A FEW months back, I had a friend who I would like to call, Maria, a common name and a pseudonym. Maria had fair complexion, nice hair and teeth, was a good fiction writer, and was then just promoted in her company.
She drove to work in a BMW; she did not have an office because she never liked staying in isolated rooms. So she brought her Mac everywhere she went and she was one of the busiest persons I have known in my life.
On weekends, she did rock climbing, sometimes an intensive training for an upcoming triathlon. Or she relaxed by doing pilates.
With her high salary, she gave money to a general hospital in the city for children diagnosed with cancer.
For me, Maria had a perfect life, making her perfect, too.
Maria had a seemingly perfect life, although not without a few setbacks, when depression came slinking in. She revealed to me that she had been diagnosed as having a major depression, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. She had been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder since high school, and had been battling this disease since then.
There were times when she would snap so bad she had to go home, momentarily shut her windows from the world, and scream under her pillow because of a sinking feeling that she just could not put her finger on.
Afraid of being ostracized and treated differently in school and by her family, she kept this a secret. She had no one to talk to about it and kept suffering in silence. Good thing she had writing as an outlet and the “happy pills.”
Maria put on this persona for so long that she almost forgot about the depression until the day finally came.
She was my boss from the United States in a part-time job I took online. We communicate everyday and she would tell me how depression felt at the moment. She had this idea that depression and other mental illnesses were hers to carry and that she was alone in fighting these.
With society’s stigma of treating depression as if anyone can overcome it as it just a “perennial existential crisis,” it was difficult for Maria to open up and discuss, if not for my persistent questions regarding the Prozac bottles lined up on her desk at home.
According to researchers at Harvard and the World Health Organization, depression has a higher morbidity rate than heart disease or cancer. It is projected that by 2020, depression could affect more people than war and Aids put together. There are hundreds of treatments but only a small percent of those afflicted could courageously come forward and seek help. Many succeed in killing themselves.
A few months back, I saw Maria at her best and at her worst. She was sometimes in the light but most of the time she was in the dark, like a shadow.
She would have turned 36 on Monday, March 27.