Last week, my loyal reader may have read my blogpost titled ‘Epiphany’, in which I tried to explain why my life turned out like it did. Fifty glorious years of mental ill health, a car crash of an education and then a constant struggle to get through my working ‘career’ without my huge limitations being widely uncovered. Fifty years of on/off therapy and counselling merely resulted in a diagnosis (severe clinical depression and various types of anxiety) and the requirement of taking anti-depressants, in all certainty, for the rest of my days. Then last week happened and I’m back under a cloud again, the consummate actor for the benefit of my world.
Two things. One that I had said epiphany last week when, as some kind of naked lunch (see William Burroughs book of the same name), it all became clear. I had learned next to nothing at school, which added to what little I had learned at home. The light in the dark I described in the blog went out straight away, wrapped up in a ball of confusion and angst. I was almost entirely self-taught in life and virtually untaught in almost everything else. No wonder things – including me – turned out like they did. Two, that I somehow thought that my social anxiety had disappeared forever, just like that. At the weekend, it returned because it never went away. I took my eyes off the ball. I was socially outclassed by (I felt) my betters, out of my depth in a place – a restaurant, as it turned out – that was a million miles outside my comfort zone. How to address this?
It’s got to be more therapy and perhaps extra drugs, the legal, anti-depressant sort, not recreational drugs. The former is simple: I call my local health centre, a GP will eventually call back and s/he will prescribe more drugs. Simples. The therapy bit is not so simple. The last time I had therapy, earlier this year, I had been on an NHS waiting list for around 15 months. Things are worse now so I would, if I was lucky, get to see someone in the spring or summer of 2021. Of course, I could go private, but that in itself causes me a problem: I am opposed in principle, in all circumstances, to private healthcare. No ifs or buts.
Anyway, I’m not whichever one of Ant and Dec took a year off work and went into rehab, or wherever it was he went, at great expense. Out of interest, I looked at the prices for private therapy and while I could probably afford some sessions I suspect it would be problematical to me. One, my aforementioned objections to private healthcare and two, my inevitable concerns as to whether these huge sums – and we are looking at in excess of £50 for a single session – would my worth my while. If, for example, you were paying privately to have your piles removed, you would know and feel that a difference was being made. But what if I had a series of therapy appointments, costing upwards of £600, and I descended back into depression and anxiety shortly after, I’m pretty sure I’d be full of regret and I’d feel twice as bad. And that has always happened when the NHS treated me. It always came back.
This is what kept waking me up last night and has left me bleary-eyed and exhausted this morning. Caffeine and bananas will do their bit to see me through today but like my drugs, and past therapies, they are always a quick fix and not a solution or a conclusion. I’m resigned to this poor mental health malarkey hanging over me until I pop my clogs and the more I think about it, the worse it gets.
