How's this for life dealing you some bad cards. I grew up in a family of 5 with me being the youngest. When I was a 5 year old little boy, I started having feelings of sadness and loneliness. Sometimes these feelings would go away and I would be real happy as a kid. These happy feelings never seemed to last very long, and then unexplicably, these sad lonely feelings would return. I felt sad a lot and even had dificulty learning at school and was made to repeat the 1st grade again, which I hated and never got over. Because of this, I shunned making any friends at school because I believed I was better than any of my classmates because I didn't belong with them because I was really ahead of them a grade. This continued until I graduated from high school. I remembered once my mother even took me to some doctor and the doc gave me some a drug, but that made me feel worse. My Dad talked my mother out of taking me to this doctor and giving me drugs for my introverted sad personality. Then when I was 10, my Dad, who was emotionally unstable and would beat up my mother sometimes in front of my sister, brother, and I, left my mother, and took my older brother with him. My sister and I stayed with our Mom. My Dad and brother came back to visit me and talked me into moving with them. I did this because I didn't feel anything from my mother, or sister. My Mom just didn't feel like she was there for me. Ok, this turned out to be a big mistake because my Dad and brother turned out to be major jerks to me and did nothing but pick on me, insult me, made me feel bad about myself. While I was away from my Mother, my Mother made no attempt to contact me or my brother to ask how we were doing, nor did she try to take my Dad to court to get custody of both me and my brother. My Dad would bad mouth my Mother to both my brother and I at times. By the time I graduated from high school, I was a loner, with major depression and no friends and I didn't even know what my problem was nor did I seem to care. I had no plans for my future, nor did I feel any positive feelings for anything. I just felt empty all the time. I became so despairing at times about life that I would quit whatever job I had after high school and move in with my Dad to let him support me, which turned out to be a huge mistake, since he was bad tempered and impatient, with a real negative attitude, which only caused my emotional problems to get worse. I would get a job, move away from my Dad, become despairing and depressed more, quit my current job, move in with my Dad again & have him support me again until I got sick of this, move out, get a job, quit, move back in with him with him again, repeat this cycle, over and over again, until I finally realized that I needed help after finally figuring out there was something wrong with me. I did get help, but by the time I was 30, I had a very serious nervious breakdown and checked myself in a county mental hospital. I required 5 weeks of hospitalization to snap me out of a very serious deep depression so I could go on and live and not commit suicide. I went on social security disability after this. I since then have had 2 other major episodes of serious depression that required hospitalization. I am currently on social security disability still, and I'm still taking medication for my emotional problems of depression that I still have. I have gotten relief from depression by taking medication, and at one time the depression has mostly dissapeared once, but my depression has come back, and it's been that way for awhile now. My current psychiatrist has diagnosed me with bi-polar 2 disorder. She wants to put me on anti-psychotic medication, even though, I am not psychotic, but says these meds can help me since I am currenly living with alot of depression right now. I am 44 yrs old and haven't worked since being on disability since I was 30. I did figure out that my Mom was depressed alot when I was growning up, and since she was depressed, her feelings of depression transferred onto me by the time I was 5. When she became happy, that's when I was happy too, because I closely identified with her for my identity until I was 10. My Dad had a withdrawn personality with paranoia, and also had what I would guess as a borderline personality disorder. So imagine growning up with two dsyfunctional parents, who were so messed up, they screwed you up to a point where you became mentally ill. Even if I would've disowned my Dad when I graduated from high school, I would've still had depression to deal with and probably would've committed suicide because I never would've gotten help. Nobody is born with mental illness, I was just pre-disposed towards getting this by being dealt some bad cards in life.