I was a thrusting, promotion-chasing, thirtysomething success story. Then one day I just broke

Iwas doing the ‘man in suit’ run along platform five at Glasgow’s Queen street station – head and torso locked stiff and upright, arms and briefcase pinioned vertically at my sides, lower half going like the clappers – when I realised something was up.

That dream everyone has at some point – the one where you’re being chased by something terrifying but your legs won’t move quickly enough: it was exactly like that. as if some super-villain had replaced the air around me with thick, invisible jelly.

I made the Edinburgh train, just, but sat slumped and breathless for the entire journey.

I was in pain, too, but weirdly so: as if the super-villain, not to be foiled, was now zapping me with some kind of death ray.

The pain washed tidally through my core, unnamable, non-specific, almost incapacitating. The word that came to mind was poisoned. Uh oh.

I was at that point a few months away from turning 30, with a partner, a baby and a good job. My only immediate plan was to get really fit before I hit my fourth decade – I was dreamily imagining a six-pack. The rest seemed to be taking care of itself.

Then – kablooey! – I took one in the chops from the nemesis that would stalk me, on and off, for the best part of the following decade.

Scary

It took a while to figure out what was going on. I was scanned and pricked and prodded and probed. Nothing. I went through all the scary tests, which returned non-scary results.

Eventually, seemingly by dint of it being nothing else, the doctors decided on their diagnosis: post-viral fatigue. also known as Chronic Fatigue syndrome. also known as ME. They didn’t really know much about it, they said, what caused it, or what cured it.

Right. I wasn’t having that. Nebulous guff. Post-whaty what? I wasn’t even sure I believed it existed. It sounded like a condition invented for wusses who couldn’t hack it.

But there was no denying the fact I was unwell, and in an unusual way, as if I had a permanent, heavy flu.

I was embarrassed; I was mortified. as a hard-driving young man in a hard-driving profession, you worked until the job was done and then stayed a bit longer, just for the hell of it. Then you went to the pub where you drank until the drinking was done, and then stayed… you get the drift.

what you didn’t do was get ill. You didn’t get fatigued, whatever that meant. what would my tough, rugby-playing boss think? what would it mean for my career, my future?

I held out for a while, drugging myself up with some pretty pink pills from my GP and collapsing into bed when I got home. But this was unsustainable.

a month or so after my 30th birthday, I finally told my boss the truth. He sent me home for six weeks. In time, with rest, I got better. Ish.

In truth, I’ve never again felt quite as robust as I used to. Indeed, the fatigue recurred a few years later, though with less intensity and for a shorter duration, and I had to take another spell off work. and this time it brought a friend: depression.

This has been my struggle, my little secret. I am a lucky boy – people have much, much worse happen to them. Even my fatigue was at the milder end of the scale. I know poor souls who’ve had to give up their jobs and others who have been confined to wheelchairs.

The latest science suggests the extreme end of ME may be something different altogether. But it’s been tricky nonetheless, balancing long hours, high stress, a young family, all with the awareness that you are prone, now and again, to break.

Because that is what I’ve come to believe happens to people – and to more of us than we generally realise.

at a conference of businesswomen last week, I listened to some impressive people talking about the difficulties they’d faced running companies and families, with all the pressures these bring. and quite a few of them had the same twist in the tale: they’d ended up ill, even in hospital, had to step back or give up. They’d broken.

That there is a link between mind and body – that the former often has the whip hand over the latter – has been intuitively understood by humans for aeons. and yet this has been, and seems still to be, more a matter for philosophy than science.

There are many disciplines devoted to it: meditation, yoga, cognitive behavioural therapy and more. The voodoo that is homeopathy certainly relies on the connection for any ‘successes’ it can claim.

Of course, what we’re really talking about is mental health, that icky topic we are only slowly learning to take seriously, and still struggle to speak about as openly as we would a broken leg or chickenpox.

Fever

Here are some facts – as far as there are facts – about chronic fatigue/ME. It is more common in some families, so there is thought to be a genetic susceptibility. It often follows viral infections such as glandular fever (this, a consultant told me, seems to be what happened to me – I didn’t even know I’d had glandular fever).

It can be caused by exhaustion, mental stress and depression (it can also cause these things), or by a traumatic event such as bereavement, divorce or redundancy.

The official estimate is that the condition affects about one in 300 people in the UK, although I suspect in reality the figure is higher than that.

when I confided to friends and colleagues – usually through necessity – that I was struggling, many responded with, ‘Oh yeah, such and such had that post-viral thing’, or ‘X had to give up his job for the same reason’, or ‘I never told you but I’ve been struggling with anxiety myself.’

Chronic fatigue is almost three times as common in women as in men (remember those businesswomen), and the most likely age for it to develop in an adult is in the early twenties to mid-forties. In children it is from 13 to 15.

The world Health Organisation predicts that by 2020, depression will be the second leading cause of disability in the world.

In some areas of the UK, usually the most deprived, as many as one in six adults are on anti- depressants, and the number of prescriptions in this country now tops 50 million each year.

are GPs more likely to prescribe antidepressants these days, or are people simply more likely to seek help for mental health problems?

Possibly a bit of both. Perhaps we’re foolishly medicalising a problem that would be better dealt with by making access to therapy easier: to talk rather than take, so to speak.

Through work, I had a private health scheme that gave me a quick route to such treatment, and the advice I received about lifestyle, changing my thought patterns and the rest has been useful ever since. On the NHs, it can take a long time just to get a first appointment.

Rewiring

There’s something about modern life that doesn’t go well with good mental hygiene, don’t you think?

whether the hyper- competitiveness of the global capitalist economy makes us all that bit more neurotic; whether technology is rewiring our neural circuits in ways we don’t yet understand; whether the ‘having it all’ approach – for both men and women – stretches us beyond our natural capabilities… I don’t know.

Jobs are less secure and personal debt levels are higher, too. It all adds up.

You can detect a growing awareness of the issue in how the modern workplace is changing.

I used to work opposite the Google office in London, where now and again you’d spot some hipster bouncing around on a space hopper. Now we’re all Googlifying to a certain degree.

Large companies provide exercise and yoga classes, free massages, healthy eating sessions, on- site access to GPs and therapists. People increasingly dress as they please. There are breakout areas, thinkpods, new buildings that maximise exposure to daylight.

There is, I think, a good a reason for all of this.

But I’m no hippie. I don’t think the answer to our mental health problem is to uproot our way of living, to turn our backs on the economic progress that has taken more people out of poverty over the past few decades than at any other time in history, to seek to return to an era of hunch-backed yeomen working the soil.

But I do think we need to be serious and open about understanding and adapting the way the human being best engages with the 21st century.

we need to take care of our employees, of each other and ourselves. Otherwise, we break.