After another medication failure, Brandon went on several different more mild medications for depression treatment. None were the solution. At this same time one of his friends was continually asking him to go to the mall. Since Brandon struggled with being around all the things he couldn’t afford, he repeatedly turned him down. He says going to the mall, “reminded me of how much I failed and how if I’m not careful we could loose the house.”

Eventually, he opened up to the friend about how shopping was a trigger for his suicidal thoughts. Instead of getting support, his friend ghosted him. He later found out that this friend felt like they were being blamed for his suicidal thoughts and wanted an apology. Brandon felt that he had just been open an honest with this person. Loosing a friend like this made it so he really didn’t want to tell anyone about his suicidal thoughts for a while.

This caused him to lean more heavily on his wife for support. She struggled to help support him and really wasn’t sure what to do. Brandon explains, “so now I felt like a burden on [her] and she has her own burdens so as a couple it was super rough.” He started to bottle up the thoughts again to help protect her, but occasionally had to let some of the emotions out to avoid a crisis. Everything got so bad that he had to take a leave of absence. It was supposed to be paid.

During the absence he got on another medication that put him in a really good mood. He was showing lots of signs of improvement and was able to do things again. Then he fell into a manic state and went multiple days without sleeping. He tried driving to an appointment with a psychiatrist, but had to pull over since he couldn’t drive. Brandon asked to do a phone appointment so he didn’t cause an accident. For this reason, his leave of absence claim ended up being denied since his symptoms were not directly observed by a psychiatrist and there was record that his mood had been improved. This meant he didn’t get paid for the month he’d taken leave.

Since the medication was improving his mood, they next tried combining it with a sleep aid. This didn’t work out well. Brandon explains, “That was my 10th antidepressant, I felt hopeless and that there would never be a solution for me. Started to be super open about my depression and suicidal thoughts.” At this point he turned 26 years old and this meant his insurance switched over to the one for his work. Because of the change, he had to switch therapists and spend another few months on a waitlist.

His new therapist was nice, but he wasn’t really getting too much out of therapy with her. Still he kept going while waiting to be matched to a new psychiatrist and to be prescribed new medication. When he did finally get to see one, they looked over his history. “He literally took five minutes to solve a problem that took previous healthcare professionals over seven years,” Brandon says. Apparently, the mania from his previous medication gave his new psychiatrist the clue he needed to see that Brandon was not suffering from depression. He was bipolar.

A mood stabilizer was all that was needed to take away the suicidal thoughts and depression.

Of course, even with this problem solved, everything hasn’t been completely perfect. After three months of doing very well he started to have some chronic migraines. The mood stabilizers weren’t to blame for these as he’d had migraines for years, they just became worse at this point in time. Since the mood stabilizer was one that was also used to treat migraines, they ruled out a whole range of migraine meds that wouldn’t work for him.

His work ended up absorbing routing and dispatch around the same time as Covid started. His job became work from home and he worked in routing, something he enjoyed. “Routing is kinda like a time management game,” he says. Brandon also got a raise in this time which allowed him to kick out another bad roommate, pay off his car, and pay off the attic project.

Brandon’s story isn’t over. The depression and suicidal thoughts are solved, but now he struggles with constant pain and short temperedness from migraines and migraine medications. His medication struggles over the course of seven years just go to show how complicated getting treatment for depression can be, especially when it turns out you’ve been misdiagnosed from the start.