Skulls in the Stars

There’s been a healthy amount of discussion on the science blogs over the past few days about clinical depression, spurred on in large part by questions from aspiring academics concerning the best way to address the impact of their illness on their job and, just as important, their advisor’s perception of that job.  Dr. Isis seems to have started the current ball rolling with a question from a postdoc, PalMD posted another reader’s experience as a grad student dealing with depression, and Mark Chu-Carroll updated an old post concerning his own struggles with depression.  (If you search through the comments on the original post, you can read one of my very first blog comments, long before I had a blog of my own.)

I feel I should throw my own personal experiences in here.  I’ve been on antidepressants myself since graduate school.  I make no secret of it to anyone anymore, though I haven’t talked about it that much on the blog, except in one early post about the unjustified stigma that antidepressant drugs have. (more…)