Is depression an acceptable excuse?

In My Humble Opinion
21

The health department here only offers services like Pap smears and birth control and STD testing. They also do WIC and dentistry, but that’s it as far as I know. There was some mental health program for the destitute, those on disabilty and Medicaid had acccess to it. I can’t remember the name, but I’ve called in the past and wasn’t eligible for some reason or another.

I need to go to grad school because I am a history major. A BA in history is pretty worthless unless I want to teach high school (which I don’t). I understand your point about maybe college not being for me, but it really is. I get so excited about the classes I get to take (Women and Withcraft in Early Modern Europe! Medieval Politics!), I really enjoy the books I read and the papers I write. I dream of spending weeks in the Vatican archives. Being a historian, lecturing, writing books, that’s my ideal job.

It’s just my brain gets in the way. I talked to my mom earlier, and she said I’m just overextending myself. But that’s not it. I could be taking one class and only working 20 hours a week and this would still happen (it has before). I could quit school, move in with my parents, get whatever crappy job I can get with only an AA, and this would still happen. It’s not the circumstances, it’s me.

22

I dunno if I could find a job with insurance. Almost all of my experience is in retail, because the schedule is more flexible. I do have management experience, but have yet to see a benefits package of any sort at any of my jobs. Then there’s the problem that seeking treatment for this now will probably exclude coverage since it’s a pre-existing condition.

I’m not sure how the walk-ins work, I’ll ask when I call tomorrow. I do know that they don’t have them every day, but they might have them Mondays and Wednesdays or something like that.

23

I don’t mean the health department. I mean the county. Look in the phone book under the name of your county for mental health services. There are things you can do besides waiting around for the school to call you back or going to the ER.

You don’t NEED to do anything. If you can’t finish your BA, then torturing yourself with this need to go to grad school is just going to depress you more.

I’m not trying to be mean to you, but it seems to me like no, it really isn’t. You have to be able to go to class, do your work, and finish. If you can’t, then until you can, it’s just an albatross around your neck, a source of debt and failure.

If you were working a job with benefits, if that’s possible for you in your condition, then at least you wouldn’t be racking up school debt, completely without health care, etc. The answer to your problem isn’t continuing to be enrolled in college, failing out because you can’t go, losing all that money, surfing the Dope until your power gets turned off, then getting evicted, which is what you’re saying is imminent if you continue on your present course. Obviously something’s got to give. It seems like school is that thing. If you get a medical leave, you can go back when you’re well, or not.

24

Rubystreak basically covered what I was going to say, but I wanted to add a couple more points to it:

Whether you can find a job with insurance or not, it’s worth trying. One person I know found a job with insurance making minimum wage at an insurance company. Their previous work experience included working in kitchens at restaurants, and collection calls for a retail store.

Group policies have different rules than individual ones, so don’t think that you’ll automatically be denied from insurance if you seek treatment. That really shouldn’t matter though, since you’ve gotten treatment for your depression in the past, so it’s already a known condition.

25

Rubystreak, don’t limit yourself to the resources at your college. There are clinics out there where you can free or low-cost treatment. I know because I owe my life and my sanity to one. You need help badly and you certainly deserve it. I do not want to see a bright, interesting, fun young lady like yourself get eaten by the monster which nearly got me. I was referred to the clinic which helped me by a suicide hotline which I called because I was broke, suicidal, and without health insurance. Your college should be able to refer you; if they can’t, work your way through the Yellow Pages. If you want to send me a PM with your location, I’m willing to track down one for you. Please, get yourself some help. You weren’t ashamed to seek treatment for your kidney infection, were you? Why should you be ashamed to get treatment for this.

Now, about your brother. Screw him! (Not literally, of course.) He doesn’t know what you’re going through, and he may not be capable of fully understanding it. I’ve got a brother like that myself. You’re not a failure, nor are you destined to be one for the rest of your life. I could look up the stock list of historical figures who were failures at your age (I think Lincoln and Churchill are on that list) but you’ve probably read it and aren’t prepared to listen to it. On the other hand, you can tell your brother you have something in common with Winston Churchill. :wink:

Finally, you might want to try temporary or contract work. At least some of the temp services provide insurance, including Adecco which operates nationwide. It’s better than fast food or retail work and one job I had through Adecco lead to a rather nice permanent job.

Yes, for you depression is an excuse, as is the rest of the stuff you’ve been through this year. There’s no shame in getting help or admitting that it’s gotten out of control. Like diabetes or heart disease, depression can be controlled and treated people with it can live a good life. I’d say “normal” but no one would believe that of me. Uncontrolled and untreated, it has a nasty habit of killing people and I am entirely too fond of you to want that to happen to you. Tell your college what’s going on; get help you need through any avenue you can and, again, please do look into free clinics, and hang in there.

