Emotional Support Sisters

If Disney made an Inside-Out style movie about me, one of my islands could very well be titled “Depression”. While I have other diagnoses and, of course, other salient aspects of my identity, depression is part of how I became the person I am today. 

Depressing, isn’t it?

I was diagnosed with “clinical depression” when I was around 11 years old. My symptoms presented_¹ differently then than they do now. In a way, depression has grown up with me and I have grown up with depression. 

It isn’t uncommon for children to present mental illness differently than adults. Children often present with somatic² symptoms. That is what happened to me. For somewhere between 6 months and a year before my diagnosis, my mornings tended to look a little something like this:

Mom: Amelia, it’s time to get up and get ready for school.

Amelia: *drowsy moaning*

————————-A short while later————————-

Mom: Amelia, it’s time to get up and get ready for school.

Amelia: *less drowsy, more moaning* I don’t feel good.

Mom: Ok. How about you get up and get going and see how you feel.³

————————-A short while later————————-

Mom: Amelia, you have to get out of bed. You know the drill. Get up and go eat some breakfast.

***This cycle continued until my frustrated mother finally got me out of bed***

Amelia: My throat hurts and my stomach hurts.

**********At this point my mom might look down my throat to see that it is not red or irritated, or she might just assume that it’s not red or irritated based on past experience, depending on how bad I said it was hurting**********

Mom: I don’t think you are sick. Go to school.

Amelia: *goes to school*

The twist here is that by the time I got home from school my throat and my stomach typically were fine. Throughout the day both throat and stomach would inexplicably stop hurting. 

At this point, I want to take a break from our regularly scheduled message to praise my parents. My parents could easily have presumed that I was a malingering little faker who was just not very creative in coming up with ways to prove I shouldn’t go to school. They could have tried all sorts of punitive measures to force me into behaving. They could have assumed that I was being recalcitrant. They certainly got frustrated with my pattern of behavior, but they saw that I was sincerely struggling and just as sincerely trying. I actually enjoyed school, was a model student, and was generally an obedient child. They saw that this morning routine was out of character and did everything they could to help me. In so doing they improved my quality of life. I’m forever grateful that they chose to see the good in me. 

Can you see the somatic symptoms? Yup, sore throat and stomach ache. Let me be very clear here. SOMATIC SYMPTOMS ARE REAL! The pain I experienced was real. While technically it was “all in my head”, you know what, ALL PAIN IS EXPERIENCED IN YOUR HEAD! That’s where your consciousness lies! Your brain has to interpret various signals received from all over in order to tell you that you are experiencing pain. The only difference between a sore throat from strep throat and a sore throat from depression is what is causing the pain. For strep throat, it is damage from a bacteria and then the collateral damage your immune system does to combat said bacteria. For a sore throat from depression, well, that’s more complicated in a way that is way above my pay grade. Your brain does not distinguish between the two. Pain is pain is pain.

Eventually, my parents took me in to see my pediatrician. They told him the symptoms, I agreed with what they told him, and they told him that they suspected it might be depression.

Many of you readers may look at the symptoms I have listed and wonder, “How on earth did your parents come to this suspicion?” What I have failed to put into this narrative is the background that my mom was an RN (so she had a basic understanding of psychiatric disorders) and my dad was diagnosed with depression a few years before I was born and had been dealing with it ever since. There’s also a lot more family history of mental illness, specifically depression, that led them to this from sore throat to depression. I didn’t know where to fit this background into my story before now. Forgive me for yet another departure from the events I am trying to relay.

My pediatrician asked some more questions, and already knew my family history (fun fact: before my paternal grandfather’s retirement, he and my pediatrician were colleagues. He’d even occasionally treated my dad when he was a child. So he probably knew my family history better than I did), and pretty quickly came to the same conclusion as my parents: Amelia has depression. He recommended medication. My parents, being new to this whole “my child has a mood disorder”, accepted his recommendation without much question. I began taking Prozac and my parents began to teach me how to cope with depression. They were new to the experience of depression in a child, they were not new to the experience of depression. They were my first therapists. They taught me… a whole bunch of stuff. That I shall save for later. The combination of Prozac and coping techniques allowed me to start feeling better. It wasn’t too long before the plague of morning sore throats and stomach aches began to be a thing of the past. Mostly.

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Footnotes

 ¹“Presenting symptoms” is a fancy way of saying what symptoms a person actually experiences. Am I being pompous by using it? Maybe. Is it the only word that my brain is conjuring to fit these sentences? Yes. Do I wish I had a larger variety of words I could use in this instance? Also yes.

²In the world of psychology, somatic or psycho-somatic means symptoms you feel in your body rather than symptoms you feel in your thoughts or emotions.

³Grammatically, this is a question. But we all know that there are some questions that are actually statements. This is one of those.