Heinz Prechter was a German born entrepreneur who founded the American Sunroof Company (ASC). He was a man recognized for his entrepreneurial accomplishments, broad community involvement and political achievements. He was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Harvard Business Club in 1979, and received the Automotive Hall of Fame’s Automotive Industry Leader of the Year award in 1990. He sat on many community and corporate boards, including those of Detroit Renaissance, Comerica Bank and ThyssenKrupp’s automotive supervisory board. By all accounts he was a successful millionaire with friends in high places, a man with a zest for life whom few would have suspected suffered with bipolar disorder(a type of depressive disorder). But Heinz Prechter had battled with the mood disorder most of his adult life, and his battle ended in July 2001, when he committed suicide by hanging himself.

People tend to think that depression is just a case of someone being in a bad mood or a deep funk. Often, even the individuals suffering with depression think that once they get the million dollars, or the perfect wife, the perfect husband, the perfect children, the perfect life, their depression will go away just like that. But, as in the case with Heinz Prechter, it is possible to have it all, materially speaking, and still struggle with depression. And the biggest risk living with unmanaged depression is to your life.

While I myself am not currently on medication for depression I have in the past used Paxil, Zoloft and Welbutrin to treat my condition. I decided to discontinue using medication because I’ve found that the different medications I’ve tried, while each has provided a different benefit, have each come with an undesirable side-effect. But everyone’s experience will be different.

It will be up to you to decide if you should use medication, or use some other method such as one-on-one therapy, group therapy, some natural herbal remedy or your own devised strategy if not to treat your depression, to at least help you maintain the focus that is necessary to run your business. But the one thing you should not do is take your condition lightly figuring it’s no big deal and you can just go right living with it like you’ve been doing for years. You cannot do this, because you just never know when something will happen that will push you right over the edge.

I have personally battled symptoms of depression since the age of nine. Before I was a teenager I was already considering suicide as an option for escaping problems. I lived with my depressive symptoms, coupled with social anxiety, undiagnosed and untreated for many years. Marital problems were the trigger that drove me to seek counseling in 2003, the year I was officially diagnosed with depression and first attempted to treat my depression with medication. However, much of the problems I was dealing with in my marriage were triggered by or at least exacerbated by the stress I was constantly under trying to single-handedly run a business.

During the years from 1998 when I started my business to 2003 when I began to fall apart under the pressure of trying to maintain a marriage, trying to raise a child, and trying to grow a successful business, my depression became unmanageable. I was calling suicide prevention hot-lines. I was contemplating going out into the street and throwing myself in front of a large truck. I was fantasizing about hanging myself from ceiling fans, stabbing myself in the stomach, in the heart, slitting my wrist.

On one occasion, in 2004, I stuffed a handful of pills into my mouth. I did this, not because I was necessarily wanting to kill myself, but because the pressure I was under to keep everybody happy–my spouse, my son, the programmer I’d partnered with to improve my dating software product, my growing list of customers, the phone company, the city that provided my electricity, water and sewer service, the cable company, the people providing the roof over my head, the people providing me with a server to host my websites, the numerous debt collectors—the pressure to be making money and the reality that some weeks no money was being made yet there was still so much work to be done I was going to bed at 3AM, rising at 6AM and working straight through to midnight, then rising at 3AM and working another 18 hours. It all came crashing down on me in one crazy moment. I snapped and could have accidentally killed myself. At the time I had stopped treating my depression and was just trying to "live with it".