It struck me today that where depression is involved, sufferers can be doing any number of things. Off the top of my head, you can...

Manage depression.
Suffer from depression.
Live with depression.
Survive depression.

(I came up with more on my drive home from work but this is the first I've really been able to sit down and post so I can't remember the rest at the moment.)

I'm a linguistics student and a writer, so I think about these things, and today I realized that I tend to use a lot of different words to describe myself, my life with depression, or the depression itself, and that none of them really match up. One day I'm living with it, the next day I'm barely surviving it. I get irritated sometimes when I see the phrase "managing depression" because for the most part, I feel like my depression is managing me. "Managing depression" might be something to strive for but whenever I am told by the doctor that a med is going to help me "manage" my depression I just want to scream, because as soon as the depression starts getting the better of me (or I'm not "managing" it) I feel like a failure, all because of the language that was used.

So I wondered ... what are you doing with your depression (or what is it doing with you?) What verbs are you using when you have to talk about it? What does it mean to manage your depression (or live with it, or be a victim of it, or whatever other words you use to describe it)?