I Despair....

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.

But what am I for??

Those of you who’ve read the first few postings on this blog will know that I took voluntary redundancy last July from my job as a lecturer at a University in London, at the age of 56, (calculating that the redundancy sum would see me through to when I could start receiving my pension without too harsh a financial penalty.)

The opportunity to retire early came at an opportune time. I was so exhausted because of fibromyalgia, depression and heart problems, that I was seriously doubting I would manage to work through to 60. When I first gave up work I slept.  And slept.  Sometimes for 20 hours a day. It wasn’t what I had thought would happen; I’d envisaged that once I gave up work my energy would immediately start to come back, and those first couple of months were very frustrating. But then  I did start to regain energy. I started to learn to pace myself and, by early December I had joined a local choir and had started attending a fortnightly kabbalah meeting- both wonderful sources of mental and spiritual nourishment.

In January of this year, however, a financial problem, which had been unforeseen when I took voluntary redundancy (that of my husband also being made redundant), led me to consider going back to work part time. There was plenty of work  for what are known as ‘visiting’ or ‘hourly paid’ lecturers in my subject. And so, buoyed up by my increasing energy levels, I agreed to go into a University in the City of London and teach all day one day a week. Looking back now, I don’t think that decision was purely financial; I think I was also seduced by the notion of being wanted again, by contributing something to society that others thought was worth paying for.

It is easing our financial situation but, from the point of view of my physical, emotional and mental health, it is proving disastrous. I'd forgotten that even perfectly healthy lecturers my age would try to avoid doing 3 hours teaching with only one hour’s break before the next 3 hours, followed immediately by one hour of seeing students with individual queries. Within a fortnight I had to give up choir and kabbalah, and was not getting up out of bed at all the day after going into London.

To many of my friends and relatives, the solution was obvious: my health was more important than money. We’d learn to manage on whatever money we had. My GP, who for years had told me that there was nothing I could do about fibromyalgia other than pace myself, finally referred me to a specialist consultant in fibromyalgia/ chronic fatigue syndrome/ ME and he told me that he thought he could alleviate the symptoms of my condition, but not while I was commuting in and out of London during rush hour one day a week.

And yet,  and yet. I have a contract until the end of July which I do not intend to break, but saying no to offers of work for succeeding terms and semesters, from various sources, has proved to be profoundly difficult. You see, if I’m not working….. what am I for??

It’s not that I have identified so completely with my work persona that I don’t feel as if I exist unless I’m working (though I have had that problem in the past.) The problem is around what I really want to do instead, which I’m now very clear about. I want to know, I want to understand everything I can about the human condition, about human potential. I want to read every book I can lay my hands on about psychology, philosophy, spirituality, watch every programme on TV, attend every talk at the RSA, listen to every radio programme and join every internet group concerned with these topics. I know my understanding will necessarily be bounded by my own level of development intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, but it is hard to describe the pleasure I get from coming across a writer or speaker who makes sense of something that has hitherto been a puzzle, who resolves a paradox, who enables me to expand the area of my understanding, to see the bigger picture.

But isn’t this all just dreadfully self-indulgent? I didn’t think it was, when I could pass on some of the more relevant things I had come to understand to my students, but when I finally give up teaching for good, for the sake of my health, I no longer have that ‘justification’. Although I suppose it’s not so much justification I’m seeking, as doing something  with what I’ve learnt.

Do many people my age feel this?

In terms of justifying these pursuits,  I know I can use what I’ve learnt to decide how best to vote, and which shops to avoid if I don’t want to be exploiting other people or participating in cruelty to animals. I am slowly learning to balance discipline, boundaries and structure with tolerance and mercy. I hope I am learning how to live a better life for myself and the good of others generally.

I passionately want to avoid leaving this planet having taken more than I’ve contributed. This is not just because I have a son, who will probably have children of his own, and I don’t like to think of leaving them a degraded planet (I know of people who have chosen not to have children because of their concern about over- population). There is an even more basic force at work, which those of you who have read my earlier postings will know I put down to the imperatives within my soul (for those who haven’t, please see 'Honouring the Gods')

But here’s another thought. We all know that a wave of anger, or of love, or of any other emotion, is as real in terms of their force as a wave of the sea. Many of us know how the material world can hold on to emotions that seem to have soaked into the physical fabric – for example, the peacefulness within many places of worship, or the feeling we get when we walk into an unknown place that something dreadful has happened there. Some people claim that if you can get a certain critical number of people meditating within a certain geographical area, that area will enjoy a reduction in crime and various other positive outcomes, because the altered brainwaves of the meditators are not confined within their own brains. (For those who don’t know from earlier postings, this is not a blog for materialists, see my post "A Sense of Being Stared At"  .)

So, then, maybe what I’m learning and understanding  is not confined to my own brain? Maybe it doesn’t all disappear when I die? Perhaps by just making the effort to learn and understand, I’m boosting the general learning and understanding level within the local population? No man (or woman) is an island......