Some interesting comments from a contributor to www.mentalhealth.org.uk:
1.
Knowing I have things to do like painting a room or even washing dishes can be such a chore when living with depression, as everything seems so pointless. Everything is so hard to do as all I seem to want to do is just sit in a corner and do nothing and it’s so hard to motivate myself to do anything without the help of others.
2.
I do not sleep well at night for reasons I do not know, and when I do sleep I never find I sleep enough. Throughout the day I’m just so tired and want to do nothing which affects my everyday tasks. I just feel sometimes I want to sleep and not wake up as I’m so much happier in my dream world.
3.
My memory and concentration has been effected (sic), it became so bad that it affected my work which I was off for nearly a year. I have just gone back to work and I can not concentrate for long periods of time. My concentration just dissappears. I cannot remember most of the things I did the previous day – as much as I try it does not happen.
Depression affects people in many different ways. These are just some of the ways it affects me.
Yes, I am still on about mental health because it’s probably my only specialist subject. And do you know what? When I was going through treatment I learned two things: 1) I didn’t realise until far too late that all these things that were happening to me were as a result of severe clinical depression and 2) I am far from being the only one.
Taking it from the top, have you ever found it a real struggle trying to do routine chores? It has been suggested to me on more than one occasion that I am just bone idle, that everyone else manages to do stuff. “Why can’t you?” Perhaps I was weak, perhaps I was just lazy. Then I realised it was all part of my illness.
Sleep? What sleep? Sleep has been a mess since I was a kid, what with panic attacks and night terrors from long before adolescence until well into it. Again, I didn’t realise that everyone wasn’t like me. The fog in between my ears merely meant I was thick. My great achievement in life, I suspect, was getting through school and work and letting everything think I was a little slow and my piss poor learning abilities were down to an absence of brain cells. It was only in the last few years of my civil service life that I encountered managers who cared about people in general and me in particular. Never before and never since. Thank you AH and PM. At least one of you might read this!
And following on from the first two, number three explains everything that ever happened in my life. If I was at school, nothing made sense. I’d be in lesson after lesson, doing subject after subject, and I’d come out none the wiser. The same at work. Training course after training course, discipline after discipline, I barely seemed to learn a thing. 39 years in the civil service. How the hell did I get by for all that time? No one bothered to find out, no one seemed to care. But why should they have cared? I was a great actor. I laughed it off. It was the clown laughing but the tears were not far behind. They’re still there today.
I’m not sorry to be banging on about the subject of my mental health yet again because it’s my blog and I’ll say what I want. I’m not too bad right now, hopefully emerging from a slump and with the right support, I’ll get through this time. Other people don’t make me ill but their actions can help or hinder. It’s the constant battle between empathy and disdain and not knowing which one you are going to encounter.
Mental illness – still the big unknown. You can’t see it, therefore it can’t be real. Pull yourself together, stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re a man and not a young man: how can you be depressed? What have you got to be depressed about? Oh Christ: not that one again.
I’m fighting the good mental health fight for me but I am fighting for you, too. Really. My crisis could be your crisis, my issues could be your issues, my black dog could be your black dog, my uncaring, unsympathetic employer (I am not saying which one) could be your unsympathetic employer. “Do you mind if I kick you when you’re down?”
And I’m mad, the angry mad. Don’t believe a word when they tell you that it’s okay to come out as a mental person because it’s just not true. Get it seen to, get it sorted but don’t expect to get the same sympathy as a celebrity or a sportsman with the same demons. The young royals get it big time but unfortunately many people who should get it don’t. We’re years away from equal mental and physical health treatment and I think we might even be going backwards. Be honest with yourself but I am not sure you can be honest with everyone else. Some message, eh?
