Mental Illness

Mental illness has been in my family for generations. Depression has been the most common. My maternal grandmother, mother, sister and I all suffer from it. We have all tried many different treatments with the results being varied. My grandmother would go to the clinic and would have shock treatments. I mean full on, electrodes all over the head, something in the mouth for biting, shock treatments. She would do this approximately every 10 years or so. I never saw it but my mother talked about it. When she (my mother) was about 8 my grandfather left my grandmother, as a result she had a nervous breakdown. She was placed in a mental institution for many months. Because there was no family to take care of my mother and her siblings they were sent to a children's home where they lived until graduating from high school. My grandmother was released after months of treatment but as I said had to go back every so often to have follow up treatment. My mother suffered from depression for years when I was a child. She did not seek help for a long time, just lived with it. I can remember little things from that time that I know now were symptoms. At the time we really didn't know what was wrong with mom. She never became very close to her mother so I guess didn't really know all the symptoms that she went through. Also, my mom didn't have any traumatic experience which she thought was how the depression would start. She didn't really have a trigger, just everything together I guess. I went through something similar not really knowing that I had depression. I thought that it was just the blues or melancholy, and that it was just a part of my personality. It wasn't until I took welbutrin to stop smoking that I realized that it did much more for me than just help me quit smoking. Now I look at my family and that of my husbands and realize that my daughter has an extremely high chance of experiencing some type of mental illness and I have to really be on the lookout for any symptoms that she may have.