People in the street are always coming up to me and asking: “How is that mental health therapy coming along? Are you feeling any better?” No, of course they’re not really. Barring a few close friends, no one really wants to ask a question of someone asking just how they mad they are today. It’s probably a bit embarrassing because of the corrosive stigma attached to mental illness and there might be a fear that they’ll get a long, drawn out answer. My answers would be, “It’s coming along very nicely and I feel much the same as I did a few weeks ago before the therapy started…pauses for a deep breath…because the black dog wasn’t present when I started. Oh, and did I mention…”
What do I mean? I’m going along for therapy even though I’m not ill at the moment? Isn’t that a bit like affixing plaster to a leg that isn’t broken? It’s a good point and it needs addressing.
The answer is that everyone’s depression is their own. I know mine very well, to the extent that he is not so much an old friend, but an annoying crotchety old uncle who just won’t shut up. And even though my black dog is out of the room right now, the door to let him back in remains slightly ajar. The purpose of the therapy, along with the handful of little tablets I take each morning with my Oatibix, is at best to make me feel a bit better and at worst to make me feel no worse. I do find it hard to explain how it is that mental illness never really goes away, at least to those of you who do not suffer from it. But I’ll try.
When I am not depressed, I can cope with the mood swings. The dips and the lows come and go, as do the sleep malfunctions that see my brain go into overdrive, usually in the darkest hour before the dawn. This is particularly annoying in June when the sun’s work starts to do its job before 5.00 am. Today I feel okay, except that I am particularly tired, having woken up frequently throughout the night. I can remember being awake at some point within each hour from 2.00 am. By the time, I was tired enough to drift off into meaningful sleep, it was time to get up.
The feelings of hopelessness and despair are very much present, the not being good at anything still weighs heavy on my mind but I can concentrate on other things. I can put more positive things at the front of my brain. But when I’m on the way down, and as I have said before, I always know when I am going down, I don’t see anything positive at all.
I’ve been through my unhappy childhood again. I didn’t really regard it as unhappy at the time because I didn’t know any different. I thought the way I felt was the way everyone felt. I didn’t even realise the psychotherapists I saw from age 13 were psychotherapists at all. I didn’t even know there was anything medical about it. No one said what I was suffering from was depression, anxiety and the most awful night terrors imaginable. I only found that out when I was in basket case territory when I stumbled aimlessly through my twenties.
My current therapist is very good at getting me to talk, which I suppose is the main aim. I am learning more and more about myself than I have with most of my last therapists. For instance, by looking back, I now realise we were much more poor than I ever realised. My mother wasn’t going to the butchers for anything other than end of the day offcuts and out of date items that no one else wanted. I didn’t know that we didn’t have a telephone or a colour TV was because we couldn’t afford them. I didn’t realise that my mother darned my socks and in fact all my clothes for years because they were the only clothes I would have because we had no money, other than through what we called the “club book”.
I came out of the session on Monday, in the middle of a day’s work, with my head spinning like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. The physical work was tiring, the mental stuff even more so. By the middle of the evening, I could barely think, never mind speak.
On question I asked was this: is it wise for me to write openly about on a website read by thousands? Well, all right: hundreds. It turns out that it probably is a good thing for me personally although I suppose potential employers who might dip in from time to time could look elsewhere for non mental employees. I’d like to think it wouldn’t make any difference, but quite frankly I am well beyond caring.
The lack of sleep is bothering me more than anything though. My partner can normally lie down and the pillow has a happy habit of taking her into deep sleep straight away. I just like there thinking about things for ages, nodding off for a while and then waking up and thinking about things.
The whole mental health experience is very tiring and it was even more tiring when I worked full time because of the need to hide my demons from managers who would never have understood and even if they hadn’t, they would not have behaved any different.
The therapy is helping and together with the drugs, which do work, I’m in a good place. Today anyway.
