In this article I write about my personal experiences with depression and about how I have learnt to cope and to even eradicate it. I am sure that I am not alone in the fact that I have regular periods of my life when I am depressed, but knowing this fact does not make it any easier for me. I hope you enjoy reading the article.

I have recently spoken to my parents about the subject of my depression. My mother has said that she thinks we have some kind of depression gene as most of our family suffer from similar symptoms.

I have as recently as last week suffered with a severe bout of this depression, however from it I learnt a valuable lesson. I had been having a bad period in my life where seemingly everything was going wrong. It was one kick in the teeth after each other. I had nothing to look forward to and decided that I needed a night out with my friends. There was one intention that I had in mind which was to get as drunk as possible.

The next day I felt really ill and hungover after having a very late night and as planned a huge amount of alcohol. For the whole day I struggled to stay awake and as the day wore on I became more and more depressed. The negative side of my brain had taken over my whole head and it seemed like there was a whole bunch of negative chemicals running through my body.

The lesson I have learnt is that is not a good idea to go out drinking alcohol if you are feeling low and depressed.

When I was speaking to my parents about my latest period of anxiety and depression, they gave me some interesting and useful advice. They asked me to think about all of the things and aspects of my life that were getting me down. What I then needed to do was to talk about them and to think positive by attempting to find solutions to each of these problems.

This is not at all easy to do but is something I now try. I have realised that it is good to talk about our fears and phobias and that there is nothing wrong with admitting that you are stressed and depressed.

I hope I will not have to live with these regular bouts of depression for the rest of my life as I have to say I hate it, especially when it means I can not get any sleep during a night, which happens quite regularly for me. I will however look for more ways of beating my depression when it does occur.

I now try to think positive in all situations, life is far too short to be always worrying about everything. I have also started to read a lot of self-help books, these have taught me quite a lot of new things and have given me many new ideas.