Working Smarter Not Harder (with Depression).

For what it’s worth, after 6 weeks after going off them, I’ve just gone back on anti-depressants.

I’ve read so much about people being encouraged to share their struggles with mental illness, and I’ve always looked at those stories and thought ‘how brave. Good on you.’

It’s important for people to share their experiences, and in reading about others challenges — I have been helped by not feeling so alone in mine.

But here’s the thing, not stepping up and sharing my own experience was (I suspect) due in part to the fact that whilst I’m on the medication, I don’t feel the ‘struggle’ that people refer to. I’m apart from it.

Recently, I decided to go it alone. Unaided. After seven years of being on a very low dose of sertraline (think Zoloft), I felt like I could go it alone.

This is not the first and only time I’ve been on antidepressants. The first time was after the birth of Luca. He was about four months old, and I wasn’t coping. The joy had been sucked out of my world. There was certainly no joy in parenting and whilst I knew there should be, as much as I tried to, I could no more connect with that joy than fly to the moon.

I struggled on, believing it was just my own inadequacy that was holding me back from embracing my new life as a…