I think work stress is making me worse.

And I had it so good for so long!

Without getting into too much detail, about six months after I started my current (part-time) job, we got a new manager. She's horrible at her profession and worse as a manager. She took some kind of medical leave starting February of last year, and since then we've had an amazing manager (whom I became very close with), but now the horrible manager is back and the good manager is gone, gone, gone.

I haven't had to work with her very much yet but everyone is already talking about how awful she is making things. I'm looking for full-time work anyway, but this is making me work even harder to get out of there. She made me feel so horrible about myself and work used to make me feel so great! I'm really proud of what I do, and usually even on my worst depression days, when I couldn't even get out of bed, if I could somehow drag myself into work, I'd leave in a good mood. I really, really love my job.

Now I dread it more than anything.

This sucks.

And worst of all, I know it's making things harder on my boyfriend too... I feel like work used to make me feel so much better and helped my depression so much so I wouldn't always have to go to him for emotional support, but now it makes me worse and I think it's taking its toll on our relationship.

(Thankfully I'm in the middle of an interviewing process for a very promising job -- fingers crossed!)

I agree that stress at work or any extra stress makes depression or other symptoms worse. Glad you are interviewing for another job. Just keep your head down, know that you do a good job and pretend your manager is speaking a foreign language you do not understand. Well maybe not the last one all the time. Try and think of 3 things that you did that made you happy for that day. Its an exercise that I do and I was amazed when I started it how there WERE things that were good in my life when I thought everything sucked. Good luck and keep us posted on the job interview.

jani