About DepressionPlace.com

Mary Drews (Shefferman) & www.DepressionPlace.com

First off, this web site is done by one person ... me! That's me over on the right with my ferret Balthazar, who passed away in September 2002.  I have been dysthymic for many years (I believe it started in childhood) and I've had a few episodes of more severe (clinical) depression, with the most recent episode requiring medication.

My background is in English (BA in writing), and I have worked in the publishing field for more than 18 years. My experience includes copyediting, editing, and writing journal and  magazine articles, newsletters, web sites, and books. I have worked on such diverse subject matter  as: ferret care and keeping, including veterinary-level articles; medical and pharmaceutical topics for physicians and pharmacists; tax and pension law for tax lawyers and accountants; human resources policy information for human resources professionals; poetry, essays, and short stories.

My motivation for creating DepressionPlace.com  is to help educate people about dysthymia  (dysthymic disorder)  and depression. I'm particularly compelled to write about dysthymia because it is rarely discussed beyond a quick mention in articles about depression. I know that there are many people out there who have never received any treatment for dysthymia, and who are suffering needlessly. I hope to help at least some of those people.

More about me: www.MaryRShefferman.com

Mary's Story

The story of my experiences with dysthymia and major depression is long and may trigger difficult emotions or dangerous thoughts in some people. Please take care of yourself first. Some people may find it necessary to read only small sections at a time -- or may choose to read only sections that seem relevant to them (I've tried to separate out various topics).

Certainly you shouldn't feel obligated to read my whole story. My purpose in telling it is to help people realize that they are not alone in the way they are feeling and to know that there is hope for enjoying life.

A Personal Account of Dysthymia, Major Depression, and Anxiety Disorder

I remember being sad as a child. Not all the time; there was plenty that I enjoyed,  that I remember enjoying. But there was a sadness, an isolation or emptiness, that I remember feeling, too. I often felt anxious in social situations or doing particular things. I always thought that everyone felt as anxious as I did, they just handled it better. Now I don't think that's true. I think I actually felt more anxiety than other children did. I don't know if it matters very much why I felt anxious, but that it was there and I felt embarrassed to bring it up with my parents. I thought it was a weakness, not an illness.

Heart Surgery

There are several events that may have triggered depression for me. When I was three years old,  I had heart surgery. I don't remember anything about it, but I'm sure that I picked up on the anxiety my parents must have been feeling. Before the surgery there was apparently concern that I might need the surgery before I was three. I've been told that my lips and fingernails were constantly being checked -- to make sure I wasn't turning blue. More anxiety in my little universe. I'm sure children pick up on these things.

After my heart surgery, or during, the doctors determined that I would need a second surgery when I was ten years old. I remember going for chest x-rays every year. I never felt that I was sickly or that my surgical scar was anything that should embarrass me. (Funny aside: It was only when I read in a Dear Abby or Ann Landers column that someone was ashamed of his surgical scar that I even became aware that it was something to think about.)

Certainly my parents and other family members never gave me a reason to think I was weak or should be ashamed of myself. I was good in school and good grades were expected of me. I was capable and was made to feel capable. But I was always very anxious about it. It was as if my life depended on doing well. Exam anxiety. Never mind that I always did well. I always felt that I was being held back by something -- some fear of going further because I might fail. I was always surprised (and pleased) to be sectioned off with the smart kids, but I never quite knew why I was there with them.

So far it sounds like my parents were somehow not encouraging; but they were! It was in spite of their encouragement and praise that I felt like a failure. And I was loved. I was adored. I was the youngest child and the only girl. My grandparents and aunt and uncle (see the "Aside" below) believed I could do no wrong. Maybe I felt I couldn't live up to their expectations. Still, I put a great deal of emphasis on my perception of things; perception is reality, after all.

Aside: To explain some unusual family stuff here ... My mother's brother married my father's sister. There were only two children in each family. Thus, my Aunt Helen was my aunt twice and my Uncle George was my uncle twice ... I think. Anyway, this extended family was anything but extended -- we were a small and very close family. Thus, when I say I was the youngest and only girl child, I mean I was the youngest and only niece and granddaughter (to two sets of grandparents), as well as my parents' youngest and only girl. Aunt Helen and Uncle George didn't have children of their own until I was 15.

The Boat Fire

(To read my full account of the boat fire, see this link.)

I don't remember when this happened. I think I must have been 4 or 5 years old, because I remember watching my brother Mike go off to school with his arm bandaged.

I live on an island. (I'm just struck by the weight of that statement.) People who live on islands have boats. Granted, a vast number of people here don't have boats; Long Island is not a tiny island, but it is an island. The first boat in my family was one my dad built. It was a 16-foot outboard and it still exists today. The second boat was a 26-foot Lhurs (I think that's how it's spelled) named "The Carpetbagger" -- an inboard boat. The engine of The Carpetbagger sat high in the hull and was covered by a box (the engine box). The engine box was in the middle of the deck and we usually sat on it while fishing or eating or whatever.

On this particular day, my mom's cousin and her family were visiting. We were out on the boat fishing. It was Aunt Delores, Uncle Marty, Uncle George, and the five of us (Mom, Dad, Mike, Mark and me). I don't think Aunt Helen was there and I'm certain that cousin Erika (Delores and Marty's daughter) wasn't there.

My brother Mike, the oldest, was sitting on the engine box eating an apple when the engine blew up. Literally. Fire. Smoke. That horrible electric burning smell.

