I find myself in the highly unusual position of having something in common with one of God’s vicars on Earth, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. We both suffer from depression. (I hate using the word ‘suffer’: it sounds so naff and self-pitying.) Anyway, not only do I have something in common with Justin, I rather admire him for ‘coming out’ as a fellow mental case.
In many ways, he has little to lose by revealing his illness. He is already a pensioner, he trousers a less than modest £86,000 per annum from the Church and no one is going to say, “Look Justin: we can’t have a bloke with mental illness doing God’s work so we’re going to sack you.” But for all that, I suppose someone, somewhere might benefit from the Big Cheese himself telling his story.
He certainly did the right thing in seeking help when depression struck and I hope for his sake he was offered more than your average person gets from the NHS which is basically antidepressants and the prospect of basic counselling, which for me doesn’t even touch the sides of my illness and never has. But Justin is grateful for the role his faith played in his apparent recovery.
What struck me though was his visceral honesty when he said this: “My own experience of depression – one of the symptoms of it is self-hatred, self-contempt, real, vicious sense of dislike of oneself.” Amen to all that, mate. That’s pretty well how I have felt since around 1969, except that I have learned with experience to hate myself even more. What appears to have helped in was his faith, when he talks about “a deep sense that I’m loved by god.”
Now I don’t feel any sense that I am loved by a god character because it is hard to feel loved by someone you don’t believe in. After all, faith is belief without evidence and I would find it very difficult to obtain solace from something that is almost certainly not true. Still, it seems to work for Justin and I’m certainly not going to stop him (as if I could).
I hope that he isn’t still experiencing “self-hatred, self-contempt, real, vicious sense of dislike of oneself” that he describes, in my view, bravely. I can only say that these are not pleasant feelings and I probably wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy. For me, the drugs do work – sort of – but very little of the counselling and therapy touches the sides. Hopefully, Justin can afford the kind of private mental health treatments which are solely reserved for the upper orders while the rest of us can go to hell (well, there isn’t a hell really, but you get the drift). Given that he’s a Man Of The People, perhaps he has been helped by the few weeks of basic counselling provided by ‘NHS partners’, in which case fair play that man. Burt if he has used his wealth to secure good treatment, who is to say that if they came into a few bob they wouldn’t do the same?
Either way, for a privileged Old Etonian and Oxbridge graduate, who sent his own children to state schools – given he has six children, you can see that even £86k pa might not have been sufficient to cover private school fees – he seems a decent, relatively down to earth chap and I hope, like I would anyone else, that he shakes off his demons. You’d like to think that if those at the top of the food chain can be honest about their lives, it might enable the lower orders to do the same.
