I remember waking on New Years Day 2012 with a level of excitement that I’d not known for years simply because finally, it was our turn to host the Olympics, something I’d been hoping for and dreaming of since I watched my first Olympics on a black and white TV in 1968. That may be a very shallow sounding introduction to my experience of depression but it goes some way to showing the kind of man I used to be, full of hope, excitable, impulsive, emotional, you get the picture….
Gamesmaker at London 2012
I suppose really there are two ways to look at what happened next, there is the way that I remember and the way that my lovely wife, Sue remembers. Sue is a far more reliable witness than me so in reading this, even I would give more credibility to her version of events than my own. You see, the big difference is that Sue said she saw my depression or some big emotional crash coming a mile off but in my version it happened almost overnight. I’d been chosen to be a Gamesmaker at London 2012, that’s really just a helper but they trained us and gave us a uniform and they put me in charge of herding a press posse around. As with most things in life, I threw myself into it, heart and soul, determined that I’d do my best to show off London and our amazing country in the best possible light. There is a danger with that kind of behaviour though because when the party’s over, it leaves a vacuum that needs to be filled with something just as good or you have to go through a big low. It’s a similar kind of feeling to coming back from a really good holiday or, as I’m also told by a former addict, the downer when the drug starts to wear off. So Sue saw all this and knew it was bound to happen. I should have said at the outset that I’m not going to give you all the gory details, there’s too much hurt, bitterness, regret, resentment, sorrow, anger and tears that runs like a ribbon through the whole saga but for now let’s just leave it how Sue saw it.
For my part, I remember waking up one day in 2013 and just not being able to function, I couldn’t think straight anymore, I was tired, I was angry with the people I worked for, I was disillusioned with the church I attended and decided that life was just too difficult. Some years previously, I had worked in occupational health and I remember one of our doctors telling me about his pint pot theory, it goes something like this: Imagine your life is a pint pot, we fill it with all kinds of things including family, leisure, work, plans, ambitions, travel, worries of all kinds, caring for others, friends and the list goes on. Eventually, for some people, the pint pot overflows, we try and fit so much in that we reach the point where nothing else will go in and we find ourselves unable to cope with life. The first reaction in most cases is to blame work and the thought process goes that by staying away from work, the pint pot will be less full and then coping would be easier. This made so much sense to me through the fog of confusion that used to be my brain that it became the option I chose.
I’m not and never was religious
I realised of course that something wasn’t right, just a few days earlier, I’d stood up in my church and promised to stand up for the people in the church who found life a struggle, for those who had a battle to fight but had no allies, for the poor and for the weak. I went further, I asked other men to join me and we stood with our arms around each others shoulders like an international rugby team singing their national anthem and knew that together we were strong enough to take on the world. I’m not sure who’s going to read this, if you are a person with no faith, you probably haven’t even got this far, you may have uttered ‘religious nutter’ as you hit the back button but if you have got this far, don’t give up just yet. I’m not and never was religious, I do have a faith but during my depression it was as meaningless to me as the dust under the chair I’m looking at as I type this. My faith was at the point where I couldn’t believe that I used to believe in anything at all and anyone that believed in anything was to be both scorned and pitied. It should now be said for those of you that do have a faith, that I was of course locked in a battle for my soul but I didn’t care who won or who was fighting for me. I didn’t want friends, if they came to the door, I pretended I was out, I wanted to see nobody, I wanted to be invisible but more than that, I just didn’t want to carry on.
Staying off work didn’t do me a lot of good, it wasn’t the silver bullet I was hoping it might be and the more I thought about it, a bullet seemed like a good idea or maybe a rope….
I made two vows to myself after admitting to myself that something wasn’t right, firstly, I would make sure that I got out of bed every day and secondly I would wash and dress. Having fulfilled these two promises I could then get on with just existing in the black hole that closed in around me more and more each day. I used to be a passionate kind of guy, I’d laugh easily, crack jokes, cry at sad movies, and always encourage those around me to be the best that they could be but that man had disappeared somewhere, dead, buried and forgotten. Hope had gone, there was no future and I despised the present and refused to believe I’d had a past. I was living in each moment and each moment was black and empty.
