Jonathan Rottenberg

So I started to get scared.

What could explain this?

So I was even more baffled, and I felt like something terrible was happening to me, but I didn't know what it was.

It took months.

I remember going home.

I was living in Baltimore, driving home, and that was very difficult to Connecticut and meeting with a psychiatrist who is a colleague of my father's.

And I believe that colleague was the first person to suggest that this might be depression.

And that rocked my world.

The sensations I was experiencing were not what I understood to be the symptoms of depression, which were feeling sad or just losing interest in things.

I was really more experiencing this terrible fatigue, this inability to concentrate.

And so I did get a referral to see a psychiatrist in Baltimore.

And

I was started on medication.

And unfortunately, it didn't help me.

And I continued to struggle and become more and more distraught over the situation and less and less functional.

So I was spending large parts of the day lying on the ground,

Yes, I felt humiliated and I felt completely like I didn't know who I was if I couldn't think that I had no reason for being.

I had no purpose in life.

And it was very scary in the fact that

The treatment did not initially help me, made it worse.