26

Bah humbug. I have most of a degree in Film Studies, minors in History and Women’s Studies. I’m a project manager. Lots of liberal arts majors go find jobs in corporate America. You cannot do grad school unless you are fully mentally healthy - it drives people who start healthy nuts. Particularly in something like History, where grad school will involve jumping through a bunch of ill defined hoops while you take more years to finish (and take on more debt) than you planned. If you are on probation, you can’t get yourself into a decent grad school anyway - certainly not with a fellowship that is going to keep you from further debt.

You may love History, but even with a graduate school degree, it may not be the way you make your living. And it may be time to realize that.

Backburner the grad school thing. Get medical leave. Find a retail job that has enough hours to cover medical care and look for a real job. Finish school nights. Starbucks and Whole Foods are two retail places that are known for fairly good benefits for retail employees (as long as you get enough hours).

(P.S. I’m 41 and just finishing my degree in December, finally. Switched majors to Accounting - looks better on a resume.)

27

Your replies to everyone’s suggestions remind me so much of Sheldon Kopp’s wonderful book If You Meet the Buddha in the Road, Kill Him. He talks a lot about being a psychologist and says that patients don’t come to him in order to get well - what they want is to become more efficient neurotics so that their sick behavior doesn’t hurt anymore.

Your life is a mess because you don’t have good mental health.
All this talk about why you can’t get help is just a smokescreen.
The longer you put it off, the worse your situation is going to get.

28

I’d suggest that you also talk to your school’s office for students with disabilities. Even if you are not ON disability (SSDI), you may qualify for a reasonable accommodation due to a disabling condition. And IMO, this would qualify—it is interfering with more than one area of your life.

29

As that’s the depression talking, I’ll address this directly to the depression:

TAKING A LEAVE IS ABOUT 1000X BETTER THAN FAILING OUT. Seriously. Failing will push back your graduation date in such a way that is much more difficult to come back from.

It would be great if you were able to make arrangements with all your profs to make up the work and not fail out. However, you owe it to yourself to at least talk with the person in your school who can advise you on medical leave. Then you will know your options in the event you aren’t able to make up the work. Just because you talk to someone about leave doesn’t mean you must take it. And even if you have taken a leave previously, and know the general gist, you still need to get information from the source (the college) about how things could/might play out for your situation this semester.

Please, please, please don’t get yourself into that trap where you’re thinking that as long as you hold out against the leave, it’s as if it’s not really real because you will technically be in school right up to the very moment you fail out.

The other thing that sometimes happens is that if you talk to an advisor about your situation, that person might pick up the phone and get you an appointment sooner rather than later with the counselor. Of course you do have the right to confidentiality about your medical situation, so you can talk about leave without getting into the details, however if you find you feel comfortable with the person, you might decide to share more personal information at your discretion.

30

OK, just woke up and will be on my way to call the counseling center shortly.

This thread turned a lot more career-advicey than I had thought it would, but I appreciate the replies.

I’m still not sure what exactly I am going to do. I’ll talk to the counseling center about medical leave and all of the other good suggestions and see what that would entail. Then it’s time to try a new medication- I’ve been on Prozac and Wellbutrin in the past (with a very brief stint on Depakote) and they work ok. I feel maybe 50% better, so I’m better able to function day to day, but I still get in funks occasionally (but no where near this bad). The problem is, they make me a nutcase in a different way. I get really short-tempered, sometimes violent. Last time I was on Wellbutrin, I had an outburst over a board game. Scattergories. Who gets mad about Scattergories? I screamed at my friend, slammed the door and stalked off, all because I had lost and he was teasing me. Whoa.

I’m feeling better this morning, knowing this will all get sorted out soon. So, hopefully I can get an appointment ASAP, and start working on feeling better.

Deciding to either leave school or move back in with my parents (things from an outsider’s perspective would be the obvious choices) will be hard. For me, school is important. It’s something I’m good at (when I’m feeling better, obviously), something I enjoy, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. Even if I do something crazy and completely unrelated to my degree, I just want to have it. Just to say I finished, that I was actually successful (sorta) at something.

Moving back in with my parents, that might even be harder than leaving school. With school, I can say I’ll go back in a semester or two when I’m feeling better. And I’ll (hopefully) feel better with that stress gone so I can focus on other things. Living with my parents, even for a month, would be so much more stressful it would probably be bad for me mentally, even if it’s a sound decision financially. We don’t get along well, although the past few years since I’ve left the house we’ve gotten along much better, because I avoid seeing them or talking to them more than 3 times a month or so. I feel bad. They’re my parents, so I have to love them, but our relationship can be… strained.