I felt like laughing out loud, low mood?? Low mood??
Because somewhere deep inside I knew that my wife loved me, I went along with her advice and saw a doctor, Sue came with me because I wasn’t taking anything in and I would have interpreted whatever the doc said to my own ends anyway. Having done the test (the name of which escapes me but I think it was either Zung, Hamilton or Beck), I was diagnosed with Low Mood. For the first time in weeks I felt like laughing out loud, low mood?? Low mood?? What kind of nondescript, banal, irrelevant diagnosis was that? I didn’t have a ‘mood’ condition, I was suicidal and even if it was a mood thing it wasn’t low it was in the bottom of a bottomless pit. If it’s possible to heap despair upon despair then that diagnosis did it and I was prescribed with anti-depressants and recommended for a course in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), not to be confused with the motor bike test. To this day, I’m not sure if the drugs did any good and eventually I took myself off them with no side effects and no noticeable change of mood. The CBT however was a different story, at least the second round where I had one to one sessions with a psychotherapist was but firstly I had to go to a group session. I hated it and walked out before the first session finished, the second session was no better and I vowed not to go back. Questions like ‘how do you feel?’ have no relevance when you have no feelings and when I was asked how I would feel if I knew that my friends were avoiding me my answer was ‘total relief’. Apparently I was supposed to be distraught and have a desire to change but the truth is that I couldn’t give a damn.
On a daily basis, suicide was at the forefront of my mind
On a daily basis, suicide was at the forefront of my mind and I looked up scores of references to ‘painless suicide’, it would seem that I wasn’t as far gone that I was willing to endure suffering to rid myself of the blackness. One thing that I learned is that there is no such thing as painless suicide, someone always feel pain even if it’s not the person who takes their own life. Someone has to find the body, friends and relatives will grieve and question themselves, colleagues will ask why they didn’t do more and the list goes on. Having decided that I’d rather die anyway I chose my tree on my regular dog walk and kept the rope in the boot of the car. It went much further than that but even now I can’t go back and relate it without it setting me back and I owe it to a lot of people not to do that. I was asked if writing my thoughts is a cathartic process and the answer is a very assertive ‘NO’. It doesn’t help me at all and it takes me back to the time when when my whole personality changed not temporarily but for good. I am not the man I was in so many ways, I can enjoy things now and I have rediscovered what love is but the intense highs and lows of life are gone, whereas my life during my depression was in black and white it is now best described as three of the seven colours of the rainbow, the red and orange are missing at the beginning and the indo and violet are gone from the end. I was reminded recently that every photo that I took during my depression was in black and white, that was never a conscious decision but it says something about what I was seeing at that time.
So the good news?
So the good news? Yes there is some! I’m still alive and I can enjoy lots of things in life, I’m learning new skills and have gone back to work full time after retirement age but to be honest, part of that is because I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts. I love spending time with Sue and we make each other laugh out loud every day. We’ve both learned to sail and will be cruising around the Ionian later this year, I’m conscious that there are lots of ropes on a boat but I’m past those thoughts now.
I’m only here because people loved me through my illness....
I’m only here because people loved me through my illness and the NHS gave me someone who really understood what was needed to take me apart and put the pieces back in the right order, I’ll admit that a couple of the pieces may have been kicked under the table but there is a passing resemblance to the old Mike still breathing and occasionally still hopeful for a full recovery. If you’re reading this and are going through that long black tunnel, my words might have little meaning but please put two minute aside every day to think about what you might do when you get better. Ask for help from the NHS, the one to one thing worked for me and there are some amazing people whose whole life is dedicated to getting you thinking about who you used to be or better still, who you can be.
Oh, and the title, Comfortably Numb?
Oh, and the title, Comfortably Numb? A song by Pink Floyd and the two words I used to say when people asked me how I was feeling. I found that they didn’t bother me any more after that reply.
By Mike Stevenson
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