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Brain Go BOOM!
Author/Survivor: John Cooper
Chapter 37: Let’s Pause for Station Identification
I
was mortified for what I had almost done. More importantly, I was ashamed for what I had
put Laura through. I needed to pull myself up from those ashes and change the flow of my
unintentional, self-inflicted, turbulent tides. You may see by now, I wasn’t big on asking others
for help, but there was no way in Hell I was going back there, so I started asking.
We now pause for a brief message about depression:
Since depression is a non-contagious illness, society often gives this disease less
recognition than it deserves. For people who have never suffered from depression, I now realize
it’s difficult for them to understand. Some may view what I went through as being a sign of
weakness and that my lack of energy and loss of ambition were me just being lazy; however, a
person with depression cannot control these behaviors. Those words were not in my vocabulary!
Depression is a treatable disease.
My case isn’t much different from most people with depression, especially after a brain
injury. Even my rehab psychologist didn’t identify my depression. To his defense, I was not one
hundred percent forthcoming during our sessions, most likely because of my pride or the damage
to the basal ganglia area of my brain which controls these emotions. More than likely it was my
pride. Even to my own psychologist I didn’t want to show any signs of weakness. Adding to it
was the adverse reaction of the two medications I was taking. I have since learned to
immediately inform my physicians of any medication changes. Case in point, my medications
had adversely affected each other causing my ferocious, downward spiral. I can’t entirely blame
the medications but I do know the underlining depression mixed with those two medications
almost caused me to take an end to my life. Even after figuring the out the medication aspect of
the depression, my mental health still needed resuscitation.
I did some research about depression and found that in the US alone, it’s estimated that
one of ten people are afflicted with some varying degree of depression. The 2015 U.S. census
report states that are approximately 320,740,000 people living in the US, making it ten percent,
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