Every day feels like it is going to be my last.

Hi PeruvianPeach-- you said that you are are weak, but it's hard for most people to share their emotions, especially their pain, even online. Maybe you are weak in other ways, but you are stronger than a lot of people just for being on here. And nobody is strong across the board, even the people who seem closest to perfect have major defects.

The most important thing is, if you have major depression, you have to try to accept that your feelings about yourself don't reflect the way you really are. I don't mean it as a criticism, it's just that a big part of depression is feeling way more negatively about yourself than you deserve to. There is such a things as fairness in the world-- every society on earth has a system that tries to maintain that fairness, in our case it's the courts and the law. Obviously we don't achieve true fairness that often in life, but that doesn't change the fact that depressed people are totally unfair to ourselves. It's one of the reasons we call depression a "disorder." There is an "order," a reality, and depression takes you out of that order through no fault of your own.

So for whatever it's worth, I think you might want to start by trying to accept that you don't have accurate information about yourself. It's like a pilot flying through clouds-- everything is gray, and pretty soon the pilot has no idea which way is up (literally, people flying in zero visibility can be upside down without knowing it). The way pilots manage to fly in those conditions is by trusting their instruments, not their senses. If you can, see if you can find some "instruments," meaning outside sources of information. Do the people you trust think you are weak? Do the kind and decent people in your life think it is fair to blame yourself for not being able to control your emotions the way you wish you could? Their opinions, if they really are good people, are way more trustworthy than the way you perceive yourself. You are flying blind, we all are.

And if you are going to stop crying uncontrollably, the best thing you can do is to make a list of treatments and just try one after the other. The only good news for people like us is that new and highly effective treatments are now available. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is HIGHLY EFFECTIVE and has almost no known side effects. I know that sounds too good to be true, but I've had a ton of treatments and there was no downside.

If you haven't had success with antidepressants, ask your doctor about TMS. And if you aren't feeling like you have the emotional resources to fight for yourself, try to reach out to someone in your life who can be your advocate dealing with doctors, insurance etc. Maybe there's someone you haven't thought of, I don't know, a cool cousin you don't see that much but who cares a lot about you, or a family friend.... someone to be there to help you navigate getting treatment. Depression makes us easily discouraged. Obviously if you can get yourself help then great, go for it, but having someone there on the bench to pull you along if you get stuck is a good idea.

I looked on your profile and I didn't see any mention of treatments. If you are in treatment and it's not working, switch to another one. You have bad chemicals in your brain, the same way drunk people's brains are affected by the alcohol, we depressed people are affected because of some evil chemicals. It's the chemicals that are the problem, not you. Go after the chemicals. The treatments really can keep that bad chemistry in check.

/r/depression Thread