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I was utterly destroyed when a past boyfriend broke up with me. We were both fresh out of marriages — our divorce papers hadn't even been drawn up — and he thought the timing wasn't right. That he seemed sad about it, too, made it harder for me to accept that the ending was real. Cue my depression after the breakup.
I'd struggled with mild anxiety before. After the breakup, though, I experienced very new-to-me depression and distress. The intense panic and racing thoughts were an assault on my senses. I couldn't take a deep breath; I was shaky, and sometimes my limbs went numb.
What a Broken Heart Does to Your Mind
I described my situation to Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D. — a psychotherapist specializing in love and relationships — who has a private practice in Long Beach, California. She said that while breakups can be extraordinarily painful, how well a person copes with them has a lot to do with what else is going on in their life.
Essentially, if the outside stressors are significant (mine were), they can intensify your pain and make it harder to recover from.
"I think you projected all your other loss, grief, and out-of-control feelings onto the breakup to compound the magnitude of the loss," Dr. Tessina said.
Why We Experience Depression After a Breakup
Marisa Cohen, Ph.D. — a therapist and an associate professor of psychology and co-founder of the Self-Awareness and Bonding Lab, a relationship science lab in Long Island, New York — said breakups can trigger depression.
"There's a theory called the diathesis-stress model, in which a person has a predisposition for the development of a disorder, and stressful life events are likely to make it surface," Dr. Cohen said. "These environmental stressors are catalysts, in a way."
In my case, getting dumped was an environmental stressor, and I certainly felt that.
In my case, getting dumped was an environmental stressor, and I certainly felt that.
I couldn't eat. I lost 20 pounds in just a few weeks. It was impossible to focus on anything besides my emotional distress. I'd wake up, get my kids off to school, then blankly stare at my computer until pickup. Since I'm a freelance writer who has to self-motivate, this became massively problematic. I felt crushing financial distress for months. The very worst part was not being able to be the mother I wanted to be. Not even close.
Deciding to Get Help
My grief wasn't linear. It got dull and distant, then came crashing down on me when I was least expecting it. I had nightmares about the man who left me. I felt triggered when I dropped off my daughter at school because it was close to his house. I had to actively distract myself from thoughts of him to keep it together.
While it may have been "just a breakup," it became much more than that. It rapidly turned into a mental health crisis unlike anything I'd ever experienced, and I didn't know my way out. I imagined my pain would fade with time. Friends, family, podcasts, books on heartbreak, and my therapist all echoed this sentiment.
However, I knew I needed more than time. I needed help.
My Diagnosis: Adjustment Disorders, Stress, and Depression
My therapist diagnosed me with an adjustment disorder, which is exactly what it sounds like: a physical and emotional response when the stress of an event becomes too big to cope with on your own.
This stress response can lead to situational depression, usually takes hold within three months of a stressful event, and is typically resolved in three to six months when the diagnosis is acute. Healing can move more quickly with treatment, which sometimes includes therapy and medication.
Unfortunately, having a name for what I was going through didn't make it much easier to handle. Part of that was because I had a tremendous amount going on at the time of the breakup.
I'd recently ended a 10-year relationship and was struggling to get along with my ex-husband. I had two kids to take care of, mounting financial stress, and an underlying mental health condition (generalized anxiety disorder, which previously only affected me when I tried to fall asleep). And that was on top of a bunch of other things — like my family cat dying suddenly.
My health was shaky at best and far from a priority for my attention. In the aftermath of the breakup, I felt like my entire life was crumbling from all angles. Ultimately, it was too much, and my mental health suffered terribly.
In so many words, Dr. Cohen said that when it comes to the pain of a breakup and whether or not it turns into something bigger, everything affects everything else.
Be Aware of the Symptoms
Among others, adjustment disorder symptoms include anxiety, trouble sleeping or focusing on day-to-day tasks, and withdrawal from social activities. I experienced all of those after my breakup — and I'm not alone.
Lauren DePino, a writer living in Los Angeles, has also been there. Following the end of a year-long relationship, she found herself completely incapacitated and up against a bitter mental health battle.
"It happened on the heels of my grandmother's death. I'm sure that contributed to it," DePino said, adding that her grandmother had been a prominent figure in her life. Losing her grandmother and relationship simultaneously became too much. She couldn't sleep, lost weight, and begged her ex to come back.
How to Treat Adjustment Disorders and Depression
Research has found that psychotherapy is the treatment of choice for adjustment disorders, and that's what worked for DePino. According to Mayo Clinic, medication can be helpful in the short term, and that's what worked for me. Well, I also did quite a bit of walking in the woods, sobbing in my car, and — perhaps all too predictably — I had a fling with a hot mess bartender (emphasis on the hot and the mess).
It took so much more than I imagined to feel free again: time, therapy, a two-month stint on antidepressants to cope with the adjustment disorder (which I ultimately decided to stop taking due to side effects).
While the "disorder" is behind me, I'm still doing some adjusting. I'm trying to remember that plenty of people have once been so gutted by a breakup that it turned into something worse, or required help to get through. I've made space for that reality — that breakups can lead to breakdowns that require diligence to overcome. However, neither the breakup nor its aftermath means I was ever broken.
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