It is always nice when someone says something nice about my blogs on mental health, particularly with regard to their own issues that they may otherwise have just struggled on with. I have had a number of private messages from people who feel they have benefited by seeking help, which is part of my motive for posting all this stuff.
I always emphasise that everyone’s black dog is different. There are often commonalities at work, but how mental illness affects someone might not be the same for everyone.
For instance, I have a friend who suffers from intermittent bouts of depression. They come along when he least expects them, sometimes when things in his life appear to be going well. Suddenly, it disappears again, completely gone, as if it never visited at all. His depression can be desperately debilitating, lasting for days on end. Life is a terrible struggle, some days he cannot even get out of bed. He is currently on a disciplinary from his public sector employer, who use a simple totting up system to calculate when he should be warned for his sick leave. His employer states constantly to employees that they take mental health issues seriously and want to help and work with sufferers. Then, when he reaches a certain number of days – and we are talking into barely double figures in a year or so – he then gets a verbal disciplinary warning, which if he is ill again will be followed by a written warning, after which; well, you know the rest. How, I wonder, does this employer, equate its sympathetic policies with its unsympathetic practices?
You do not need to be a qualified psychiatrist to work out that taking disciplinary action against someone who is suffering from, say, depression and anxiety, might not have the most positive effect on that person’s state of mind.
My anxiety and depression, as my loyal reader will know, never actually goes away. Lately, the lows have not been that low and the anxiety is just about manageable, but it is a constant. But unlike my friend, whose deep bouts come and then go, completely without warning, I can spot mine coming from a good distance away and usually I know how to deal with it. But not always. In the last five years, thanks to a supportive family, a sympathetic set of managers, lots of therapy and anti-depressants, I took almost no time off work at all, including times when I thought the world was caving in. My managers were brilliant, just brilliant. (Until I entered the hell zone that was Tesco, but that’s another story!)
And I actually feel lucky, somehow grateful, that my black dog is a constant, a model of depressing consistency, but not, in his current form, a killer or anything like it.
You might be surprised at just who has a mental health problem. It’s not exactly a rarity, far from it. Do I like to write about it? Well, not exactly like to, but I don’t mind writing about it. There’s a therapeutic value, there seems to be value to others. That’s nice. I do get some feedback amongst all the junk and spam. I publish everything now whereas I used to get precious and delete the negative stuff. No more. I don’t really care if people don’t like what I say about mental health. I care what they say about other stuff because, sometimes, maybe quite a lot of times, I make mistakes and I try to learn from them.
It was a bit of a shock to get some abuse about mental health stuff although that’s not happened for a while. It says more about those who write the abuse than it does about me.
I don’t think I’ll ever quite get out of this mental straitjacket but I am very lucky with the black dog I have. He might be a pain in the arse, but at the moment, he’s more of a yapping Jack Russell than an angry Alsatian.
If you think you have a black dog, get him seen to right away. You might just be fed up or sad, or you might be ill. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, no matter what media tells you. You are not alone and never forget it.
