STARS’ MENTAL HEALTH: WE WON’T BE SILENCED
Nadine reveals mental health battle
I was thinking about death when I had a wonderful life. Nadine Higgins discovered this year how important it is to talk about mental health. Today, she reveals why.
When I was 16 years old, a member of my family made a serious attempt at suicide; so serious no one could work out how they’d survived. I remember sitting on the floor in the lounge, going through the motions of doing my homework, wondering how anyone could do that. Being a selfabsorbed teenager, I also wondered how someone could do that to me. Then I started worrying about how we shared genes and whether we might also share that bit. The depressive bit.
That fear has gnawed at me ever since, until this year, when it seemed as though it was being realised. I was sobbing myself to sleep and waking up feeling empty and heavy and angry – and I couldn’t work out why.
I’d try walking the dog in the bush, but would plod along wondering what the point was of putting one foot in front of the other. I’d scowl at the furball I adored. Wasn’t he supposed to be picking up on how I was feeling rather than ignoring my calls and racing off to sniff another dog’s bum? I’d try going to the gym, but start with a quiet, inexplicable sob in the loos.
Then I’d work out, hard, silently begging the exercise gods for some endorphins to fix me. In the middle of cooking dinner, I’d find myself slumped on the floor, amid the dog hair I couldn’t face vacuuming up, feeling like all hope had deserted me. I’d berate myself for being so bloody melodramatic, all the while eyeing up our lovely Japanese knives, wondering with intent whether they were sharp enough.
I felt too ashamed to tell anyone, worried they’d think I was a just a bit blue because I no longer had a cool job on the telly, but that wasn’t it. Then there was the guilt. I’d just got married. I was supposed to be in the lovely gushy honeymoon phase, but instead my new husband was busy mopping up my tears and trying to reassure me I was worth it. I felt like a mopey burden he’d be better off without.
I knew I was supposed to talk to someone, but felt like no one could possibly understand why I was thinking about death when I had a wonderful life. It was when I started to scare myself that I finally told someone. She told me she’d been depressed before and medication had fixed her. I told another friend and he told me he sometimes suffered anxiety so badly it made him vomit.
Feeling like I wasn’t the only one, the crazy one, was a turning point. I took the plunge and booked a doctor’s appointment. I felt like a right twit doing it, all the while muttering to myself ‘‘what do you have to be blue about, you sad sack?’’ She told me I was likely depressed and prescribed me antidepressants. I decided to see another doctor, who dug a little deeper, ran some more tests and concluded I had a hormone imbalance.
Hormones, I can now attest, can literally drive you crazy. A few weeks of pills, and the sky dawned a little differently. No more pity parties for one in the gym loos. No more shade thrown at the dog for doing what dogs do. I decided I was officially ‘‘balanced’’ again when I got a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere and didn’t crumble in a heap or rage at the world for conspiring against my happiness. I just sighed, and got on with it. But my inner 16-year-old’s fears mean I’ve kept the antidepressants in the medicine cabinet, just in case.
So, why am I telling you this when I didn’t even want to tell my nearest and dearest? Well, when the suicide statistics this week showed more Kiwis than ever killed themselves last year, there was some debate about whether talking about it openly is the right strategy. I’m not an expert, but I know what I experienced. As the girl who was eyeing up the steak knives just a few months ago, talking was the one thing that stopped me picking them up.
I knew I was supposed to talk to someone, but felt like no one could possibly understand why I was thinking about death when I had a wonderful life.