Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.

Hermann Hesse

You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Don’t Look Down

This is a memoir of depression. It is also my story, because I believe that we learn through stories.

We learn that we are not alone.

My story is no better or worse than the next person’s, just as my depression was no better or worse, although it felt like it at the time. I thought I had no hope of ever making it back to that place I called life. I thought, too, that I was the only one who felt that way. Depression feels like the most isolated place on earth. No wonder they call it a disease of loneliness.

If you are reading this book and you feel that way too then you are not alone. I understand how you feel. I think that anyone who has suffered from even mild depression understands how it feels. Yet we forget that others understand our suffering. We withdraw, isolate or shut down completely. We lose ourselves in our selves, and in the illness.

It doesn’t have to be that way. If we connect with even one other human being who truly understands, we take one step out of the illness. Life is about connection. There is nothing else. Depression is the opposite; it is an illness defined by alienation. So I offer this book by way of connection. I offer it too, as a source of hope. I hope that by sharing what I was like, what happened and what I am like now, that it may bring somebody else comfort.

I am not an expert, except by experience. For nearly four years, I lived with depression, day and night. I thought I would not make it through. I thought, without wishing to be dramatic, that I would die. I wanted to die. At one time it was all I wanted.

It is not something to regret, or to be ashamed by. Wanting to die (or ‘suicidal ideation’ as the experts would have it) goes hand in hand with the illness. It is a symptom of severe depression, not a character failing or moral flaw. Nor is it, truly, a desire to die so much as a fervent wish not to go on living. All depressives understand that distinction.

I no longer want to die. I am well. I would go so far as to say that I am happy. They say that happiness can’t be measured. Perhaps not. Like depression, it is unique to the person. But just as we can encourage depression to recede, so we can encourage happiness to emerge. To begin with, I had no idea where to look. My training in the art or experience of happiness was intensely poor. The last place I thought I would find it was in myself.

My recovery was slow. I felt like I was learning to walk again. Very often, I tripped and stumbled. Some days, I could not manage more than a few steps. But every day I tried and slowly I clambered out of that pit of total despair. There are no miracles. Getting well, and staying well, takes time, dedication and full attention. It means taking responsibility for our own emotional health and happiness. It requires rigorous honesty and constant self-examination. It needs humility, patience and willingness. It sounds like hard work, and it is. But it is nowhere near as hard as living with severe depression.

You might say that this is a spiritual book. In some ways it is. It is a spiritual book, written by an atheist. As a recovering alcoholic once told me, ‘Religion is for people who don’t want to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who’ve been there.’

I make no apology for that. You can take from it what you need and leave the rest. In my own recovery from severe depression, I have drawn on various disciplines from modern therapy, through Buddhism to the Twelve Step programme—the spiritual approach practised by Alcoholics Anonymous. I have taken help from psychiatrists, therapists, friends and perfect strangers. I have discovered comfort in literature, science, and gardens—most particularly, my own.

It is also a practical book, inasmuch as it offers ideas about what might work. There are no promises, only suggestions. In my travels through depression I have tried eating in certain ways and swallowing handfuls of vitamins, amino acids and essential fats. I have done yoga, massage, meditation, homeopathy, acupuncture and bioenergetic feedback. I have had healers standing over my head, drawing bad energy from my neck, and others describing angels at my table. I have tried every form of therapy and read every book on depression I could lay my hands on. Certain phrases, from spiritual leaders, poets and writers, I have muttered like mantras, hoping to absorb serenity by sheer repetition. It does not all work, of course, but some of it does and about that I can tell you. Again, you can take from it what you like and leave the rest.

As to whether the depression will come back, it is every depressive’s fear. It might. It might not. I have no way of knowing. I still get low but I have discovered that if I can meet that difficulty, I can go some way to heading it off. The most important thing is not to become trapped in fear. Depression is a paralysis of hope. One thing I know is true. Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.

So here is my story. It travels here and there in time. Sometimes, it goes backwards because, as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard pointed out a few hundred years ago, ‘Life must be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ He also said ‘Don’t forget to love yourself’, for which I rather love him. My story stops too, now and then, to give direction or, at least, useful ideas. It is not neat or tidy but then, neither is my mind. And nor, as it happens, is a life.

It starts on the morning of my fiftieth birthday. It seems like a good place to start. Every day without depression is a good place to start.

I wake early and sit in bed with a cup of tea and think. Not about anything in particular, it is my way of untangling the chaos in my head and establishing a sense of peace and order for the day ahead. I do this every day for half an hour, and then I meditate for twenty minutes. It’s a routine I’ve got into since I was ill. I don’t know how or why it works. I just know that it does.

