by Tony in California

My name is Anthony, and I was injured while serving in the Gulf of Oman. I served with VFA-97, on board the USS Kitty Hawk CV-63. The reason for this message is very complex, but I will try to summarize. You see, I was discharged from the Navy back in 1995 with a very small severance pay of $5000. Before deployment I met a young lady close to my base. We fell madly in love and couldn't get enough of each other. That was back in 1993. We got married and started our family.

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by Susie in Wyoming

I was born and raised in Southern Illinois, right outside of St. Louis. I really can't tell you when I first noticed my depression/Bi-polar illness. But from high school, which was 1972 and on, I have abused alcohol and drugs and overdosed several times which required hospitalization.

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by Life Ministries in Wisconsin

My whole life I have been on some sort of medication. At the age of 14, I was told I was a manic depressive. The medicine my parents and doctor put me on turned my life upside down. I started drinking, having sex and then running away. I was 13 and just moved from Great Lakes, Il to Camp Lejeune, NC. My dad was in the Navy.

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by April in Georgia

My Bipolar disorder has been the dictator and ruler of my entire life up until about three years ago. As a child, it destroyed my self-esteem, isolated me, confused me and eventually, consumed me. As a teenager, the black cloud seemed to get thicker; however, the common misconception was she's a teenager.

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by Renee in Pennsylvania

My search for the meaning of life began at the age of 14 when drugs and alcohol became a way of life for me to cope with the years of abuse and the nightmarish memories of my past. I became a high school drop-out and ran away from home, looking for love in all the wrong places. I had been consumed body, soul and spirit by overexposure to alcohol, drugs and sexual abuse by the time I was 17.

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by Jamie in Tennessee

I'm not sure when it all started, but I think I've always dealt with depression. I just didn't always understand it. The first memory I have of it was when I was six and my grandfather died. I remember trying to hide my feelings because I thought I felt different than everyone else. I wouldn't even cry. Everyone thought I was too young for it to bother me, so I didn't let them know it did. I was always socially withdrawn because we moved around a lot, so I didn't have any friends except my sisters and brother. When I was seven, my oldest sister (who is 10 years older than me) started to molest me.

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by Jennifer in Florida

At the age of 12, I began to have trouble with depression. This became a chronic problem for me, which eventually resulted in a suicide attempt at age 15. At the same time, I was developing anorexia nervosa, which I struggled with for many years. I was hospitalized for my eating disorder at age 17. I had also developed an addiction to self-injury as a teenager, something that I was able to completely stop doing when I was in my twenties.

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by Michael in Michigan

I think I was just a boy when I started suffering from depression. There was a sense of hopelessness and I asked God to save me and my family from my Dad, but all I ever got was voice mails. When you're so young and don't have a clue where to get any help, you just learn to cope or accept what is going on around you. After a while depression hits very hard and actions and consequences blend and really don't mean much, so you start to use drugs to plug holes and gaps in your life followed by negative police associations which becomes normal.

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by Patrick in Oregon

My mental illness has probably affected me most or all of my life. I was a loner. My siblings both younger and older (yes I'm the middle child) were so much more advanced than I was that I was labeled to be slightly retarded. I didn't understand or much less care about anything or try to do anything because I would never follow through. That's what I was told.

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by Jan in Florida

In high school, drawing the window shades and listening to Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead" on occasion could have been the beginning of depression, or just teen angst.

In my 30s, I was a daily drinker as were most of my friends, and I was trying various self-help programs to feel better. Apparently my use of alcohol was an attempt to self-medicate the mood swings, as many psychiatrists informed me, though I didn't drink while depressed only when manic. Then alcohol lost its ability to stop me from being out of control. It's my personal opinion that underneath every alcoholic there is a mental illness.

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