An excellent ‘Morning Edition’ on BBC Radio Five Live this morning, featuring an item on depression. I am not sorry to go banging on about this subject again because it is one that remains close to my heart, or should I say my head. In today’s Sun newspaper, there is an interview with the former footballer Clark Carlisle in which he reveals that his recent collision with a lorry was not an accident. In fact, it was a suicide attempt. I haven’t read the interview because I don’t buy The Sun on matters of principle (it’s shit, Murdoch, Hillsborough, its politics) and you can no longer read the content on-line unless you pay for it but I do know that Carlisle has suffered from depression and this was what led to his attempted suicide.
On the show, Radio Five’s Peter Allen interviewed the former cricketer Graeme Fowler who bravely revealed the secret of his own battle with depression. Perhaps it’s just me but I found the interview quite harrowing, possibly because I recognised everything he had gone through. Depression affects people differently and Fowler has been unable to work since last year. In more recent times, I have managed to struggle through, even during one major episode last year and despite the absence of any kind of help and support from my former employer whose sales pitch runs ‘every little helps’ to which I reply, yeah, right.
A person I know tweeted sympathy towards Carlisle and – unbelievably, or maybe not – the replies were often abusive and lacking any sympathy at all. To paraphrase, he should snap out of it, the standard idiotic response of anyone who doesn’t understand mental illness. They’d never say to a cancer sufferer that they should stop complaining and just get on with it, or maybe they would. You can’t educate pork.
My worry is that this is a subject that comes and goes. We hear a terrible story, we applaud the victim’s courage, we say that something should be done and then we forget all about it. Until next time.
I hope Carlisle and Fowler get the help they need. There are few things worse than looking at the world through a fog of despair and disillusion.
