How did I recognise that I needed help?

One night I was wandering along Tottenham Court Road. Typically for me, it was very late at night few people passed me in the street. Those that did were Londoners who knew the rules of eye contact: look to the left, look to the right, look at the floor, but never look anyone in the eye. I like that convention.

It was 1999 and I was in my first year at university. My roommate had gone home for the weekend and I was at a loose end, so I went for a potter. I felt trapped in my room. The air felt stagnant. I had the sense that I would suffocate. I felt tearful and decided that being away from the room (a place that I had decided might be possessed) would give me an open space to relax. I popped a mixed tape in my Walkman (Walkman!), put on my headphones and stepped out into the darkness. I had forgotten to put a coat on, but the wall of cold that hit me, making my eyes feel all spiky, was such a relief. For a brief moment, I felt emptied of the sludge that had built up inside me.

I didn’t have a route planned. I knew I would end up at the Virgin Megastore because I always did, but as I passed by Borders I was struck by a book in the window, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, with its giant eye (Winona Ryder’s – a new cover to tie-in with the film adaptation) staring back at me through the glass. The word ‘interrupted’ seemed to strike a chord. Yes, that’s what this feeling is: something has been interrupted. What or why were not important; the word itself seemed to clasp me. I walked into the bookshop and pulled a copy from the shelf. I sat in a chair and began to read.

What struck me most wasn’t that the patients were crazy, quite the opposite. They all seemed, to varying degrees, familiar. Yes, they were at the extreme end of an experience I was yet to have, but whatever it was that called out to me from behind the glass of the window that night, made me feel as if at least someone out there shared the chaos and confusion I had felt through my teenage years.

I bought the book and finished it an hour later, but when I put the book down I felt bereft. Things felt resolved, inasmuch as the distance between Kaysen’s time as an inpatient on a psychiatric ward, and her writing her memoir, appeared to have lifted some of the truth from it. I didn’t believe that time could be that much of a healer. For me, this horror I was experiencing was permanent. Writing a memoir and being pragmatic, philosophical, about such a painful and confusing time was anathema to me. Since then I have returned to a chapter here and there, but I am detached from it and on some level resentful that the closing portion of the book has such clarity and insight. Perhaps it is a tribute to its essence, however, that the film has a special place in my heart.

Maybe it was the wrong time to find the book. Perhaps because I was still so hopelessly confused about what was wrong with me, I wasn’t willing to see that diagnoses and treatment are only an aspect of living with a mental illness. For me, a diagnosis was a death sentence. The GP that mooted the possibility of my depression was still a memory that was repugnant to me. But I simply did not understand ‘depression’. I needed to find a voice I could get on board with. And then I found them: the voices that created form and substance.

I am certainly not the only person to collect memoirs and autobiographical fiction, but when you start to collect, you collect and you read and you ruminate and you tangle yourself in knots. Is this me? Do I do that? And the answer kept coming back to me: yes, I feel like that and, yes, I have done a lot of those things. The common feature of these tomes was depression and finally I found something that could articulate the pain I was feeling and direct me toward understanding that my agony had a name: depression.

 “…now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.”

(Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, 1925)

 “…because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

(The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, 1963)

 “The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”

(Darkness Visible, William Styron, 1989)

 “Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it’s the worst.”

(Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel, 1994)

Once I had found the words, I could then start to reorganise my thinking and understanding of what had been happening to me for such a long time. Thanks to the words of others, I now had a new vocabulary, but it took another three years to speak up and seek help. It wasn’t until 2002 that I realised time was running out, I had to bite the bullet or I would certainly die.

“Do you think you might be depressed?” And I replied, “yes, and I need help.”