Andy May discovers that when it comes to Clinical Depression, there is a very fine line between refusing to talk about your problems and being ‘manly’ about them.
It started with headaches. Before long, I found that I couldn’t sleep, I kept bursting into tears or getting filled with rage, and my concentration was so shot to hell that it was taking me an hour and a half to read a single page. Being sixteen, I had no idea what was going on, and naturally enough neither did my parents. There were a few false starts, diagnostically, and some reluctance to accept the situation on my own part and that of my family, but eventually we found a doctor who understood what was happening, and who would explain it in terms that we could accept. It was nothing serious, just a case of depression. Clinical depression is how it was described, from the outset, to make it clear that the condition was an illness, rather than anything which could possibly have been avoided or foreseen. I was given a course of what were then called ‘fast track’ antidepressants, which we were assured would clear up the problem in next to no time.
They did not clear up the problem at all, in fact they nearly killed me.
There are several advantages to explaining depression as a disease like any other. First (especially with younger sufferers), it prevents people from being blamed either for causing it, or for allowing it to happen. Second, it means that the sufferer is freed from some of the stigma relating to the disease. When you explain to somebody that your depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in your brain, a lot of people will stop telling you to buck up or snap out of it, and it can help parents to understand that it is not something which can be fixed by trying harder.
Third, it can let you off the hook when somebody asks you why you’re so desolate, and you have no easy answer. Unfortunately, like any analogy, it does not give you the full picture. Of course there are kinds of depression which are a simple case of chemical imbalance, and in some of those cases pharmaceutical intervention will be all that is needed, but in my experience the vast majority of cases are a mixture of chemical imbalance and what I call ‘situational depression’. For most sufferers, merely being medicated is not going to cure anything, because it is just going to help them ignore the other factors which are contributing to the problem.
For me, these factors were absurdly commonplace; marital strife between my parents, academic pressure which I could not cope with, and loneliness. After six years apart, my parents decided to try living together again, and I moved countries to make it possible. Due to ill health, my mother was not able to travel until a couple of months after me, which meant that there was nobody familiar to me in the country. The sudden change of lifestyle took its toll.
Being a young man, and armed with the ‘disease’ model of depression, I felt that the most sensible thing to do was to keep myself to myself. There is a very fine line between refusing to talk about your problems and being ‘manly’ about them, and another between being honest about how much you are suffering and whining about it. At the time I did not have the experience, the ‘social calibration’, to pull off being both manly and honest, so I went for the safest option: silence.
I tried to wait out the advertised, but steadily worsening, side-effects, hoping for them to pass, and did whatever I could to cope in the meantime. As anybody who has recovered from a mental illness will tell you, it is hardly ever a case of simply waiting for things to improve. The process of recovery is a long and seemingly thankless task. It is an endless succession of impossible choices, between comfort now and health later, between asking for the things you feel you do not deserve and doing without the things you know you need. It takes years, and every step of the way is both terrifying and mind-numbingly boring.
By allowing myself to just sit there and wait for things to improve, I caused myself far more harm than good. To escape from the world in which I was suddenly failing classes, to escape from the world where my family home was full of spitting, silent hatred, I started telling myself stories in my head, and letting myself sink into them. In order to stay silent, and keep from upsetting my friends and family, I ended up spending more and more time daydreaming, until the day came when I couldn’t tell the difference between my daydreams and reality.
The medication, which caused side-effects including, but by no means limited to, confusion, feverishness, sleeplessness (again), and suicidal tendencies, had made it easier for me to drift away from reality, until eventually the school nurse informed my mother that, without intervention, I was unlikely to be alive at the end of the year. The medication was immediately discontinued and, after a period of withdrawal lasting six months, I began to heal. I was sent, briefly, to a psychologist, but once it had become clear that inaction was not the key, and that my gut feelings were not unfounded, I had the direction I needed to find my way back.
