Living with PTSD and Major Depressive Disorder
By Joe Maxwell
Dear Friends,
I consider all who visit this site to be my friends as we all have the same things in common: mental illness. I was diagnosed with these disorders MDD in 2012 after losing my job due to a chronic illness and PTSD in 2014 after the death/suicide of my darling wife. She was my greatest love. I never knew I didn’t know what love was until she showed me its true meaning. After discovering her body, something in me snapped and I have never been the same since. As I type these words, I can feel my heart pounding in my chest and the arteries in my neck pulsating harder and harder. This was such an unexpected tragedy and none of us saw it coming. Being left a disabled, unemployed and now widowed father to six of the world’s greatest children, I reached my breaking point.
As time began to pass after my love died, I began to notice major changes in how I reacted to things and how my thought process rapidly declined. So much so that I began having dreams of me hanging myself in my wife’s closet. I think part of that was the guilt I was feeling and still feel because she died on my watch. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully forgive myself about this but never say never. I felt/feel I failed her terribly. I felt/feel it was my fault. She became so stressed out over the years as she watched my health deteriorate, and often stated that she would want to die if something happened to me. First being mis-diagnosed with ALS, this sent her over the top with worry and stress and uncontrollable fear. She worried constantly about me as I began to have fainting episodes and seizures. I stopped telling her how I really felt as I saw how much it affected her. So I had no one to really share my stresses and worries with and slowly became confined to the house and then to my bed and now a wheelchair. This is where the MDD hit its peak I believe.
As I sank deeper and deeper into depression, I lost my ability to see a way out and my desire to find one after my wife’s death. Everything seemed hopeless and I just felt completely helpless. My career was taken away, my health was gone, and now my wife, love, mother of my children, and best friend was gone all in what seemed like a matter of seconds in comparison to time itself. I refused to get out of bed, only to walk what seemed to be a 100 miles to the bathroom and then crash back into bed and sleep the day away hoping that if I awoke, my love would have returned to me and that losing her was just a nightmare that got out of control that felt so real. Each time I awoke, the nightmare slowly became reality.
Reality: Something that took me over two years to begin to face. This was pure hell but the beginning of even considering opening the door for help on a subconscious level. As I would look in the mirror at myself, at my unshaven face, and dirty body. As I began to see the worry in my children’s faces about “what’s wrong with daddy?” I began to realize this situation was not just about me. My perspective began to change and as I thought more and more of the devastating affect this was taking on me as an adult, I just could not imagine what these poor children must have been feeling. Here they had lost their mother in one of the worst ways any kid could lose a parent, and now it looked as if dad was not going to make it either. What hell they were in. It was at this point that I realized that I had to pull myself together somehow if not for myself, for my children. I tried to do it on my own but each time I failed and realized this was something bigger than myself and that I was going to need to find help.
Turning to my faith, Christianity, I called upon God to lead me in the right direction for help with these life altering issues/circumstances and God led me to his Word and to some of the greatest mental health providers I could ever ask for. Just the thought of going to see people about my brain and its weaknesses was sheer terror! What am I going to say? They are going to think of me as weak or just plain nuts! I’ve always been independent and strong; I should just be able to handle this too!
Well I re-reflected on my past at trying to accomplish this alone and decided, yeah, it’s time to get some help. I’m so very glad I did. I have been placed on medication, attend one-on-one counseling with my therapist, one-on-one with my psychiatrist and also group therapy. All of which I have grown to love and don’t think I can make it without. I now am angry at myself for waiting so long to seek help. If anyone on this site has those fears, has any doubts about therapy and or mental drugs, believe me when I say there was no greater skeptic than I and no one more un-at ease about the whole idea of it than I was. Trust me, it works. Sometimes when our minds are so dead-set on being closed to certain things, we place blinders on our minds eye and may miss the very things we need to turn our lives in a new, positive direction.
NAMI: I attended my first NAMI session almost two weeks ago. They had two speakers come and they both shared their stories with our group at the center for mental health I attend. These two women blew my mind with their stories for starters but more so, they blew my mind because they were willing to walk into a room full of complete strangers, come out of their comfort zones and share their intimate details of how they acquired their mental illnesses, what their diagnoses are and how they have learned to cope with them. I found this to be profoundly brave of them and extremely encouraging. These two ladies cared enough about me to share their stories and it had a profound effect on me as well as others in my group. It made me want to share my story in the hopes it too would help someone which is why I’m on this site sharing it now.
I have never been more inspired and empowered to share my story than I was after meeting these two wonderful speakers. They brought information, they brought love, but most of all they brought with them hope. If I could have, I would have hugged them both because in this life, it’s not just about me. It’s about reaching out to others even though my issues still confront me each morning and haunt me each night. I can stretch out one hand to someone that has not reached the level of recovery I have and with the other hand, grab the hand of one who is in a more advanced stage of recovery so they can pull me up to where they are until we all reach the top of the mountain together.
We truly are not alone. At times we feel isolated but that’s the beauty of group therapy, or at least it was for me. It opened my eyes to the fact that there are more and more people with diagnose—and more common—undiagnosed, mental illness than I ever imagined. So let us all work together to help one another and not be ashamed of our diagnoses because in doing so, we further empower those who place a negative stigmatization on those of us with this illness. One that none of us chose and one that those without it, are just a perfect storm away from acquiring. So fight for your ability to manage your mental health, remember the effects it can have on those close to you, but most important, do whatever is necessary to get better. God bless you all and may he lead you to your recovery and new hope for life and the future.
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