Childhood Depression – Growing Up in a World of Grey
Trigger Warning: Discussion of dark thoughts, childhood suicidal ideation and intent, and self-harm
Summer hung heavy in the air, but a light breeze ruffled my hair as I stood outside at my school and stared at the road. It wasn’t particularly busy, but the cars would fly by despite the school zone signs. At ten-years-old, I stood there thinking that, if I timed it right, I could walk out there and it would all be over. A friend came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder and asked me a question. Her words went right past me as I whipped around. I looked at her with wide eyes and said, “thank you.” That was not the first or last time that suicide crossed my mind. Life with childhood depression was like growing up in a world of darkness and grey.
As an adult, I understand my depression. I know what it is though I still struggle with it. As a teen, I tried to convince myself that it was anything but depression. But as a child, I didn’t understand what this feeling was or why it was happening. But childhood depression didn’t just impact me then; it shaped the way I view and interact with the world to this day.
It started as far back as I can remember.
I never felt like a happy-go-lucky child. It felt like I was walking a very fine line. My emotions were out to get me, and guilt and shame haunted me like ghosts. Tears came frequently, and often out of nowhere, and I was embarrassed by the fact that I didn’t know why I was crying. Fearing others finding out there was something wrong with me, I would lie. I latched on to the first thing someone suggested as the reason for the tears, making my childhood a rainbow of fake injuries. My fear was that there was something horribly wrong with me. And I worried that I would be shunned by teachers, friends, and even family if they found out.
When I was young, I was often asked if I was okay.
By the time I was in sixth grade, I was regularly asked if I was okay. I would look up – usually kind of surprised, and say yes. It wasn’t always the accurate answer, but sometimes it was. My childhood depression had worked it’s way into the very fabric of my being. My view of the world was painted in grey. I felt like nobody liked me even though I knew they did. I felt like a failure even though I was consistently placed in advanced groups in classes and showered in A’s. At an elementary school with a total enrollment of 115 kids, everyone knew each other and I had close friends and support at home, but I felt profoundly alone.
Childhood depression is a dark state of being.
In my child psychopathology class in college, we were divided into groups to present on different disorders in children. My group was assigned depression. In our discussions, suicide came up. My groupmates scoffed at the idea that young children understood suicide and it’s permanency. I hesitantly piped up with my own experiences.
Even prior to staring at the road as a ten-year-old, I knew that suicide was permanent. I saw suicide as an escape from the pain, the guilt, and the shame. When digging through some old bins in high school, I came across a few pages of paper stapled together to make a book. I had drawn it when I was in second or third grade. Even though I was still steeped in depression when I found it, it broke my heart to flip through those pages. On the last page, was me, drawn in thick pink marker, wrists bleeding. The caption read, “why is my life so stupid?”
So why wasn’t I treated?
My childhood depression tormented me. I just wanted to feel normal, but I felt so broken and fundamentally different than everyone else. It was like I was doing something wrong or that I had made some mistake somewhere along the way and could not find it no matter how much I scrambled. I felt like no one could possibly understand. If anything, I felt they would leave me or be horrified by me and my lack of control over my thoughts and emotions. So I kept it all to myself. Occasionally it would sneak into things, like a poem made up entirely of metaphors of being suicidal that I let slip with two friends in sixth grade. But for the most part, I kept it locked away until I opened my heart to friends in junior high and high school.
My parents put my brother and I in therapy for a bit when they divorced, and one of the therapists I saw gave me a cardboard box of toys to play with in a sand tray. One by one, I reached into the box and pulled out each toy, casually handing damaged ones to the therapist, explaining their defect as I moved on to the next. By the third or fourth one, she commented on the fact that, when I looked at something, the first things I saw were what was broken.
To this day, I am excellent at finding flaws. Growing up, those were the things I saw in myself. And I felt more and more hopeless when I could not fix them and be like everybody else. But, I was so good at hiding the extent of it, no one saw how broken I really was.
What I’ve come to realize is this.
My childhood was full of people who loved me, but wrapped in loneliness. Thoughts of suicide and self-harm came to me naturally, not through the media, though I never acted on them anyway. Maybe medication would have helped. Maybe more time in therapy. But the severity of my situation flew under the radar of not just parents and teachers, but also professionals. I didn’t know how to ask for help because I didn’t even have the words for what I was feeling.
In our society, it seems like we often see young children as carefree and full of hope, but forget that their mental health is still fragile and forming. I believe that mental health should be a topic we do not just discuss about children, but also with them. Help them understand these feelings in themselves and others whether they appear to be struggling or not. Maybe we can help children find their voice by making mental health a normal topic of conversation.
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