Help me help my wife, possible depression / stress related illness.

Wookster … erm … bloody hell

Wookster – well put.

My wife is a city lawyer, and broke down 5 years ago. To everyone on the outside, she is confident, bubbly, independant and successful. That is a thin veneer. Inside, she is riddled with self doubt, and a feeling she isn’t good enough.

One day, she called me from the office in tears – couldn’t cope, didn’t know what to do. I persuaded her to come home, and took her for a walk on the beach. We sat down with a coffee, fish and chips and just talked.

She saw the GP, and was referred to a stress counsellor. She was brilliant. The main thing she took away was the importance of some time for herself. She now writes novels as a hobby – the first one is about male depression, and I think it’s a great book, but she doesn’t want it published, it’s for her.

Her work were amazing too. They took her out of front line law, gave her a more back office professional support role, and agreed to whatever PTW pattern she wanted. They thought the world of her, she just couldn’t see it herself.

Wookster, wow, just wow. Thanks so much for posting that.

Sat reading this waiting for the Mrs to get back so I can tell her I’m going to throw in the towel at work. I’ll just be a teacher and hopefully can get back to enjoying being a dad too.

Haven’t read everything that’s been posted, so I’ll assume that I’m repeating stuff that others have said – it’s worth saying again though.

My fiancee has anxiety depression, she’s got family history of it but it hit her like a train when she moved a couple of hours away from home (and five hours from me) to study midwifery at uni. Crying all the time, panic attacks where she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, zero motivation, constant tiredness, physical pain (mostly in her stomach), insomnia.. This went on for a while, and it really wasn’t fun.

Much like your missus, she didn’t want to go to the GP – she didn’t have time to waste on that sort of thing, plus she was too strong for that, and having a mental illness is so… embarrassing.

First thing to note: your wife is awesome to have coped for so long. Like, really awesome, and so, so strong.

Talking about having depression anxiety isn’t about admitting to having a weakness, it’s about showing how strong you’ve been and getting help to make things easier.

So yeah, GP is a good call; she deserves all the help she can get. Just don’t forget that no matter how many therapists or doctors she sees, no matter how many drugs she tries, you’ll always be the biggest help to her, even if you feel totally out of your depth and useless.

I’m doing an engineering degree, so everything in my brain has to be logical. Depression anxiety isn’t logical, and there isn’t a way to model it or predict behaviour based on past experience – there is no specific cause, there is no definite effect; all you know is that it’ll be rubbish every time but that it’ll pass. So don’t waste time trying to get your head around it, just hug her/talk to her/rub her back/sit in silence with her until she feels better – different methods will work better on different days.

There’s a stupid stigma surrounding mental health; people don’t really know how to deal with it when they see someone with a problem that’s not visible like a broken leg. I’m pretty sure the statistic is something like 1 in 10 have anxiety depression, so also make sure she knows she’s not alone. We found that it helped to just be up front and honest about it, and talk about it as if it was just a broken leg. For instance, if someone asked her how she was, she got in the habit of actually telling them honestly how she’d been as opposed to the normal “I’m fine”; that helped her a lot as the amount of people that offered support, or actually mentioned that they’d been through something similar was staggering, and it really made her feel a lot more at ease.

It will end, and you will come out the other side stronger both individually and as a couple – just don’t give up, find what works for you and get all the medical help that you can.

Back to my lady, a couple of years down the line, she patched the uni course as it was only making things worse and moved back home. I then moved down to hers for the summer to do a work placement, and she improved dramatically over the summer (she’s on sertraline now as well which helps, with a tiny dosage of diazepam for when she’s feeling edgy). Where we’re at now, she’s bagged herself a retail job and although she has the occasional wobbly, she’s absolutely nailing it and is already being trained to be a supervisor.

So, tell your wife she’s awesome and that she can do it; just look at the support she’s received on some random bike forum on teh internets..

Focus on getting better first, and everything else will fall into place. If that means time off work/reduced hours, then so be it. We only get to live for a short while, not worth wasting that time slogging away at a job if it’s detrimental to your health!

Whilst I’m encouraged to hear her boss going to cut her work load and consider what the impact on others might be I can’t help thinking that he should have been acting for years to defend his teachers from changes (often for the sake of change) that have systematically increased workload, administrative non-productive nonsense, responsibility, accountability (with a presumption of guilt)… . And all this against a background of society in general devaluing teaching when it isn’t actually slagging it off.

This is what teachers are up against at parents’ evening:

angeldust – Member

Teaching kids is the last job in the world I woud do. I just could not do it, yet I have zero respect, and to be honest, generally nothing but contempt for (secondary school) teachers, due to their attitude and constant whining. I’ve never met a teacher that I’ve liked.

Google it to find the thread, there are plenty of other such gems in the archives of this forum.

Edit: Google something like “skiving teacher” for a wider view.