I am 32, and have suffered from major depression since age 20. It has not ruined my life, but nothing has ever been the same. I believe Zen meditation and various Chi Gung exercises made things worse near the start, and I'm wondering if anybody else has experienced this.

I want to say up front that I have no intention of denigrating or criticizing Zen, Chi Gung or any Eastern or Buddhist practice. I think they are wonderful ways of improving health for or spirituality for most people My experience is entirely subjective, and from what I've seen in the literature, somewhat unusual.

When I was 17, I took a strong interest in Zen Buddhism and Zen meditation. I visited a few local temples, but primarily I meditated by myself regularly, a half hour each morning. I believe this had a calming effect as I tended to have an overactive min.

During my 18th year, I experienced my first spell of depression for a few months, but only symptoms of sadness and crying spells. This went away after a fun summer vacation in Europe.

I felt peaceful and happy, and healthier, while I was meditating and for some time afterward. But I found that if I stopped altogether for more than a few days, I felt considerably worse. At the time, I assumed this was similar to how people who exercise regularly feel if they haven't been to the gym for a while.

The next year I took a year off and worked before going to college. I lived with a friend who had studied Kung Fu for many years, and who taught me a number of Chi Gung exercises that he learned from his teachers. At this point, I was doing *both* Chi Gung and Zen meditation.

I had an abusive boss at work, and I started having panic attacks when she would yell at me. I developed a generalized anxiety stomach ache from coming into work, and eventually I quit. These symptoms soon faded away.

By this point, I was experiencing two things from the meditations that would later be problematic. During Chi Gung exercises, I felt warmth and tingling, both in my stomach and my extremities, from the "circulation of chi." And during Zen meditation I was getting to the point of complete non-thought while sitting, but was starting to find that i had more obsessive or racing thoughts than usual while not sitting, almost like a homeostatic reaction.

When I was 20, in college, I stopped doing Chi Gung and started attending Tai Chi classes instead. I also stopped sitting Zen alone and went to a school group a few times a week, and a few weekend retreats. At some point, my appetite and sleep cycles started to shrink, but I didn't notice. If anything, I thought it was an asset that I had "more energy," which I attributed in part to my meditative activities.

In the early spring of my Freshman year, a number of stressful events happened within the span of a few months. First, I broke up with my girlfriend. Second, my father, who has a physical disability, had to start using a wheelchair. And finally, my sister was in a major car accident and was in critical condition for a month.

In the six weeks that followed I lost 25 pounds. The reason was not *total* lack of appetite - rather - I had severe stomach pains whenever my stomach was just the slightest bit full. I would eat quarter-portions at meals. The pain was intense enough that it became Pavlovian - just the sight of food caused me to lose whatever appetite I had. And no over-the-counter stomach medications helped.

I also believed, for no reason I ever figured out, that salty foods made the pain worse, so I cut out salt as much as possible. I also was extremely sad all the time, felt that life is pointless, had crying spells, and, I started to experience uncontrolled tingling and warmth in my extremities during the course of the day, in a way that was unpleasant.

I became convinced that I had either (a) some sort of chi problem that required acupuncture, or (b) some sort of gastrointestinal disorder like IBS or Crohn's disease. I went for some acupuncture sessions but they didn't help. I didn't once consider that I might have a mood disorder, believing that my mood was bad *because* of my physical distress.

Just after finals but a few days before I was to return home for the summer, I collapsed in my dorm complaining of severe internal pain, and my roommate called an ambulance. You might be thinking this was all psychosomatic pain, BUT, at the hospital, it turned out that my internal organs were at risk because my sodium levels were dangerously low. I had been drinking very very large amounts of water, as one of my symptoms was thirst, and I had been avoiding salt, for two months. The doctors forced me to eat a box of Saltines (no joke), and the pain was reduced.

I was also shocked to discover that I weighed 125 pounds instead of 150 (i am 5'9"). I was underweight and hadn't noticed, even though it was staring me in the face every time i looked in the mirror.

