Depression and the Disappearance of Positive Thoughts… My Story

Great News!

It was fall of 2002. I had just found out I was expecting our first baby!

The next step was to call my doctor and find out whether I could continue to take my migraine medication while I was pregnant.

But…

The migraine medication was also an antidepressant. I had been told the year prior (by a different doctor, who was no longer there) that taking this antidepressant daily would stop the migraines. Since I had been getting debilitating migraines 3 to 5 times a week for about a year, I agreed right away. I stopped getting migraines almost immediately, and I felt great.

That doctor had also told me that the antidepressant he prescribed was not habit-forming.

The new doctor who had taken over his office told me otherwise. He said I should not continue taking the medication while pregnant, but that he would wean me off of it slowly since it was a “pesky” medicine to get off of.

Over the next three weeks, I was “slowly” weaned off the medicine.

It wasn’t slowly enough.

Withdrawal… to Depression

A few weeks later, I started feeling… different. I can’t really describe it. I don’t know exactly when it started, I can’t pinpoint the day that I knew something was wrong. But for some inexplicable reason, I wasn’t happy anymore. It didn’t make sense. I was newly married and expecting a baby, everything was going well… but nothing really brought me joy. I felt anxious and guilty.

By February, I could barely get out of bed. I started seeking help from a counselor and a pastor. Actually, make that a couple of pastors, one from our church and the other from a Bible study group I attended from another church. Something was definitely wrong. I wanted to sleep all day, just to escape life, I was neglecting responsibilities at home and work, and – worst of all – I was convinced that God had abandoned me.

What happened to positive thoughts?

The sense that God didn’t love me anymore was the most bitter pill to swallow. I had been raised in a Christian home. I became a Christian at an early age and had been involved in various Christian ministries for a long time. My father was a pastor. But something strange was happening to my understanding of the Bible. I could no longer process positive thoughts and ideas. Only negative ideas would “stick.” So, if I read Romans 6:23, it read like this:

“For the wages of sin is death.”

That was it. The verse stopped there. I could read the words that followed, but they didn’t mean anything to me. It was rather like reading in code. I could read but not comprehend.

I started reading Psalms… I liked Psalms. I learned later that many people who are depressed end up reading the Psalms. Many of the Psalms seem to match the despair and sense of abandonment that depressed people feel.

I started thinking that everything was sin. Everything. Talking on the phone, holding a teddy bear… I won’t go into detail, but I was convinced that just about everything was morally wrong.

I also learned later that the part of the brain that processes positive thoughts is not the same part of the brain that processes negative thoughts. If the positive-thought-processor is not working properly, that has no effect on the negative-thought-processor. Hence, I could process the part of the verse that said the wages of sin is death, but not the part about the gift of God being eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.

Light at the end of the tunnel!

In May, it was finally time for the baby to be born. I wasn’t happy about it. I hadn’t been happy at my baby showers. I didn’t want to bring a baby into this miserable world where God would hate her. I had a crib and a bouncy seat and lots of fun baby stuff that people had given me, but I didn’t set up her room. My mom and my husband finally set it up for me.

My beautiful daughter was finally born in mid-May. I brought her home, somehow managed to take care of her in spite of the depression (with a lot of help from my mom), and then, a week later…

The depression lifted.

Just like that. It was gone.

I got up one morning, and something was different. I felt joy again. I stopped thinking everything was sin. I remembered that there is actually a lot of good news in the Bible.

My brain’s positive-thought-processor was up and running again!

But I still had a lot of emotional scars from the whole experience. I didn’t understand it. What had happened? Why was my thinking so crazy? Would it happen again? Was the depression and the goofy thinking going to come back?

I was also embarrassed. I still had to see the people who knew what I had been like for the past few months. I wished I didn’t. What must they think of me?

A few years went by before it got to the point that I could think about without feeling emotional pain. A few more years went by before I could talk about it.

I didn’t fully make the connection between the withdrawal from an antidepressant and my own depression until a long time after my daughter was born. A couple of years later, I got a postcard in the mail about a class action suit against the makers of the antidepressant. It listed the possible symptoms I might have experienced after taking it, including suicide if a loved one had taken it. That’s when it hit me. My brain had become dependent on the antidepressant and forgot how to regulate my emotions without it.

Others have gone through this

Years later, I found a YouTube video of a fabulous speech by Pastor Tommy Nelson, in which he described his own experience with depression and anxiety. His experience sounded a lot like my own, except that his depression didn’t start from medication withdrawal. I have recommended that video to many people. I wish it had been around when I needed it. But Pastor Tommy’s experience hadn’t happened yet when I was going through mine.

I feel a great deal of empathy for anyone dealing with depression. I understand why Christian psychiatrists advise depressed people to stop reading the Bible. And I get a little touchy when people who haven’t gone through this ordeal decide to criticize Christian psychiatrists for saying it.

If you’re going through depression…

There is hope! Don’t give up.

And I highly recommend watching this YouTube video:

A Christian Looks at Depression – Tommy Nelson – YouTube