My name is Alexandra Massey and I have been through the hell of depression and come through to the other side.
Some years ago I woke up one day and thought ‘I can’t go on….’ I felt like my world had come to a full stop because the feelings of hopelessness were totally overwhelming. I’d had depression for some time but it just kept getting worse. I had gone from being depressed, but able to function, to being hardly able to function at all. It took me all my strength just to get out of bed and I wasn’t able to do much else. However, I had a small son at the time and I knew that I had to find a way through this.
When I was severely depressed I knew I didn’t want to resort to prescription drugs because I had been told it was like ‘having a glass of wine three times a day’ by a family member who was also a doctor. Whether or not that was true I knew that any type of drug was not going to cure me. I knew that if I started taking prescription drugs that could take me down a slippery side road and when I stopped, I would be right back to square one. It was the short cut that I didn’t want to take.
I was desperate so I started searching for help. And the more I looked, the more I found. It was a number of different things that finally started to lift the despair and blackness to a ray of hope again. My recovery took some time but I knew that I was sorting myself out to ensure I would never go down that black hole again. After what seemed like forever, I finally got out of the hole and I know that I will never go back down there again. I learnt that if I take my recovery seriously, I would knock depression on the head once and for all. And I have.
I started working on help lines, for others who were depressed, as my role as Chair of ‘Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families’, a 12 Step program. I was aware that people were asking the same questions like: What’s wrong with me? What can I do to feel better? Where can I get help?
I decided to write a book of my own experience in case it could help anyone else. The book, ‘Beat Depression And Reclaim Your Life’ came out in 2004 and became an instant best seller. I wrote several more but my heart always lay in this first book. I knew I wanted to help more people beat depression and that was when I thought of turning the book into an online program.
The Beat Depression Program is a starting point and it’s the recovery stepping stones encapsulated into ten steps. I hope you get as much out of it as I got when looking for ways to beat depression. We’re a growing community. Please stay in touch. Let me know your story. It’s why I’m here.