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How do you treat the Dog when you’ve never seen one?
Mental disorders can be so unrelated to us if we do not have a family history or a member near our social group that is living with it. I could not be more ignorant myself until I met my former boyfriend. Since I had grown up in a family already with four adults, I felt protected and secure most of the time. Our problems now past my father’s alcoholism, which had ended more than ten years before I was born, rested more on financial crisis than on damaged relationships within our nucleus. I grew up to be a very lively and happy person (with serotonin levels higher than average) and I surrounded myself with friends who had common moods and interests. By the time I met my boyfriend, mental disorders could not have been more strange to me than UFOS could have been to any other human. I had only read once of twice about them in school and I mean, it wasn’t on purpose… I just think that people come to be interested or impressed by certain topics if they are related, in one way or another, with their daily routines.
So meeting up with the Dog in complete unawareness of what it was o how to treat it, was frightening. Not because I was afraid of my former boyfriend but because I was completely inexperienced on how to handle his mood changes and I was confused on how to make the relationship work even if there was canine breathing in my ear. One of the biggest mistakes after meeting up and finding the presence of depression in my partner was that I didn’t take the matter into account with seriousness. I repeated constantly to myself, “Okay, everybody has their traits and flaws and Edward did not choose to have depression so it’s better to let it be.”
Wrong. Completely wrong.
First thing I should have done was researching and informing myself (which is a total pain since my career emphasizes in investigating what you don’t know). I only explored months later when I was desperate to find a solution to the fights we had rooted because of certain canine annoyance. What added to the whole confusion frenzy was thinking that maybe his depression was something “seasonal”. “Of course, it is no current form of disillusion, but it can be something that just came into his life sometime ago, and as it came it will go”.
In this seasonal hopelessness my lover was in, even if I did not make the effort to dig up more deeply, I felt the need to help. Let’s cheer him up! let’s help him see that he can make it out of his blue season, of the dark spot and into my amusing world ‘goggles’!
And in some occasional months, I am sure he did.
Feeling in love, having someone to share your problems and your happiness with, finding that person with whom every conversation is filled with comprehension and surprises…all of it reduces the presence of the Dog. The illusion is that we expect, once an alternative works, that this is the path to take. And you keep repeating the stimulus of love and comprehension as the complete answer to his/her problems.
Reality came to me again when in a sudden relapse of depression, he decided to cut all his hair off with a razor and ended up completely bald:

“I just needed to change something in myself. It bothered me to realize how fed up I was with the person I looked at in the mirror.”
After that, I always reacted with disgust when he told me he was thinking of cutting his hair once more because he did not feel ok with the way he looked.
For me it became a painful symbolism of how the Dog took control over my partner and tried to reduce his lovely features into something strange, unknown and ugly.
But never told him that.
However, playing the loving therapist was not only not going to solve the ‘Dog problem” but it was going to transform the union into a twisted type of patient-counselor relationship. Depression takes a whole lot more than that. Because love, I found, cannot remedy the absence of will or the extreme incompetence a person feels with themselves. It is a problem that needs careful treatment. And I am talking about professional treatment and not only lovely-dovey girlfriend conversation here.
Finally, one of the most fundamental details I left behind until recently (and that most of ‘depression fallouts’ disregard) was the importance a stable family environment has in the recovery process for this illness. When I came to know his family, it seemed as though there was a strong support group of people for him and his disorder was mostly a product of an unbalance of chemicals and negative thinking. When I looked closer, not only did he have a long family history of relatives with different types of mental illnesses (one of his cousins tried to commit suicide some months ago) but also his family nucleus was constantly in distress with infidelity, sadness, anger, fights and rivalry.
For a person that has any kind of mental illness, including depression, the need to rise comes within, inside the most private and intimate part of your life: family. Love, again, is not enough and though your relatives do want to help you out and do the best for you, the foundation has to be one of a functional union between the couple, the offspring and the extended family. Conflicts between them cannot only prolong and deepen depression but it can also be traced as the root of the illness itself. In my boyfriend’s case, I found later a direct correlation between the intensity of his depressions and the conflicts between his parents.
So I asked myself: “If you do not see what surrounds the Dog, then, how are you going to understand its existence and its solution?”