Mike and Aunt Delores were both burned, everyone else was all right. My hair was singed. I recall seeing what seemed like 20 or so boats in a ring around our boat. I remember having to crawl across a rope to another person's boat.  I remember that horrible burning smell.

For most of my life, I mitigated the effect of the boat fire. But now I think it was probably a very traumatic event for me. I can now associate clearly the burning smell with intense anxiety. It actually came to me in a moment of relaxation only a few weeks ago. I suddenly related anxiety (one of the most awful of human emotions) to my mother's death and then directly to the feeling I had while on the burning boat.

So the boat fire probably also contributed to my mental illnesses. I think the stage for anxiety disorder was pretty well set by that point in my life. I don't recall ever talking about my feelings about the boat fire. Even in all my years of therapy.

The Year The World Exploded

Sometime in 1972, my mom started having shoulder pain. Then she started having difficulty walking. After tests revealed nothing, she ended up in the hospital for exploratory surgery. It was lung cancer. She was 37.

For some reason, I don't remember anyone using the word "cancer," though Aunt Helen insists she told my brothers and me that our mom had cancer. I only remember the definition: "A tumor that keeps growing." Same thing, unless you're a 9-year-old girl who can't begin to wrap her mind around her mother's illness.

My mother's birthday was two days before mine. That year, she was in Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City. I remember the car overheating or something while we were on our way to the city on my mom's birthday. We didn't make it there. My mom's last birthday and she was alone.

The following day we tried again. We pretended that this was better because we could celebrate both our birthdays.

On August 9, 1973, I turned 10; by October 28 my mother was dead.

It's odd how I can enumerate the events of the next year, but I associated no or very little emotion: I was numb.

In April of 1974, my brother Mike had his Confirmation; my father remarried; my father's new wife moved her 15-year-old daughter in with us (I had to share a room!) and had our Dalmatian, Cinders, put to sleep. (To be fair, Cinders had gone after two members of the same family on our block. I think he missed my mom). Things were disappearing, changing -- the tide had begun to take me.

In July of 1974, I had my second heart surgery. In September, I started at a new school. My dad had bought a business a few towns away that he had been planning to buy for years.

Mom died. New family. Dog died. Surgery. New house. New school.

In terms of major life events that cause stress, I experienced five of them in  the span of a year, and that's going by the adult scale; there wasn't an entry for starting a new school or having to make all new friends. If it sounds like something could break -- yes, and it did. And I was still just a kid.

To make maters worse, it turned out that my father's wife (henceforth: "Bitcho") was unbalanced and took a strong dislike -- which was mutual -- to my brother Mike. My father drank. It was his way of numbing himself; I needed no help.

Eventually my father and Bitcho divorced. Two years later my father married a wonderful woman with two kids of her own. We all get along wonderfully. We dubbed "your mother and our father" (or "your father and our mother") The Parents. After all, each is a parent. The moniker sticks to this day, nearly 25 years later.

MORE TO COME HERE

Poetry

I was 15 when my friend Lisa triggered my fist and most powerful epiphany when she -- almost off-handedly -- said, "You should write poetry." I had been writing things -- what I would have made into songs if I had any musical inclination at all. Lisa opened that door for me, and for that I'm forever grateful.

If it hadn't been for that sudden intense realization of purpose, I think I wouldn't have survived my teen years. I poured all the pain, anger, hurt, abandonment, doubt, fear -- all of it -- into my poems. I'm just now getting through some of them and will post them in the Poetry section when I have chosen some of the better ones from that time.

Therapy At Last

At 15 or 16 -- I forget which -- I started counseling at the insistence of my friend Lisa (yes, Lisa again). I didn't want to tell The Parents about this. Eventually I did. And so began some treatment for the depression, dysthymia, and anxiety I had experience for probably 10 years.

I stayed in counseling until after my first year in college. I felt I was all right. Besides, my counselor had gotten her PhD and was off into private practice (I had been seeing her through a United Way free counseling center). I didn't really want to go through finding a new counselor. In retrospect, I probably should have pursued therapy further at that point. It's cliché, but hindsight is 20/20.

I managed to get through the rest of college and into the working world before I crumbled and found myself asking The Parents for help in finding a therapist.

More to come.

Poetry By Mary R. Drews Shefferman

This subsection consists of some poems I've written that touch on the feelings of anxiety or depression I have experienced over the years. You may not find them uplifting, but you may see yourself in them. If you do, then know that you're not alone.

read Mary's poetry

I started writing when I was about 11 years old. Those early poems are gone. But they were mostly about the loss of my mother, who died when I was 10 years old. My writing really started to take shape when I was about 15 years old; by the time I was 16 I knew that writing would be my life. It was one of the very few things that gave me any pleasure. In a roundabout way, it probably saved my life.

Some of my early poems are very rough and show little discipline. The later poems are better (going to college and taking a lot of writing courses really helps!).

I use my maiden name in conjunction with my poetry because it just seems like the right thing to do (much like I know that a particular word is the right one to use in a poem).

Major Life Stressors:

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Double Depression

Other Types of Depression

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All contents on this web site are copyright © 2003 - 2008 Mary R. Shefferman/Mary R. Drews. All rights reserved. No part of this web site may be copied or used in any way without express, written permission from the copyright holder.
This web site is for information only and is not to be used in place of proper medical treatment. If you think you are depressed, see your doctor. If it is an emergency, call 911.