Let’s all talk about our depression, because not everyone is as lucky as me
At the beginning of the month, I wrote a pretty bleak column about suffering from depression, because depression was the only thing I had in my head and so it was the only thing I could write about. I felt a bit bad for penning such a wretched, miserable piece at such a wretched, miserable time of the year – I should have done something about kittens, or balloons, perhaps – but then I reasoned that I felt a bit bad about everything, from waking up in the morning to putting one foot in front of the other, and if people didn’t like it, they could… well, I don’t know really. I wasn’t thinking very far ahead at that point.
Anyway, I wrote my piece and returned to lying flat on the ground with my mouth shaped like that of a goldfish, with my husband occasionally prodding me to check that I was still alive.
Time passed, in the way that time does, even when you are convinced it won’t, and my iPhone started pinging with new emails arriving in my inbox, which seemed strange, because it was now Saturday and nobody ever emails me on a Saturday, except Mothercare to remind me that there is a sale on.
Ping, ping, ping, went my iPhone. To my amazement, the messages were all emails from readers with similar stories of being immobilised by their thoughts and feelings. By their own minds.
Saturday turned to Sunday, which turned to Monday, and the messages kept on coming. There were hundreds and hundreds of emails from people who had experienced something similar – or who simply wanted to wish me well.
I wanted to print them all out and clutch them to my bosom. I wanted to cry, so I did – happy tears, for the first time in months.
On Twitter, too, there were scores of supportive messages. Only one person trolled me, and even he eventually apologised.
Work had kindly given me time off, and when I returned to my desk this week, I was stunned to find more letters and cards, and even a jar of homemade marmalade so delicious that there is now a queue of Peruvian bears outside our flat.
Anyway, I surveyed all of this, all the notes and emails – which I promise I will finish replying to soon – and while still feeling ill, I also felt so unbelievably lucky. Lucky to have a platform on which I get to communicate with all the wonderful Telegraph readers, lucky to know that there are others out there like me, lucky to not feel so alone.
But what has struck me over the past couple of weeks is this: what if I was the kind of person who didn’t feel they could talk to anyone about their mental health? What if the thought of talking to someone about the way you feel was almost as horrifying as the feeling itself ? What if you did eventually pluck up the courage to tell someone what was going through your head, only for them to suggest you pulled yourself together?
What if you didn’t have an understanding employer? What if you went to the doctor and the doctor prescribed you antidepressants that you then read – as was reported on Thursday – might raise the risk of suicide, making you even more scared? What if your doctor said they could put you on a waiting list for therapy but that you’d be better off paying for it yourself – and you didn’t have any money?
How is it that people in a 21st-century, first-world country can have organ transplants and brain surgery but not get an appointment to talk to a professional about depression when they need it most?
This week, it was reported that deaths among mental health patients in England have risen by 21 per cent in three years. That statistic can only really be described as despicable, but it is not unique: this week we have also learnt that the number of specialist mental health nurses has fallen by 10 per cent in five years; that care for abused children “shames the nation”, according to the NSPCC; and that Wales and Northern Ireland have no mother-and-baby units for women suffering from acute depression.
Next Thursday is Time to Talk day, run by the charities Rethink Mental Illness – one of the Telegraph’s Christmas appeal charities – and Mind. It aims to get people chatting about mental illness in an effort to remove the stigma surrounding it, and I hope that people everywhere will get involved.
We need to be more open about the stuff that goes on in our heads, because depression, while it feels abnormal, is not all that odd. It is experienced by people every day everywhere.
“This too shall pass,” we often try to convince ourselves when things are particularly bleak. But what really has to pass is the shrouding of mental illness in silence and secrecy.