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My Health Experience: After a very long, painful battle, Julie McCarthysays she feels very well for the first time in 22 years

I LIKEN IT now to a silent scream. I was screaming inside, dying for people to understand the desperate sadness, anxiety, fear and pain that were overwhelming me. Everyone around me could see something was wrong, of course – I was disappearing in front of them, emotionally and physically, but they were as helpless as I was. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, depression wasn’t associated with young girls from happy, middle-class families in suburban Dublin. We were all clueless.