It was in the news this week that Stephen Fry the actor, comedian, raconteur,
author etc. tried to commit suicide last year, because of his depression. He is
the President of the charity ‘MIND’ and, in that capacity, felt it was
important to talk about what happened. There is still a lot of shame, mystery
and misunderstanding generally about the condition, and he hopes that the more
the whole subject is brought out into the open, the better the situation will
become.
For sufferers, and no doubt many others, depression is a
miserable subject to talk or hear about. When I was urged to attend a self- help group
with other depressives, I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it. The thought of
spending a whole evening with other people suffering like myself was too much.
But it does help to read about other
people’s experiences, and to know that one’s own experience is not unique.
However, I think it’s even more important to have
non-depressives understand the condition. I am an ‘endogenous’ depressive which
means that, even though life can be going swimmingly with everything I ever
hoped for, I will experience bouts of depression, because of the way that
chemicals in my brain seem to have been programmed, or perhaps wrongly programmed. (Exogenous
depression, as opposed to endogenous, is caused by external events, such as a death in the family. One in four people
will experience endogenous or exogenous depression in their lives.)
Recently a friend who I had
known for some time accidentally made my condition temporarily worse when she
heard I was having what I call a ‘flat’ day (with life feeling as if it has no
meaning, but is just one long struggle). I think she thought that my depression
that day was down to the situation my husband and I are in at the moment, with
him having been made redundant and searching for another job (it wasn’t, it was
just those chemicals not behaving as they ought again.) In an attempt to cheer
me up she told me about a friend in a much worse position, somebody who had
just discovered that her husband had stage four cancer. I know her intentions
were good, but endogenous depressives like myself have very porous boundaries,
in so much as we’re not always sure where we ‘end’ and other people start. So
this other woman’s agony became my agony, and life seemed even more of a meaningless,
painful struggle.
One night, 25 years ago now, before I knew that what I was
suffering from was depression, I had an experience of this ‘boundary porosity’ that
nearly did for me. My baby son had very bad nappy rash and had woken screaming
in the middle of the night. I took him into the bathroom to wash and change him
when I suddenly had a vision of all the women, both then and down the ages, who
had heard their children screaming and couldn’t do anything about it. I saw
mothers in famines with starving babies, mothers having their children wrenched
from them by soldiers….it was all over in a second, but literally knocked me
backwards against the bathroom wall, so overwhelming was the despair.
I thought I was probably going mad, and it’s only now that I
know that depression isn’t just severe sadness, it’s more to do with extreme
fear and hopelessness, the sort of fear that leads to despair; and it’s to do
with a porosity of boundaries (see above) that means that one is trying to cope
with the ordeals of the entire world.
My search for ‘God’, for meaning, is probably born of an
even more instinctive need for self- preservation, coupled with an intuition arising
from my own experience and intellectual reasoning that the materialists who
dominate our modern culture seem to be overlooking and dismissing whole chunks
of reality in a way that doesn’t make sense. (For more on this see my post
‘Betwixt and Between’.)
Like many people with endogenous depression, I suffer from
other ailments, which doesn’t help. I have a heart problem which means that I
have to take tablets which worsen the chronic fatigue I suffer because of my
Fibromyalgia. For a long time my GP thought that I didn’t have ME or Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome or Fibromyalgia; she thought that my lack of physical stamina was purely
a result of my depression. It has been suggested to me that the depression is
actually a side effect of the Fibromyalgia/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I am
fairly sure now that I was born with depression. I know of lots of people with
this sort of confusing diagnosis and, believe me, it doesn’t help!
My brother once remarked that it’s depressed people who see
the world as it really is- that is, unpredictably and potentially horrifying,
and that it’s ‘normal’ people who have been born with rose- tinted spectacles
that screen out this awful truth. Scientifically we know now that it’s not rose-
tinted spectacles that keeps the majority of humans struggling on, it’s
serotonin and, although I’m against testing on animals in general (especially
for cosmetics) I bless day and night every animal who died to help produce paroxetine
without which, I’m very sorry to say, I probably wouldn’t have made it this
far.
As always, I would love to hear the views of others. Lots of
people find it difficult to make the ‘comments’ box below work, so please feel
free to email me at helenjdavis@hotmail.co.uk
with your observations, which I will reproduce below.
