Fall 2022

Fall 2022
This quarter our Spotlight tells the personal story of a young woman from our congregation who has been stuck, watching a vibrant world all around her while she struggles to engage. Her story may surprise us, but the overwhelming message is that there is hope and promise that this Rosh Hashanah she will emerge shouting and blasting like the shofar. Here is her story:

Depression isn’t something that anyone has for a specific reason. For me, there wasn’t a specific trigger, there wasn’t a list of traumas I’d lived through. I had a pretty great, fairly average life. Then, three weeks before I returned for my sophomore year of college I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I went back to school, and, while still weepy, I managed to go to classes and function to some extent. I started to see a therapist at school, who helped me figure out coping mechanisms and strategies that allowed me to function better and get what I needed to do, done.

Then, my depression started to shift. I wasn’t weepy all the time anymore. Instead, my energy, my motivation, and the amount of enjoyment I gained from things all decreased significantly. I continued to see my therapist weekly, but these mostly turned into venting sessions that I needed to get through the week. I have no doubt they kept me from further spiraling, but I wasn’t getting any better.

I had assumed that because my depression had such a sudden onset, it would go away fairly quickly as well. But it didn’t. I saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed medication for my depression. I spent years cycling through medication after medication in various combinations and none of them did anything to help. Part of what was so frustrating was that it can take 4-6 weeks for any given antidepressant to reach therapeutic levels in your system. Every time they changed my medication it would be weeks before I would even be able to tell if it was helping. 

I graduated college and I found a therapist back home. I tried different therapy techniques, both in groups and in private sessions, and sometimes they gave me some more helpful strategies for certain situations, but none of them really helped overall.

Sometimes I wondered if I even had depression because it presented so differently from what I had always heard. It wasn’t like I felt sad all the time; I just had no real energy or motivation. It was a struggle to get up and get moving and go about my day, but it wasn’t because I felt sad. I didn’t have depressive episodes that went away and came back, it was just this big long stretch of time—I had one depressive episode that just never ended.

After almost six years, I asked what other options I had. I could continue doing what I was doing, trying different medications, which wasn’t very likely to help. I found out that after failing three different classes of medications, which about two-thirds of people do, new medications were not likely to work. I could try clinical trials, which was not something I felt ready to do, though I greatly admire and appreciate the people that do participate in them. One of my last options was to undergo Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT), which was ultimately what I did.

I’m sure we’ve all heard horror stories about ECT, whether they’re from books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, from social media, or from people we know. They perform ECT very differently now—they put you under general anesthesia and give you a muscle relaxant and a paralytic agent. Then, they run a brief current of electricity through your brain which induces a seizure. They repeat this every few days over the course of several weeks and then spread out the time in between sessions over the course of the next few months. I’m not going to lie, it was a really hard decision to make and I was really scared when I went in; I even take an anti-anxiety medication the morning of.

I’ve been going to ECT for several months now, and will continue to go for several more. Almost immediately I started to notice changes. I was sleeping better. I had more energy. It started to become easier to do small chores around the house, like making my bed in the morning or doing the dishes. People started to tell me that I seemed brighter, that I was smiling more. I’ve started to feel interested in things like auditions, looking for a job, and hanging out with friends. For the first time in a long time, I feel hopeful that I’m getting better, that I can not only see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I’m actually approaching it.

Blast and sound the shofar! “Sleepers, wake up from your slumber!“ We will rejoice at the gift this Rosh Hashanah brings and the hope and promise of a vibrant New Year!