One of the best things about having friends – real ones who stick around, rather than the here today, gone tomorrow acquaintances variety – is when they ask how you are and you trust and love them enough to give a full answer instead of the expected, “Great, thanks.” That’s happened a few times this weekend and it’s been lovely. My answer at the moment is, “Not too bad, thanks.”
Of course, when you are a little bit mental, like me, you don’t really want to give the absolute full answer. It might take all day and still might not make any sense. It goes like this.
I’ve got this illness called severe clinical depression and a variety of anxiety issues, too. That’s not me self-diagnosing, you understand. Each condition was confirmed by medical professionals, experts in the field of mental illness. I’ve had all this stuff since the late 1960s when I was, believe it or not, VERY young. I’ve had more therapists, counsellors and doctors who were so important they were actually called ‘Mister’ than I have had hot dinners. Well, not really. Sometimes, it felt like it. I’ve taken enough drugs to fill your local branch of Boots. And I’m still standing.
The depression is always there. It does not take much to set off again and one it’s been set off again, life becomes a bit of a struggle. With me, the drugs work like this. They create two versions of me. One, the person you see from day to day and the other, the person you don’t. I’d describe it as living a life and then being able to see and feel the depressed version in the background, knowing it’s been suppressed by anti-depressants. Does this make any sense? It’s like an outer body experience, I suppose, actually being able to see yourself as you are without chemical assistance. It’s even more weird knowing you are being protected from your worse self and what’s more feeling kind of safe, or safer.
I saw someone yesterday I hadn’t seen for a long time. For reasons I didn’t ask about, he explained he had suffered some severe mental health problems and how now recovered. This was a bit of a shock to me as he didn’t seem like the type of person who would ever suffer the demons of mental illness. Then, I remembered the truth: there is no one person on earth who might not one day have some sort of mental health episode. That he appeared to have made a full recovery and was now drug free was good news. I can’t pretend I wasn’t a bit jealous.
I have always seen life as more of a struggle than anything else, something I just have to get through in one piece before it’s all over. I do not exaggerate when I say that I was very lucky to get through 39 years in the civil service given my issues and limitations. The effects of mental illness on learning and performing to an acceptable level can be devastating. Added to that, mental illness did not exist until the last decade or so. To some, it still doesn’t today.
The problem I used to grapple with was, and still is, that depression, for example, wasn’t a real illness; that it could be ‘cured’ by trying to be happier, by pulling yourself together or by employing the services of, say, a motivational speaker. You would never tell someone with cancer that theirs wasn’t a real illness, that they should pull themselves together or listen to some bloke curing illness with words. That’s what the evangelical christian fanatics in America do, see also the fraudulent faith healers who are little more than illusionists. If you think you can be cured like this, you were not ill in the first place.
No. If you have a broken head, you should be afforded the same medical level of care as someone with a broken leg. Those who inspire me, in medicine as in everything else, are not those who talk, but those who do.
Thanks for asking how I am. Situation normal, or at least as normal as it gets. Thanks to drugs, my depressed me is inside, less effective and debilitating as he would otherwise be. I’ll tell you about it one day.
