This morning I asked Ben the Today’s Parent kid question, “What’s the weirdest thing that your parents do?” He thought about it for a minute and and then answered, “Well, other kids’ parents play with them, but you don’t.” Talk about your kick in the gut…

A lot of other truly excellent and extraordinarily brave mommy bloggers have written lately about depression, like @JDhonestmom from Honest Mom in two particularly stand-out posts, one about how normal people have this and another about hitting a crisis point and then pushing back, and @jessicaesquire from Don’t Mind the Mess guest-blogging at Honest Mom about depression, pregnancy, and nursing.

Now I guess it’s my turn, although Honest Mom’s first post pretty much sums it up for me, so I can basically say “Ditto!” and then move onto the dry, impersonal statistics that I prefer to focus on in situations like this:

According to Statistics Canada, 13.4% or 1 in 7 adults experienced symptoms that met the criteria for a mood disorder at some point in their lifetime with 5:3% reporting those symptoms in the last year (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2006), and studies consistently document higher rates of depression among women than men at a ratio of about 2:1 (Canadian Psychiatric Association, 2001).

Postpartum depression is the most common side-effect of child-bearing and affects an average of 13% of women (O’Hara & Swain, 1996).

My main symptoms seem to be sleep disruptions (I guess it runs in the family!) and anhedonia, which is a fancy word meaning an inability to derive enjoyment from activities that one would normally find enjoyable, like (nail on the head, there, Ben), playing with your kids.

Being depressed sucks, for you and for the people around you (possibly probably definitely even more so), and there are a whole host of resources out there, so don’t hesitate to seek them out and use them. The system isn’t perfect, but the faster you go looking for them the sooner you can start feeling better.

Anyhoo, now that I’ve word-vomited that all out there for the whole internet to see, let’s get this sucker taken care of so Ben and Molly can come up with an answer I actually can send in to Today’s Parent. Just as soon as I bring myself to hit “Publish.”

~ karyn