Renewed energy after treatment for depression

Kirk:

My name is Kirk. I served in the US Air Force for almost 13 years. My career field was, Survival Equipment Specialist, that dealt in parachutes and all the lifesaving equipment for the pilots and for special operations. Most of what we dealt with was local terrorism. We had to watch our backs from either our allies.

We were probably halfway through the war and I don’t know, one day I was just real lethargic and my mind seemed to be gone. I spent most of the year after coming home in kind of a lethargic state and where it seemed like the world around me was in slow motion and I was just watching it. My poor family, they didn’t understand and I didn’t either. I figured it’s just a little phase, maybe it would go away. They sent me back 11 months later and after I came back from four months of that I was extremely irritable and very quick to anger, to lash out, highly stressed out and eventually that cost me my marriage.

After getting out there was a lot of frustration and trying to find answers and never really could find any, and of course frustration led to drinking, and so I finally decided “Well, I need to get some help because, it’s just not going away,” and so I went in to the VA, I went in through the triage for depression, they got me checked out for that and then of course I got filed into the system. After getting checked in it was about three years of counseling and medication. The Counselors, the first one I went to was really friendly and listened really well, so that helped a lot.

Then I got back into the counseling when I was attempting to quit drinking, and I decided that in order to quit drinking I was going to need some counseling on the other stuff. I kind of made a deal with myself somehow. It was either get it fixed or it was going to be done, and I just couldn’t live feeling that way anymore, done. I lived with deep depression for 23 years and it continuously getting worse and you look at life and wonder “Is this all it’s going to be?” I just kept hounding and hounding, and got into a year of counseling with the VA and a year of counseling with a private outfit and, between the two of them, we got things straightened out.

So my next step will be looking into school and getting my life leveled out. All these years of going through this and living in the darkness I still knew there was a flip side to it, and I wasn’t going to give up on that. If it seems like things aren’t working, give it the time or keep knocking on that door to get some other type of help, but don’t give up. There are the people there that really want to help and so that’d be my main advice is just don’t give up, don’t lose hope.