I don’t think I had much of an understanding. I knew for myself though how it felt—it wasn’t good.

I didn’t really have a concept of it. I had heard of people who had trouble getting out of bed but I didn’t grasp—know what it meant.

Initially, I was embarrassed. I thought it was laziness, ignorance, something I could change. That lasted for a pretty long time.

Suicide. That’s it. Basically, I have seen people depressed, and I didn’t understand it until it happened to me. I thought it was so bad that I would end up killing myself.

My understanding of depression was that one got depressed because of a culmination of events in their life that they normally just blew off or denied ever happened. The shadow of those events would move in.