A suitable case for treatment?

by Rick Johansen

The good news for me finally came last week when, ironically on the day of the General Election, I got the call to say I would finally be getting some psychotherapy for my ongoing struggle with depression. After a mere six months of waiting, just to be seen, I’ve got someone to talk to, listen to and, hopefully, be treated by and I am going to write about it.

I’m not going to go into huge detail, but I am going to record the salient bits because I am a man on a mission. I have publicly “come out” as a depressive so I shall inform my loyal reader as to what happens.

I am have wondered why I bothered to come out. It’s not a matter of self-pity, that’s for sure, although the ignorant often look at us as if that’s why we struggle. And it’s certainly not a matter of “Oh look at me: I’ve got depression! Isn’t that trendy?” I think it’s partly because I know there are a lot of people who spend their lives under the shadow of the black dog but they never say or do anything about it. The world, I believe, is full of “happy depressives”, who keep it to themselves because of the undoubted stigma that remains. They fear for the consequences if their employer got to find out they were mentally ill, they fear that, if they are not currently working, their chances of finding work would diminish. And I think they are right to fear it too because there is a deeply negative but ingrained view among many that depression is merely being fed up, that we should “snap out of it” and that if you suffer from it, you couldn’t possibly be trusted to carry out a job, certainly not as an airline pilot. I mean, just look at that Germanwings co-pilot. Anyone pilot with depression would have done what he did was the suggestion from the red tops.

I have an idea what’s going to happen at my treatment. I will provide daylight mood charts, I will be counselled about my life and we will try to get to the root of my issues. I know because I have been doing this since I was 13. It’s a shame that we’ve not found the answer, but I am willing to give it another try. I envy those for whom treatment has worked and seemingly had the black dog put down forever. I cannot imagine how good it must feel. My illness usually goes into a type of remission after treatment, before I sink back into it again. Since my last period of therapy, my medication has not ceased: it’s doubled and I know I could not function in any meaningful way without it.

So I am going to talk about my unhappy childhood, my poor background, my dismal academic career (I might as well have stayed at home instead of attending secondary school for all the good it did) and a lifetime of hopeless underachievement and failure. And I am going along with a prepared agenda in my mind that this will be another temporary fix and that in a couple of years and after another shedload of anti-depressants, I’ll be doing this all over again.

None of this is in any way to suggest I am not positive about it, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked for treatment in the first place, but I have been here before and I’m still the same.

And I’m going to write about it because I don’t care who knows. I don’t care who knows and I want anyone else who is going through mental turmoil to know that there is, if you are prepared to sit on an ever-lengthening NHS waiting list for six months or longer, something out there for you, beyond medication alone.

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1 comment

Kevin Spencer May 10, 2015 - 11:09

You should also discuss how your caring nature makes you concerned about others and their problems which added to your own must be very difficult for even the toughest human being to cope with. You should also reveal how frustrated you get when things that you have no control over spin away from you.
Neither of the above are criticisms, they are what help to make you the wonderful person that you are to both your family and friends but life must be tough trying to juggle so many balls at the same time.

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