Taking a hiatus from school I can handle. I’ll have to figure out the details like how long and what happens to my work this semester (I’ve slogged through some really boring books this semester- I’m looking at you, St. Augustine- and I don’t want that work to go to waste). If I could get an incomplete, then I could work at it when I feel up to it without the pressure of a looming deadline. In a month or two, I think I could handle that. The amount of work isn’t all that daunting intellectually, two of those 5 papers I could write in a day. It’s just, mentally, I’m not up to it.

We’ll see. First let me go call the counseling center and get that appointment. And Siege I wouldn’t mind seeing that list of people who were failures at my age. That might cheer me up.

31

I should have taken medical leave my senior year of college. I went from being on the dean’s list every semester to something like a .5 GPA my last one. That isn’t a typo. I graduated by the grace of my advisor - I suspect he may have had to give a few blowjobs or something, because there are requirements that I just didn’t finish. The reason I blew up so phenomenally, the reason it took me two tries to get into library school, is that I didn’t seek help soon enough. If I had taken medical leave, I’d have been okay, probably. If I’d have come forward sooner my professors could have worked with me. Obviously that’s part of the disease - I honestly didn’t know if I was going to graduate until rehearsal, but I didn’t pull out because my 90 year old grandfather had come all the way down from Pittsburgh in his wheelchair to see me walk. Take action now, don’t let yourself wait. Take medical leave if you have to. There is no shame in it.

PS - part of why I was so messed up had to do with giving up my dreams of a Ph.D. in medieval history, coincidentally. I’m much happier now as a librarian. YMMV.

32

I was about to post the exact same thing. Grad school makes getting your BA look like a cakewalk. No matter how much you love your subject, grad school is hard. Give yourself a couple of years, work outside of the field, then evaluate if you want to try for grad school. As Siege says, temping is a good path to working your way into a corporate job with benefits. It might not feed your soul, but there’s a good deal to be said for work that you can leave at the office at the end of the day.

33

OK, finally got a hold of the receptionist. Apparently there are 2 walk-in appointments this afternoon, at noon and 3. I’m heading over there right now, because it’s a 45 min to an hour drive.

Thanks for the support. I might ask about career counseling, too. Not that I don’t want to go into this field, but to get a better idea of if that’s really going to work out for me.

34

Take some advice from an old depressive - with suicidal bouts - who has managed to be medicationless for years.

Your depression may be the cause for your poor performance - it is not an EXCUSE for your poor performance. Your medication may have some side effects that create emotional turmoil - your medication did not MAKE you lash out at your friend. No matter how depressed you are or what medication you are on, YOU are responsible for YOUR behavior. It may be near impossible to get up each morning - but if you don’t, your EXCUSE isn’t depression - you have made a CHOICE that day to accept that you are too depressed to leave your bed. You may stomp out on your friend, but you ALLOWED your emotions to overcome you to the point you behaved badly.

Depression can lead to some very bad reasoning. Changing that reasoning - which may mean FORCING yourself to rethink everything - can help.

I was in a room once with a counselor. She said “you get to choose to describe yourself as a victim or as a survivor.” The moment I chose to became a survivor instead of a victim was the moment I started to be mentally healthy.

35

I had a completely different take on that anger episode. I don’t know you anywhere near well enough to make an educated guess, but I think that depression is sometimes related to clamping down on ALL emotions. Shutting down. Once meds start to loosen that a little bit, it seems natural for different, previously unexpected behaviors and responses to fly out.

Not that that’s an excuse for behaving badly – but, sometimes people seem to get a little bit “worse” on their way to getting a whole lot BETTER.

That’s why meds alone aren’t enough. Talk therapy is essential, too.

36

Oh, absolutely. But don’t allow depression or medication to become excuses - i.e. don’t let yourself become a more effective neurotic. If your antidepressants aren’t for you, don’t just drop them, talk to your psychiatrist and see what else might be better. If your therapist doesn’t seem to help, say “we aren’t hitting it off, do you have a recommendation for a different therapist or different type of therapy” - or just switch - but don’t just stop going. If money is critical, call the United Way and get a sliding fee referral. Don’t wallow and don’t let it define you.

I have one sister that fought cancer. I have another sister allowing depression and alcoholism to control her life because its easier than fighting it, it allows her to make excuses and let other people take responsibility. I looked down that tunnel myself - and it does look alot easier to make the excuses, but its worth fighting for control of your own self.

