Thanks for sharing this. You know, I really relate to your wife quite a bit. I've had depression my whole life. I've never tried to hide that fact from my husband either. I guess he's the knight in shining armour type and I'm the damsel in distress type. Just look at the way we met - I was sitting in church bawling my eyes out, and he found that attractive. He knew the people I was sitting with, asked them about me and got my number. On our first date I told him I was crazy (not that depression is generally considered equivalent to insanity but I refer to it that way sometimes) and he said he didn't believe it. Anyway, my problem and his denial go back that far.

I have ups and downs - most of the time I'm pretty stable but sometimes I go off the deep end. Until just recently, he's always said it wasn't that bad. I haven't ever been hospitalized for it and nobody even offered me medication until recently and now I'm refusing it, and my therapist is really concerned about that and my husband keeps telling me how concerned my therapist is. I've never made an active suicide attempt although suicidal gestures and ideation have not been uncommon and I've made passive attempts such as wandering around dark streets in the middle of the night wearing dark clothing and hoping to get hit by something. I've also been picked up by the police for being a danger to self, and I was handcuffed and searched and sat in a jail cell for two hours being observed, but they decided to let me go. When it gets really bad, rational thinking can go out the window and memory can be impaired also. I've just been through a bad month and my therapist is still after me about meds, but right now I'm reasonably sane. So I understand some of what your wife is going through. I feel really bad about the things I've put my husband through too, and I bet that your wife feels bad about what this is doing to you also.

So that's my personal experience. I'm also a psychology student (essentially done with my BA and hoping to start on a PhD and become a psychologist), so I know something of the academic side too.

I'm pretty sure I know what she means by FLY. Check out <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.flylady.net>http://www.flylady.net</A> . Flylady's mission in life is to help people get a handle on house work and being organized. It's a really good program, and although it isn't specifically targetting depression and mental health, Flylady herself has been through depression and about 90% it seems of the people subscribing to the program have issues with depression. And her program does help with that too. FLY stands for "finally loving yourself" but it also refers to following the program, and being organized and on top of things.

Right now, it sounds like your wife is where she needs to be until she can get stabalized. Then she will need a lot of support. I'm sorry it's so hard on you. Try to remember that it is extremely hard for her too. One thing my husband said to me that really hurt was when he picked me up from jail last February, and they wanted me to go to the ER to have my wounds looked at (I had injured myself but it looked worse than it actually was). I said no, I had been through enough and was exhausted, and he exclaimed, "You've been through enough! It's the rest of us who have had to deal with this!" I know he made a valid point, and he was hurt too, but it hurt me that he was negating my emotional pain that caused the incident in the first place. It's not like I did that to hurt him - it was an effort to cope with things I couldn't deal with. So try to look at both sides and be supportive. There are a combination of biochemical and genetic factors involved as well as environmental factors also having an impact. Even though she is the one with a problem, it is a hard thing to deal with and getting counseling yourself would probably be helpful.

I'm sorry that you have to go through this. It's hard on everybody. I hope that this helps a little, and just ask if you have any questions or if there is anything I can do to help.

<font color=green>"Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible" Carl Jung</font color=green>