“Oh! How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning,
Oh! How I’d love to remain in bed
For the hardest blow of all is to hear the bugler call:
‘You’ve got to get up, you’ve got to get up,
You’ve got to get up this morning!’”

I may be the only person my age who knows all the words to that Irving Berlin World War II song. My grandfather taught it to me, along with other early 20th century songs such as “Come Josephine, in My Flying Machine.” When I was suffering through major depressive episodes before I was diagnosed, though, the Irving Berlin song was the one that used to run through my head every morning.

For me, as for many people with depression, morning was the most difficult time of the entire day. I’m not sure if it was that my depression was chemically the most severe at that time of the day, or if the temptation to stay in bed and pull the covers over my head was a factor, or what. But I definitely remember lying in bed trying to think of good reasons to get up.

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Why is Sunday night the cruelest night of the whole week to a person with depression? You would think that all nights would be bad with depression, which is basically true. But I think, without a doubt, Sunday nights are the worst.

I remember that when I was depressed, Sunday nights seemed like the absolute pit of despair. They were even worse, in some ways, than Monday morning. The cause boiled down to one thing: escapism. If you work or go to school, weekends are, for the most part, the only time you can use escapism to, well, escape from depression.

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Over the years, since I first set up a chat room on my Web site for people with depression, I’ve had to take a lot of elements into consideration that many chat room hosts do not. If you’re running a chat room centered on a non-mental health topic, it’s fairly easy. Get a critical mass of chatters and boot troublemakers out; a lot like throwing a party in real life.

Things are not quite so simple with a depression chat room. I’ve developed guidelines over the years to keep people from bringing up “trigger” topics (not discussing details of “cutting” that might trigger someone to self-harm, not discussing sexual topics because it might trigger a flashback in someone who had been sexually abused, etc.). Although I finally had the operation of the chat room down to a science, I found some new problems when I decided to add a chat room in an online virtual world.

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Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a personality disorder that is often accompanied by depression, is considered the incurable cancer of mental health, at least in its moderate to severe forms. However, I recently read a book that showed there may be more hope for successful treatment than is generally believed.

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Relationships with our partners can be complicated when both people are mentally and emotionally healthy. When one person becomes depressed, it can play havoc with the dynamics of a relationship, even one that was previously stable.

As the person on “the outside,” it may be hard to understand what your partner is going through, unless you’ve been depressed yourself. But being able to empathize with your partner’s internal struggle is not as important as learning how to balance helping your partner with staying emotionally healthy yourself.

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Soon after I created my website Wing of Madness in 1995, I wrote an article about women and depression. At that time it was believed that women suffer from depression about twice as often as men do, although no one was sure why. Some hypotheses posed biological reasons, such as greater incidence of sexual assault and abuse and role in society.

I was never completely comfortable with the idea that more women than men were depressed. It didn’t seem to make sense to me. For one thing, most of the famous people with depression who came to mind (for me, at least) were men. Winston Churchill, Mike Wallace, Abraham Lincoln, Robin Williams and Terry Bradshaw, to name a few. Not that famous women didn’t come to mind, but I couldn’t come up with that many more women than men, if I could come up with more at all.

The other thing that bothered me, as it always does, is that there was no clear reason why women would experience depression so much more than men. I admit that I like to have reasons for things; I don’t want there to be unknowns when it comes to something like depression. And all the explanations for the disparity were vague at best. There were no hypotheses that had held up under examination as far as a definitive study.

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