37

I want to add to the chorus: TAKE A LEAVE! I took a depression-related leave between my 3rd and 4th years of college and told myself I had one year to straighten things out. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. It worked, and I got my best grades during ever during my 4th year.

And you don’t have to worry about it “looking bad.” That should be the least of your concerns. Four years later, it hardly ever comes up. If asked to elaborate, I’ve always thought it was no one’s business, so I say that I went through a period of stress or burnout or whatever, and that I took some time off to work and to re-focus myself on what I wanted to get out of school. Totally true, totally not-embarrassing, totally an “acceptable excuse.” If it’s uncomfortable, you don’t need to bring up your depression to any one at any time, unless you’re actively trying to get depression help from them.

38

OK, I made the noon walk-in. I feel a thousand times better. I like this therapist much better than the last one I saw. We’ve got another appointment this Friday, and she said she’d look into referring me to another therapist- I only get 10 sessions per year at the counseling center, and if we do them weekly (or more often, which she thinks will be better) we’ll run out quickly. She said there are some programs that will offer an extremely discounted rate to students referred there by the university, and in the meantime, I can see her. I’ve also got an appointment scheduled with my psychiatrist.

I’m not dropping everything this semester. We’ll see about taking time off next semester (hell, I haven’t had a semester off in 2 years) when that time comes. I’ll talk to my professors about making up what I’ve missed. She gave me some advice on how that email should sound to get the best results, without going into too much detail about my problems. If they say I can’t make it up, oh well, I’ll finish off the semester and hope for Cs. If I can, then hopefully I can get a B or two.

The problem with dropping everything right now is that it feels like giving up. I’m saying, yes, this is too hard for me, I’m outta here. She commended me on finishing my AA degree without any psychological or psychiatric help at all- it shows determination and resilience, I believe she said. I said it felt more like beating my head into a brick wall, but your way sounds better.

I’m stubborn. Ridiculously, shouldn’t-be-allowed stubborn. But I have to be. Cleaning the apartment is a task that sometimes seems too daunting for me to even attempt when I’m in one of my moods. But that’s my luck, I got dealt a shitty hand. I can lay on the couch and whine all I want, but if I want to actually do anything with my life I have to, well, do something. When given the choice between doing something or not doing something, even something as small as doing the dishes, I feel better doing something. Honestly, just doing the dishes when I’m so depressed makes me feel a lot better.

So yes, dropping all my classes right now, and spending a couple of semesters off will remove the stress of school from my life. But it will add the stress of thinking, “I gave up.” I don’t want that.

Here’s another anecdote from one of the other dozen times this has happened to me. I had a paper due in a week. I had procrastinated because I was depressed, and that made me more depressed. I spent several days in bed only leaving to use the bathroom. I didn’t eat until I got some killer heartburn, and then only enough to make the heartburn go away. A friend of mine who also struggles with depression was trying to encourage me to get my paper done, but I was too miserable. He got frustrated and left. Well, I laid in bed for a while more, thinking about what he had said. And I realized that if I just lay down and die whenever I feel like this, I’ll never get anywhere. I had to try, even if I didn’t succeed (it was a pretty big paper and I had very few days to work on it). So I went over to his place (first time I’d left the apartment in days) and just said, “If I’m going down, I’m going down swinging.”

Got the paper done on time. Got an A on it, and an A in the class too.

Yes, taking next semester off will be helpful. I can work more, I can get things straightened out in my head, and I can decide if I really want to drop my minor or not. I can see if I’d like to cut down on my classes when I do go back, so this doesn’t happen again.

But kissing those 14 credit hours goodbye, when I am still capable of finishing them? No way.

As bullheaded as it might seem, I’m going down swinging.

39

Things must not be as dire as it seemed at first. So your rent, electric, and phone are getting paid, then? What’s going on with that?

40

Well, that’s my goal for this week. The stupid bookstore owes me money for double charging me for books, if I get that outta them that’ll cover a lot. I can always pawn something, as much as I hate doing that, but I’ll figure it out. A friend owes me some money, I’ll just have to call in that debt. As a last resort my parents may be able to lend me a little for a month or two, but I hate doing that because I know they’re not very well off right now either.

I’ll manage to scrape by somehow. I’m sure I’ll be without a phone for a while, but that’s not so bad.

I guess things are probably dire from an outsider’s perspective, no phone, no electricity, living on the weird crap way in the back of the cabinets… Ah well, that’s what I get for going for a useless liberal arts degree. :wink: