@bethcollege <-- Tag function notifies the people you’re referring to
Let’s see… I’d been seeing a therapist since October for general anxiety about college, and she noticed before I did that I was getting depressed. It took a while for me to believe her, because there were periods of feeling really down, and then periods where I felt a little better. But when the depression got really bad in November, I finally accepted that I was depressed.
As for managing it, I didn’t want to take medicine, so I tried cognitive-behavioral therapy for a while (identifying negative thoughts as just thoughts instead of letting them worsen my mood, making myself do fun things that would make me feel better). I also tried some natural medicines like Super Complex B and St. John’s Wort that are supposed to increase mood, but they didn’t really work. And outside of this, I managed by quitting many of the ECs I was no longer having fun doing. I actually didn’t have any problems doing assignments or studying for exams, although I needed the pressure of a looming deadline to make me do it. Maybe it’s because of all the things in my life that were going wrong, schoolwork was the easiest one to deal with.
At the start of the second semester, I finally, reluctantly, agreed to take antidepressants, because I was still feeling really numb and apathetic about life. It really helped, lol. It took a while to get my mood up, but I had more energy and motivation to do things within the week. I still see my therapist once a week to work on improving the way I think (I tend to be very self-critical and pessimistic even when I’m not depressed) and a psychiatrist once a month.