It’s Hard to Watch Your Loved Ones In Pain

My adult child has depression. Not is depressed; that implies a temporary condition, and what they have is a permanent thing. Their brain doesn’t produce enough/the right kind/any serotonin.

There’s a lot more to it than this, of course; in fact, brain chemistry is only one small part of what makes up Depression. It’s one of the easiest to directly address; my kid’s had good luck with SSRIs, and I know several other people who’ve found medication to be life-saving.

In the cross-country move, we all moved together, me, my husband, my kid (our three cats). But in the move, my kid lost their health insurance. They’re too old to be on ours, they don’t have an outside-the-house job, and the US doesn’t have what every other ‘first-world’ country has: a working health-care system that’s free at the point of service, for everyone.

(Don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into a rant about how behind we are and how badly we’re serving our citizens — we are both of those things and it makes me incandescent with fury — but that’s an active and important part of what’s currently going on in my life and with my beloved child.)

So, California had a better medi-cal system; my kid had been on it (and paying their way on it) for years. New Hampshire’s system is complex and convoluted, and much harder to figure out, especially for someone who’s already depressed and who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder. (Let me tell you, snow and cold and lack of sunlight are not nice, even for people like me who’re solidly neurotypical.)

So they’ve run out of their medication, and we’re struggling to find a way to get them to a doctor so they can get their prescription re-issued. (If we could find a dentist, that would also be amazing, but I don’t know that the New Hampshire medical system covers that.) Just figuring out what the system requires is difficult: the websites seem to contradict each other, the information on them is vague and misleading, and it turns out, the federal government just said that the state can’t require one of the big things that was a barrier for us to get to service.

Meanwhile, every day, they’re more tired and more lethargic and less ‘themselves’, the funny, bright, engaged person they are under the fatigue and anhedonia. It’s excruciating to watch, and I know it’s worse to experience.

I hate watching them get quieter, more irritable, less happy, and generally stuck in what we’ve termed ‘down the well’.

I wish with all my being that I could just offer a brain chemistry transfusion. I mean, I can give blood. I know why I can’t — I understand the chemistry of it — but I just want to be able to donate some of my very functional, steady brain chemistry to them. (And to others who need it, if it were possible.)

There’s nothing I can do, and that’s the hardest part. I can offer support (and I do), but there’s nothing I can do to directly ameliorate this for them. If they had a cold, I could offer soup and tuck them into bed. If they had a broken leg, I could carry things for them and help with getting up and down the stairs.

But this leaves me helpless and it’s an awful feeling.

This is not to make their issues all-about-me. I don’t point this in their direction (always complain OUT, never IN). These are just my feelings, when watching someone I’ve loved all their life experience pain.

There’s no solution. This is just something I have to live with and go through. It’ll get better — we’ll figure out getting a doctor for them and they’ll get the prescription re-issued, and their depression will fade back again. But in the meanwhile, all I can offer is love and hope and steady support, in all the ways my kid needs me.

It’s what I signed up for, when I decided to have the baby, all those years ago. I’d choose it again, in a heartbeat — no question.

Just… sometimes I miss when they were little and I could fix any injury with a kiss and a cute bandaid.