10th October 2020 and it’s World Mental Health Day.™ I’m just wondering how I should celebrate? With a fully-fledged meltdown, perhaps, or a bout of uncontrollable anxiety? Or maybe just a simple depressive episode? All these things and more have been present in my life for the last half century so I think I’ll celebrate the fact that I’m still here. Others, including some friends, have not been so lucky. Today, I shall be thinking of them.
Friends and acquaintances were committing suicide during times when it appeared mental health was not a thing. As a teenager in the 1970s, if you felt low, there was a simple remedy: pull yourself together. If you were depressed, you were actually just fed up and everyone gets fed up sometime. You were feeling sorry for yourself and you were weak. It was a perverse form of Darwinism: survival of the mentally fittest.
Having undergone mental health treatment from the age of 12 – not that I knew it was mental health treatment at the time because no one, least of all the psychiatrist or anyone in my family, felt it necessary to tell me – I can claim some level of understanding of just how debilitating and destructive poor mental health can be.
It was not so much my own issues that shocked me. As a young boy, I had no idea my mental health was different from anyone else’s. But, without giving away anything that might identify anyone, I knew people, and some were friends, who were committing suicide. By my late twenties, I knew of at least five people who had killed themselves, two of whose funerals I went to. By now, I knew I had my own issues, including major bouts of depression and self-harming, and I did have dark thoughts, as I do to this day, but nothing, absolutely nothing, so serious that I decided upon ending it all.
One person I knew was thought of as being “a bit mad”. By that, we meant a little reckless with few filters, but not ‘mad’ in the clinical sense. After all, we were not experts on mental health, or anything else for that matter. Then, one day, word came that he had killed himself.
Although we went to the funeral, I recall nothing about it. The other funeral I don’t recall either. I don’t know whether my brain has compartmentalised this stuff and filed it in some deep recess or something else. Maybe I just didn’t take it all in. But I do remember thinking this: just how bad were these people feeling that they concluded the nothingness of death was preferable to life? As I grew to understand my own demons, everything became a little bit clearer. Mental illness killed, just as physical illness killed and it does so in a variety of ways.
I went through phases where I didn’t look after myself. When I was low, I might go off for long walks in the driving rain and just sit in my local park. Literally soaked to the skin, I might be unable to move, other than shivering because of the cold. I would scratch my wrists until they bled because, I felt, I deserved to feel pain. These things and more and, indeed, there was much, much worse going on.
By the time I was saved, by friends and lovers, sometimes by strangers and later by doctors and therapists, I understood much more about my illness. I learned that I could not just leave it and hope it might go away, that it had to be addressed with more therapy and eventually drugs.
More than that, I learned the painful truth that my depression was unlikely to ever leave me, that try as I might it would be with me until I took my final journey to that great crematorium furnace. So, in a strange way, my depression became, if not my friend, then a key part of who and what I am. In a way, I had to embrace it to the extent that my depression became my comfort blanket because no matter how bad things became it wouldn’t kill me, at least not directly.
Now that’s my truth. I don’t know about yours. But on World Mental Health Day, if you think you are ill, then please talk to someone about it. If you know someone who suffers from mental illness, then tell them you will be there for them. Whatever you do, don’t leave it for someone else to deal with. It’s an invisible illness, but only if you allow it be.
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