The Truth About Depression

Thinking back, Gary says there were signs that his wife was depressed, but she was never diagnosed. Gary remembers periods of time when Angela seemed down and hopeless. "To me, it was something we were going to get through," he says. "It was very illogical when she would stay down for so long. I never really understood it."

Many of Angela's friends and family members asked her to seek professional help, but Gary says it was hard for her to accept that something psychological might be wrong. "There was a lot of illogic, I guess, in her thinking," he says. "If we were arguing, and I said, 'That's crazy,' that was something that really cut. I always had to kind of backpedal from that and say, 'I don't literally mean you're crazy.'"

Instead of looking inside herself, Angela blamed her bad mood on migraines and allergies. On the evening of her suicide, Gary says he believed his wife was physically ill. "She had a bunch of pain medication in her body," he says. "I believe the migraines were the trigger—that was where her depression started. That was the part that everybody missed."