Helping Others After you Recover?

Hello everybody! I am a bit new here, and I wanted to ask if anybody else here has found ways to help other people after their own recovery from some sort of mental disorder.

Personally, I am a psychology major, and I hope to go into Clinical Psychology someday. I was always interested in psychology, but I feel like this would be a great way to give back.

I also think that we have a lot that we can give due to our experience of actually dealing with these things ourselves. Has anybody else here put our unique experiences and perspectives to work helping other people, either by volunteering or as a job?

I don't work or volunteer with people with depression, but I do work as a writing peer tutor on campus where we get a lot of ESL or returning adult students. I try to be sensitive to how nervous that can make a person, being around a much younger crowd who's already getting their education or around a different culture all the time. Maybe that's one upside of living with depression--I know all the little, insignificant things that can hurt.

I've considered working with children who've been through abuse, though I think I'd be required to undergo specialized training and study for that and I'm pretty set on what I want to do elsewhere. I've always felt a little helpless, too. Depression is very much an internal thing and some people suffer for life. I don't know how I'd guide someone through that when, even when I'm "better" relative to being suicidal and utterly without joy, I still have depression and don't fit in.

One thing I do want to do is tutor younger kids or returning adult students in math, because I self-taught after struggling so badly that early teachers were saying I simply couldn't. That was a major contributing factor to my unhappiness for awhile and I had a mental block for years.