This was not my finest hour. I’m ashamed to say, that when this was mooted, I was insulted. I wasn’t curled up in the corner crying under a sheet. I came to school. I did my work. I hadn’t fallen apart. I didn’t leech the energy from the room like a mood hoover. I thought depressives were malingerers or merely an cinematic construct. Depressed people were extremely annoying and I had no patience with them at all.

Except that I hadn’t met any depressed people. I hadn’t met any because depression isn’t something that comes up in general conversation. Depressives are the silent faces in the crowd. They don’t stand out. No one shouts it to the heavens that their lives are suffused with such darkness they thought they’d die or take their own life just to escape said darkness. If they do reveal themselves, it is because they are desperate and need help, now. It is the consequences of such despair that becomes the feature of many mental illnesses and this shapes how people perceive those with such illness. This, in turn, informs how they are presented in the media. So maybe I was being disgustingly naïve, but I was seventeen and perhaps should be forgiven for being influenced by the acceptable face of the ‘weeping, suicidal depressive’. I had met depressed people, those 1 in 4.

This face of depression still persists in some quarters, but the statistics suggest that depression in young people is a serious and pressing problem:

• 0.9% or nearly 80,000 children and young people are seriously depressed
• 0.2% or about 8,700 aged 5-10 year-olds are seriously depressed.
• 1.4% or about 62,000 aged 11-16 year-olds are seriously depressed. (1)

In 1996, it was still something that could be dismissed as just a word. It certainly wasn’t something that I spoke about at home. Looking back, my GP had seen something in me that I hadn’t dared to explore. Up to this point, I had excused a lot of my behaviour as a consequence of various familial factors, but the extent of my behaviour could not be easily explained away as mere teenage angst.

The more important thing for me was to find a way to cushion and mitigate the effect of my moods and impulses because I recognised that they were often the author of many of my questionable behaviours and rash decisions. I tried sitting still and letting my mind go blank, but meditation took me away from pressing matters. There were no pressing matters, but my brain told me that there were things I might miss if I sat there for any length of time. So, meditation was out. I tried baking, but I got bored after the fifth tray bake. I read a lot, but I did that anyway, so it wasn’t going to get me through the blackness. I listened to music, but I had to listen to the most bleak and maudlin music I could get my hands on. I listened to ‘The End’ by The Doors over and over and over again. I wanted to hear Jim Morrison confess “my only friend, the end” and I felt he knew me and that we had a kinship. I didn’t particularly like The Beatles, but I’d listen to the opening bars of Strawberry Fields just to hear John Lennon sing, “Let me take you down” (I’m sure I’ve read this somewhere else). And then there were various metal and grunge bands that fit the purpose. And the ‘angry women’. All this just made things worse, but that was the point because I wanted to hear the confession of what I perceived as lived experience. I wanted someone to say “I’ll run the gauntlet with you.”

Did I want to get better? Well, I had dismissed my GP’s suggestion. I didn’t think I was ill; I thought I was fundamentally flawed. I didn’t want help for something that I didn’t think I had. But there remained the question of how to manage myself (ill or not) because I felt in the grip of something that would eventually kill me.

I have chosen to write the following as I have finally begun to accept and address this as a problem. I know that it is both a symptom and a cause.

I like to drink. And at some point it moved from enjoyment, to it seeing it as the only viable panacea. 

It all started in the summer of 1996. My friend had a post-GCSEs party and we were all expected to bring a bottle (or in my case many bottles). Up until this point I had had the odd drink, but nothing that felt problematic, as it was infrequent and sanctioned mostly by my parents (the odd tipple, or an ill-fated trip to a wine-tasting festival – all very middle class!). But in the vacuum that opened up after my GCSEs, I had too much space. I had lost some of the structure and foundation that tenuously held me together. My life began to lack nuance. So many decisions needed to be made, but all I wanted was for the noise to stop. 

Up until a couple of years ago I had assumed that racing thoughts, ‘head-music’ or ‘earworms’ and an impulse to STOP-GO were something that plagued only me. But it was during the summer of 1996 that I felt unable to manage the overload. It was as if half my body was swimming in a pool of thick tar and the other half was in the middle of a blitzkrieg. Then the STOP-GO turned to into something that more obviously resembled depression. Everything just stopped.

A heaviness fell upon me and I felt like I was beginning to corrode. No longer was I being propelled forward; instead I was sat, still, subject to malevolent forces that hated me and made me hate myself. The lights were turned down. I felt so sad I wanted to be sick. I was frightened to touch things because everything felt hyper-real and poisonous. I lost confidence. I’d had these feelings before, but the slow build up that started when I was about twelve had suddenly exploded and infected every pore of my body. I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I’ve slipped out of synch. I’m broken.

I banged my head against the wall. I crawled under my desk in my bedroom because I felt so unsafe. I stopped talking to my friends and sat staring into space. And I hated myself: a pure hatred, as if I had discovered that my mortal enemy was in fact myself.

Depression for me is like catching a fleeting breath before being punched in the chest. Something starts to envelope my head, wrapping itself around my eyes. A silent scream builds and deafens me. And then it’s like falling. I hate myself. I see no future. Everything is too sharp, too bright, too loud. And the feeling of ‘wrongness’ settles into the space; a space which was formally inhabited by a more productive, less fatalistic me.

All the medications that I have taken in my adult life have only marginally tempered my feelings of ‘wrongness’. I return again and again to the conclusion that I don’t deserve the space I occupy on the planet. And I return again to alcohol to supplement any other forms of treatment. Sometimes I will go for a year without ritualistic drinking, but when I perceive my medication to be less effective, I panic and return to using alcohol as a crutch. On a couple of occasions I have determined that it would be easier to die from an overdose if I washed the pills down with alcohol, therefore ensuring that I would be too drunk to panic at the realisation of my own demise.

Depression for me has been marked by periods of moderate drinking (this estimation may be an understatement). Mania has been marked by periods of excess. Up or down, I needed something medicinal to contain my emotional spillage. I won’t feel like this anymore! I need to blunt this flood or else I will drown!

Does it work? Sometimes I believe it does. I tell myself that one glass of wine is OK because it smoothes the edges. I want to put parts of myself in a cage. But what I’m really searching for is a way to lock up the depressed me and unleash the hypomanic me. I like hypomanic me. Depressed me misses hypomanic me. But depressed me cannot fill the void that hypomania leaves once it’s run its course. Depressed me is “default me” and this is the core of why I feel often as if I am undergoing a slow death.

“Do you think you might be depressed?”

Yes. Depression is something that feels so recognisable to me that I frequently believe that “depressed me” is the real me. Depression isn’t just being gloomy and negative. I am not a malingerer. I am sick and depression is a symptom of a cascade of emotions I can’t contain or manage on my own. How I deal with my emotions has to be strategic; it has to be the symbiosis of medical support and focused attention on recovery, but recovery is not at the bottom of a glass.