Land of the long black cloud

This is the land of the long black cloud. Ministry of Health figures tell us that 16.7 per cent of the adult population of New Zealand, in 2016-17, have been told by a doctor that they have depression. That adds up to 640,000 of us.

There are demographic variations. More women than men are affected. Numbers are higher for Europeans and Ma¯ ori than Pacific and Asian populations. It rises in deprived communities. And despite the attention paid to depression in young people and to youth suicide, depression is a disease of the middle-aged. Almost one in five New Zealanders between the ages of 45 and 64 are affected. In women, it comes close to one in four.

There is a strange paradox. People are shocked by these numbers, and the epidemic they reveal, and yet they will have had close experience of depression in their own lives. It is said that depression is an illness people feel very alone with, yet the numbers identify an army.

Depression is on our radar again because of the sudden death of broadcaster Greg Boyed at the age of 48. But depression should never be off our radar.

The public outpouring of grief and sorrow that followed Boyed’s death has been heartening. Tributes came from politicians he interviewed, journalists he worked with, and the public who watched him and never noticed any darkness behind the witty irreverence he often brought to interviews and commentary. That is the point: we just don’t notice.

Most who worked with him remember someone cheerful, helpful, funny and talented. If there were signs of his depression, they failed to notice them.

Mental health advocate Mike King argues strongly against the ‘‘myth’’, as he calls it, that there are signs to watch for. In King’s view, there is only one sign and that is if the person tells you how they feel.

What do we need to do? When he interviewed King on breakfast television, broadcaster Duncan Garner said ‘‘we need to be kind to each other’’. But this is the same Garner who called gang members ‘‘brainless scumbags’’ on the show the day before.

Too often, the media contributes to a culture of competitiveness, hostility and judgmentalism. The media may be respectful when confronted with the harrowing realities of depression and other forms of mental illness but it also slips very easily into enabling a culture of bullying and shaming.

Suicide always strikes us as inexplicable and suicide in middle age seems especially hard to process. Surely, we say to ourselves, if someone has made it that far, and has a family, they can survive the rest of their lives. We think of Anthony Bourdain, Robin Williams and Charlotte Dawson. Bourdain was 61, Williams was 63 and Dawson was 47. All had people who loved them and, it seemed to us, much to live for.

But serious depression does not observe logic and cannot be defeated with reason. You don’t ask people to pull themselves together or look on the bright side. We must recognise it as an illness that needs serious treatment.

And we must be open-minded and nonjudgmental when a friend, family member or workmate reveals their story of depression to us. We will hear this a lot over the coming days, but we cannot hear it enough.

‘‘Serious depression does not observe logic and cannot be defeated with reason . . . We must recognise it as an illness that needs serious treatment.’’