Hands up who’s had depression? Or, more pertinently,
who is depressed or at least suspects they may be suffering from depression?
You at the back? No? The guy with his head in his hands propping up the bar?
Sure? OK, I believe you. Anyone out there at all? Thought not. That’s
because no matter how far we’ve come over the decades in dispersing the
stigma surrounding mental health issues, reluctance to admit we have a problem
still endures. So what keeps us from coming clean? Well, the answer is predictable:
we feel it’s a sign of weakness.
A few years ago, I got some bad news. Not just in a ‘you've-lost-job’ kinda
way, but in an off-the-Richter-scale way that inks your life for good. Or not
for good as it turned out, because although I thought I was being stoically
strong and suitably stiff-upper-lipped I failed to realise I was actually falling
into a big black hole. Whereas life is supposed to be light and shade, life
had become only darkness with all the light filtered out. I was depressed,
but couldn’t see it. Everything was an effort. Getting out of bed, going
on the semi-skimmed-milk run, reading, watching telly, having sex – anything
I enjoyed gradually became a brow-furrowing chore.
‘
That’s a classic story of the slow way depression progresses,” says
consultant psychiatrist Dr James Morgan who’s seen depressive illness
in all its manifold forms in his 14 years practising. “Depression often
creeps up on people. It can be a very gradual trajectory. Symptoms at first
can be very subtle and are easy to overlook. People often put it down to being
tired, life stress or just going through a bad patch, or as in your case, reacting
to some bad news so it’s only natural to feel low – this is called ‘reactive’ depression – but
the time for concern is when those feelings persist and begin to dominate your
day, begin to rule your thought-processes. It’s not simply about having
a few bad days. It’s about your life becoming a permanent bad day, when
your brain gets stuck in a certain mode of being and its chemical balance becomes
skewed.”
Read the full article in the current issue of RedHanded.
The winter blues are as common as a cold, but what happens when feeling down becomes more serious? Jason Jones on depression
SILENT KILLER