I don’t mean to imply that men have it worse, in terms of the way mental illnesses are treated, but I would not hesitate to say that we have it bad in other ways, and that this is one of them. Without the expectation that I would not talk about what was going on inside my head, without my friends leaving the room every time I tried to explain what was happening to me, things might have turned out differently. As it happened, I believe that the breaking point I reached made me confront some things which would have caused more damage had they gone unchallenged, and that I am stronger and healthier now than I could have ever been otherwise, but the requirement that I go through it alone caused a lot of unnecessary pain.
It took a good four years for the worst of the side-effects from the medication to subside, and ten before I would say I crossed the line between ‘recovering’ and ‘recovered’, but for me it was a natural part of growing up. Like most transitions into adulthood, it was neither easy nor painless, but I am grateful for the ways in which it has forced me to know myself better.
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There is a lot to say about depression, most of it has already been said, and I think this is because depression is both a setback, and a goal; despair is the last thing you want in your allies and the first thing you want in your enemies.
It was days before I felt ready to read this after setting it aside. I spent almost an hour condensing my depression and my thoughts on it into an overlong sentence.
It’s never easy to fix problems that involve human beings. Even if the medication had worked, it would have only been a band-aid slapped on the symptoms, not a fix for the actual injury underneath…. I’m sorry you went through this. While my depression was on the female end of things, I have witnessed the men in my family also suffering and know that the trials for each gender are excruciating and often difficult enough to seem worthy of separate diagnoses. Add that to social and cultural roadblocks…. It’s great your school nurse saw the problem and made the urgency… Read more »
Thank you, Laura. If I do say so myself, I was very pleased with the way the piece came out. As to being recovered, the feeling is still so fresh and strange that I can hardly believe it’s true, but talking about it and hearing about others’ experiences seem to make it more so. Sometimes the help I needed was just to be reminded that recovery was possible at all, and on that score I could name a half-dozen people who helped to steer me through. I hope I can pay that forwards a little. Health and luck to you… Read more »
Beautiful article, Andy. Well done and so honest. I think many people, not only men, will relate to what you’ve written here and appreciate your story. You don’t place blame, merely articulate circumstances. And it does sound like a long and harrowing journey. I am so glad to know that you are “recovered” and can look back and see it all much more clearly. And I”m glad that school nurse was there for you through the chaos. And Tom, your personal story is sensitive….so honest and kind of you to share it with others as well. I wish you both… Read more »
Andy thank you for this well written piece. I would say that depression is at the core of my problems at well. Yes I am an addict, sober now 15 years. But the booze was my attempt to self-medicate depression away. As long as I can remember there has been a dark cave which I return to sooner or later. Nothing has ever been able to take it’s existence in my life away–not booze, not women, not wealth, not extreme sports, not even proper medication. So for me its been a process of trying to come to terms with the… Read more »
Hi Tom. Thank you for sharing your story here – I really admire your honesty and, as Pauline says above, we improve the world slightly every time one of us has the courage to speak out. I know what you mean about the days when it is best not to act at all, for fear that you will act badly, and I can empathise with the knowledge that the dark place (for me it has always seemed like a weak spot in my mind) will always be there. I also struggled with addiction, although for my own part I was… Read more »
Sounds quite similar to my experience with my life as well, Tom, though addiction hasn’t played a role at this point. Hard stuff.
Thank you very much for sharing that with us. I could very much relate to some of what you went through.
Stay well and take care 🙂
Thank you for sharing your story. Every time someone speaks up about their struggles with depression and mood disorders, a bit of the mental illness stigma slips away.
As someone who has struggled with depression, i can say I am familiar with the arc you describe. I was lucky in choice of meds, and grateful I was able to work my way off of them. A little less lucky in that early on, I had almost no support from the very person I was most expecting to help. Survived that, too, but it is a long, uneasy road. We do have to know ourselves so much better in order to survive. Good post, Andy.
Hi Kevin, One of the things that surprised me most, during the recovery process, was the sheer range of reactions I got from friends and family members. Some people who I had barely known rushed to help, and we built very strong and lasting connections because of it, and others (who, likewise, I had fully expected to at least offer their support) behaved very negatively indeed. How people reacted at that time has had impacted very heavily on whether I decided to keep them in my life, and I can’t say I’m sorry about that. I suppose what I’m trying… Read more »