I made my plane flight home, but suffered a complete breakdown upon arrival. I was hit with pretty much every symptom of depression in the DSM-IV. The most immediate emergencies were that I couldn't sleep AT ALL due to anxiety and frequent panic attacks, and powerful headaches, and I couldn't eat due to severe stomach pain. Also, I couldn't concentrate on any sort of intellectual activity such as reading, and even watching TV was a strain. Meditation was out of the question, and stopping cold turkey definitely caused a sort of withdrawal that made everything even worse. My thoughts raced constantly and I also experienced a strange sort of photographic recall of past events, only it was at random, fragmented, and punctured with a painfully sad nostalgia. Basically, I was in hell, and fantasized about ending my life. I also thought that life was pointless and felt, at various times, and almost paralyzing apathy. Sort of a loss of affect, a hollowness in the head.

Thankfully, I never reached the stage of active planning that most psychiatrists would consider fully suicidal. I think the only reason I didn't was because of the constant support of my parents.

My parents essentially forced me to drink Ensure every two hours throughout the day to try to gain the weight back. And, we went to acupuncture sessions (because of my insistence that my problem was "Eastern") and to Western doctors who tried to understand the stomach pain. No dice. Nothing. It was only then that doctors, and my parents, started suggesting that I see a psychiatrist, which I resisted fiercely at first because I didn't want the stigma of that, or of taking drugs.

But they were right. Because when I went on Zoloft, all of the emergency symptoms (stomach pain and loss of appetite, no sleep, panic attacks) went away within one month. Gone. Also gone were the heat and tingling in my extremities, which I had long used to justify my theory that my problems were all from a Chi imbalance. Also, at this time, I learned new information about my family history that suggested I was predisposed to have a mood disorder.

My other symptoms remained in reduced form, but for the most part I had a textbook recovery over the next three months, and I resumed school in the fall, which had been in doubt for a while.

I was also quite lucky in that I did not experience many of the side effects of SSRI's - no loss of orgasm, no nausea or dizziness. Drowsiness has been an issue, but caffeine takes care of that.

I went to cognitive-behavioral therapy for the next few years, but I found it was not very helpful for my remaining problems (which were mostly obsessive negative thoughts), so I eventually stopped.

Except for a few brief interludes where I felt strong enough to stop taking Zoloft for a year or two, I've been on it ever since. I also have never gotten involved with meditation again.

Now, many people have said, that any problems related to meditation/Chi wouldn't have happened if I'd had a teacher looking out for me. Others have said that some sadness is normal in the "early stages" of such practices, and that one eventually gets past it.

I think these viewpoints are dangerous, because they usually come from people who have not experienced a major mood disorder and think that "depression" is only extreme sadness. But that is just one of many symptoms.Also, spiritual teachers are not necessarily trained to diagnose mood disorders.

Somebody experiencing the first symptoms of depression while meditating might find their diagnosis camoflauged, or be dissuaded from taking drugs or going to therapy, because of a belief that they just need to "work through it." Therefore, for me it's sort of moot whether meditation actually contributed to the *onset* of my depression or not - because the bigger problem was that it delayed diagnosis. And that I had the poor judgment to keep these problems secret for too long.

I know of only two scientific books that look at the effect of Zen meditation on the brain - Zen and the Brain, and Zen-Brain Reflections, both by the neuroscientist James Austin. The latter touches on depression, but not really this intersection I'm addressing here. In fact, it more implies that meditation may help reduce depression (which, perhaps it might for some people).

If anybody has either experienced this or read something about it, please do post it here.

I'll end with some advice:

I think the hardest thing to do when one is just starting to grapple with depression symptoms is to understand what is causing them, and to talk about it with other people, both in terms of embarassment, but also, just describing the phenomena. It's some strange stuff to experience.

And the most important first decision is whether to (1) go on medication, (2) go to therapy, or (3) both. Yes, all the statistics say that the combination is the best route. Also, many people have more of a stigma problem with medication than with going to therapy.

I can't offer any general solution for figuring out which of these three paths to choose, and experimenting can take a good deal of time and money. But I hope people will share their thoughts about this, because it's often the biggest initial hurdle to improving the quality of life for somebody suffering from major depression.