor in October shortly after moving back to university for my second year as I felt things were getting too much for me to deal with; she suggested I try counselling and offered medication. I took up the offer of counselling but was very scared by the thought of taking tablets as it felt as though I would be admitting how bad things had got. After weeks of counselling, things seemed to be getting worse rather than better and got to the point where my counseller advised that I try medication because I'd got to the point where I had lost all hope in ever feeling better and had lost all confidence.
I went from being a loud, bubbly girl who loved to go out partying with my friends and having fun all the time to losing all confidence in myself and everyone around me within the space of a few weeks. I used to cry all the time at nothing in particular for hours at a time on my own as I locked myself away from everyone. When I started counselling things started to look up for the first few weeks, it felt as though I was addressing problems that I had buried away for too long and was dealing with things.
I don't know when things changed but all of a sudden I dove into a far worse depression than I had experienced even at the beginning before counselling. I lost all hope of ever getting better, I got so anxious about leaving the house or even getting out of bed that I couldn't do anything for fear of having a panic attack. It was around this time I first started having suicidal thoughts, I thought what was the point of anything, of getting a good degree or a good job if I wasn't going to be happy, the only thing that stopped me from doing anything was the thought of the affect it would have on my family. I told my counsellor all of this which is why she suggested the tablets, I went to the doctors later that day and was prescribed citalopram.
At first I started to feel very spaced out and kept getting a clenched jaw which I have noticed some other people saying but I felt like I was coping better than I had and was hopeful that things could get better. However, after the first week my mood nosedived to the lowest I have ever felt in my life, I felt anxious constantly, I struggled to get out of bed or concentrate on anything. I felt in a constant deep depression, I saw the bad in everyone, even the people who were there for me the most I didn't feel I could trust. I got so low that one day I came so close to taking my life it scared me, I looked how many paracetemol I needed and when I saw that it didn't always work I started to try and get the blades out of my razor. I don't know what stopped me from doing it but it scared me so much that I booked into the doctors the next day to discuss the tablets. As I had only been on them for just under 2 weeks he told me that hopefully I was past the worst of the side effects and prescribed me diazepam to help with the side effects.
I have now been on citalopram for 2 and a half weeks but I;m still feeling very low most of the time, I do have moments where I feel like I am getting better but this is usually followed by feeling feeling desperately unhappy and hopeless. I've taken a week off university because the worry of this affecting my degree has been adding to my anxiety.
I feel so bad as I know that I'm not the same person that I was, people have even told me this and that is one of the things that hurts me the most. I've turned into a selfish person that I never was before and I've been taking out my feelings on the people I care about the most, especiallymy boyfriend who has put up with so much recently and I'm so very guilty but I can't seem to stop and I'm terrified he's going to have enough soon and leave me even though he has said many times he won't but like I said before I have lost all confidence in everyone :cry:
I'm trying to stick to the tablets but at the moment its so hard to believe that anything will get better, I've joined this site because I feel it might help me knowing that other people are experiencing the same things and maybe even got better after taking the tablets.