I have been so severely depressed for so many years that I don't know what it is like to be normal anymore. I see people every day who do not want to hurt themselves and who do not want to kill themselves and who love life and live it. I don't understand them.
I understand that severe head trauma results in depression. I have PTSD. I was in an RTA in 1964, multiple compound fractures of the face which required reconstructive surgery. I am also a survivor of child abuse and sexual abuse including sexual abuse by the attending physician at the time of the RTA. Not the surgeon, but a captain at the base medical facility where I was stationed and where the RTA occured. I often cycle the abuse while in the USAF and my father's physical abuse and abuse by significant others, male and female. Later I was sexually abused by a psychotherapist in whose custody I was placed after pleading no contest to a drug charge: go along with the therapist or face forty years. That was in 1966. The RTA was 1964. I was beaten raped and left for dead in a dumpster in 1957. At the same time I was being sexually abused by my employer, a women who owned the horses I took care of in my father's stables before and after school.
I have been alcohol and drug and smoking free since about 1968/69. I graduated from college in 1969 and never finished my doctorate, although I have two MAs. I developed epilepsy (psychomotor, temporal lobe, partial seizures) in 1973, and aphasia in 1974. Tegretol cured the aphasia and memory loss. Was on Tegeretol until 1981. Seizure free since about 1979. No nuerological meds since until this year when I started to take prozac (generic prozac).
A shrink just told me I might have an encapsulated seizure disorder.
I would really like to know more about head trauma and depression. I had many head injuries as a child falling off horses and playing baseball as well as some car accidents. The prozac does not help the PTSD symptoms but it does make me feel a whole heck of a lot better, even positive sometimes.