To my great surprise, I’ve turned, at least temporarily, from hopeless clinical depressive into amateur mental health therapist. I kid you not. In recent weeks, I’ve been asked, very nicely, by some people I know for a few words of advice and guidance. Imagine that: people asking me for advice and guidance. It’s all true though.
The best question people always ask is this: what brings on your depression, to which I often reply, I hope not too glibly, I don’t know. That’s not strictly true. Sometimes I do know, like for example my last year of employment with the bullies and abusers of the British Red Cross and the death of my father in 2011. Other times, it just seems to happen.
My ears are always open to handing out snippets of advice to fellow sufferers because – and this, I know, is bleeding obvious – I have an idea of what they are going through. That’s not to say I know exactly what they are going through: I don’t. Everyone’s Black Dog is different from everyone else’s Black Dog. There is no one size fits all in the mental health department.
I know I am in a relatively good place when I can feel the mood start to drop and I can arrest and, on a very good day, stop the drop. This has happened on a number of occasions this week. If I could bottle the prescription, I would sell it to the NHS at a very reasonable price, obviously.
My advice, for what it’s worth, is that if you think you are getting depressed, then you probably are and you should do something about it. That something should be going to see a GP and having a talk about it with someone you know well and can trust. It could be that the depression will be a temporary feature which will begin to disappear once your personal circumstances change and improve, but it might not. That’s where you need to be careful.
I have lost friends and acquaintances, as well as knowing other people, who have killed themselves. In each instance, nobody realised that there was anything serious wrong, whatever that means. One guy I knew was more than slightly eccentric, very loud and sometimes a risk-taker. I had absolutely no idea he suffered from huge mood swings, during which his behaviour would become reckless and he had a tendency to self-harm. Another friend led a chaotic personal life and I did harbour thoughts that he might kill himself one day. I concluded that I was being silly and he would eventually sort himself out. A year later he hanged himself. I was not that close to him, but looking back the signs were there.
I’ll talk to anyone, me. I’m not exactly a professional counsellor but if you think I can do anything to help, you know where I am.
