Welcome to Depression Club

It never occurred to me until a few minutes ago, in the shower, to create a blog about depression. The catalyst for this revelation is the group of 50 women that I will be standing in front of in three hours as I teach a class called "Recognizing and Confronting Depressed Thinking." But this story started long before the phone call in April when I was asked to teach a class on dealing with depression for the Ann Arbor Stake Women's Conference. I was diagnosed with depression ten years ago this November, but the story starts before that. I could say the story starts when my mother first began experiencing symptoms of depression in her early twenties. But even before that, her father was struggling with alcoholism and her mother had experienced a significant change in her personality, which we believe was probably the onset of her own depression. And if we knew more about my grandparents' parents, I imagine the story could go back even farther.