This is how depression feels

When the suffocating fog descended on Phil Quin, it left tears no more within reach than laughter.

This is not an advice column. I hate advice columns. Never more than when I’m depressed. Exercise, they say. Eat better, try yoga, meditate. Yeah, cheers for that. Why not fly solo across the Atlantic? I’m two weeks free of my worst episode yet: seven months in duration; more harrowing than ever. It felt final, ineradicable, as if the disease had burrowed into my core. Bedridden for months at a time but hardly sleeping; at moments writhing in anguish, but mostly heavy and still, willing myself into a corpse.

By the time I staggered from my apartment in Medellin, Colombia, to make the 48-hour journey home, I was down 15kg in under two months, blinking in the sunlight, disoriented, unsteady on my feet. A hostage, unexpectedly freed.

In his magisterial survey of the subject, The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon gets depression right: it isn’t the opposite of happiness, but of vitality. Which is to say it is not an elevated version of sadness, a purposeful note on the scale of normal human emotion. ‘‘Sadness has some adaptive functions,’’ according to University of New South Wales psychologist Joseph Forgas, ‘‘and so should be accepted as an important component of our emotional repertoire.’’

To experience loss and longing, grief and hardship, every bit as much as joy and contentment, is to be fully alive. Depression, for me at least, obliterates the scale altogether, leaving tears no more within reach than laughter.

The business of living requires effort, entails struggle. This is true for anyone, depressed or not. In my case, whatever ups and downs I’ve endured, they are nothing next to suffering I’ve seen up close in Rwandan genocide survivors, or in friends who wrestle daily with the unimaginable grief of losing a vibrant, beautiful child to cancer. By contrast, my life has been one of privilege – largely squandered, perhaps, but privileged still. Loving family, good health, a varied and interesting career.

But all that good fortune proved no match for whatever inscrutable alliance of nature and nurture conspired, a decade or so back, to bring depression crashing in. In the years since, I cycle in and out of ever deeper episodes interspersed with ever more elusive pockets of relief.

A disease with as many variants as sufferers, I speak only for myself – and before memory plays havoc – in trying to convey what depression is like.

Let’s start where so-called life coaches everywhere suggest: by making the bed.

You make the bed, if you do, in the knowledge that whatever parcel of energy you spend will return with interest when the day is done. Incremental efforts like this accrue similar, imperceptible rewards. Shopping for groceries, preparing a meal, commuting through daily traffic, visiting in-laws. All demand effort, but each delivers payoffs, large and small, that together sustain you, helping form the basis of an amenable and well-populated life.

But what if all that effort brings no such rewards; if the neurochemical engine designed to deliver them has shuddered to a halt? Why make the bed? Or open the mail? Why bother cooking or eating when food is sawdust anyway, or dragging yourself to the office when the most a salary can do is prolong matters?

So, while depression hits when it wants, irrespective of what’s otherwise going on in your life, reasons to despair soon pile up. Can’t sleep, won’t exercise or eat, stop seeing friends or answering emails, tune the world out, hoping Lifeline (open 24/7) – 0800 543 354 Depression Helpline (open 24/7) – 0800 111 757 Healthline (open 24/7) – 0800 611 116 Samaritans (open 24/7) – 0800 726 666 Suicide Crisis Helpline (open 24/7) – 0508 828 865

(0508 TAUTOKO).

Youthline (open 24/7) – 0800 376 633. Or text 234 for free between 8am and midnight, or email talk@youthline.co.nz

0800 WHATSUP children’s helpline – phone 0800

9428 787.

Kidsline (open 24/7) – 0800 543 754.

Your local Rural Support Trust – 0800 787 254

(0800 RURAL HELP)

Alcohol Drug Helpline (open 24/7) – 0800 787 797. You can also text 8691 for free. Supporting Families in Mental Illness – 0800 732

825.

For further information, contact the Mental Health Foundation’s free Resource and Information Service (09 623 4812).

above all to be forgotten. Neglect, shut out, avoid; compounding everything. What’s more, you know, marrow-deep, that you deserve every sorry bit of it.

On February 18, the date by which I knew beyond doubt depression had taken grip, I found no will to fight. A psychiatrist’s appointment had fallen through, leaving me distressed and helpless. My addled brain took it as a signal to finally retreat, which I did; first to a granny flat in Ballarat where I had been working, and then, in complete surrender, to Medellin, as far away as I could fathom.

In the end, financial reality – and perhaps the last gasp of survival instinct – brought me home to Wellington. Here, my family and friends have rallied around me in ways that leave me awestruck and grateful beyond words. Even the city’s fickle weather has mostly complied. I saw a psychiatrist and a priest – both excellent – to cover all bases.

Then, two weeks back, meeting a friend for coffee, we each ordered a miniature bread pudding infused with raspberry. I had felt the stirrings of recovery, but when I took a bite – I can’t possibly do it justice: the texture, the taste, the indescribable magnificence of every morsel – I knew. The suffocating fog had lifted.

This is not an advice column, so take what follows as a reminder to myself. If it offers solace elsewhere, even better. Don’t get lost in yourself. Live outwardly. Accept love when it’s offered, give it back in spades. Believe that things will get better, because they do. Do what’s needed to stay well. And make your bed.

‘‘While depression hits when it wants, irrespective of what’s otherwise going on in your life, reasons to despair soon pile up.’’