My bedroom is white and filled with light, with French windows leading straight on to the garden. The light is important to me; it fights the darkness in my head.

In his seminal book on depression,
The Noonday Demon
, another depressive, Andrew Solomon wrote, ‘To wage war on depression is to fight against oneself.’ He’s right, although on first reading I took the phrase to mean that in depression one becomes one’s own enemy. In the intense self-hatred encountered during an episode of severe depression, I think that’s true.

I hated myself so much that I tried to kill myself.

These days I believe that it wasn’t myself I hated, so much as the self I became during depression. I wanted it dead.

It is two years since I emerged from depression and I no longer want myself dead. I want myself alive. I am no longer my own enemy. Depression is the enemy. The monster lives at my gate. My hope is that, with sufficient effort and luck, I can keep it there. And if that means behaving in ways that I once thought uncharacteristic, such as getting up at six in the morning to meditate, then I will.

Once I have meditated and set my head in some sort of order, I look at myself in the mirror. To see, I suppose, if I look any different now I am suddenly older. I see the same blonde hair, the same blue eyes and the same childishly snub nose. I am not wearing my glasses, so I am a little blurred. Then again, even without that merciful soft focus (one of Mother Nature’s kinder compensations for age) I am my most unreliable witness. There is too much history attached to my face, too many memories are butting at the edges of my reality. I cannot see myself. What I can see is that the marks of depression are no longer on my face. These days, I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti.

My daughter, Molly, takes a photograph, to mark my birthday. ‘Open your eyes, Mum,’ she says.

My eyes are very deep-set and inclined to disappear entirely if I don’t pay attention.

‘They are open,’ I say.

‘Well, open them some more. Look surprised.’

I do, because I am.

I am surprised I have made it to fifty when I once thought I’d never make it at all. I am surprised that I am sitting peacefully in the garden in the sunshine. I am surprised that my daughter, who is fifteen, is beautiful and abundant and taller than I am. Most of all, I am surprised that I am happy, that I have the capacity for happiness again.

When I was very ill, and Molly was nine, she used to leave notes Blu-tacked to the wall above my bed. One said, ‘Dear Angels, Please bring my mummy all the joy and happiness she deserves.’ I cried when I read that note because I knew that I deserved none.

I would not wish depression on anybody. And yet, it taught me a lot. I have not become suddenly mawkishly grateful for my life but I am more interested in it, more engaged you might say. When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary.

I look out at my garden. It is not my first garden, but it is the first that I made myself. When I was very ill, before it even existed, dreaming about this garden kept me going all through the long dark nights, and darker days. Planting it, putting my hands in the earth, have been both therapy and a connection to the future. Even at my most despairing, I kept planting. Even in the darkness, it seemed to me an act of optimism, of hope.

When I was really ill, I was living in a flat without a garden. It is symptomatic of how little pleasure I could find, even in things about which I am passionate, that I bought that flat. But, though I could scarcely get out of bed and getting dressed was a superhuman feat, my friends pointed out that every time I managed to venture out, I returned with a plant; a geranium, a pot of jasmine, a box of lavender. It is that same jasmine that now covers the wall beside my kitchen, filling the room with scent each summer, while cuttings of the original geranium bloom in pots outside my shed. When I found the garden it was a mess, a beauty sleeping under a weight of laurel, privet and brambles thick as a man’s arm. A little maple, which now has peonies at its feet, still bears an S-shaped kink in its trunk, where it fought to reach the light. I love that tree.

Once I had cleared the worst (me, a man with a van and back-breaking days) I started to lay out the garden using a tape measure, a can of spray paint and bits of string. It was a very hot summer, so I was generally out in the late evening in my nightdress. I must have looked like the local loony (well, let’s be frank, I was the local loony) but my neighbours are too charming ever to have mentioned this.

Now the garden is beautiful. I watch the light lift and the light fall, witness the spring come and the summer go. When I feel, as I sometimes do, that all hope has fled, it is a gentle reminder that when something dies, something else must take its place. I love nature for her serene indifference, her insistence at taking everything at her own, sweet pace. The daffodils will unfurl their yellow trumpets in their own time, no matter how often I insist that they, and the spring, hurry along. The roots, hidden beneath the earth, will slowly unfold as they are meant to do, just as life will unfold as it is meant to do. No amount of fussing or fretting on my part will change that. There is freedom in that understanding. And there is joy, too, in knowing that beauty is inevitable, in the slow blooming of a rose, in the smell of newly mown grass, in the warmth of early summer sunshine on our backs.

When I said to friends that I was writing this book, they said, ‘Why are you doing this to yourself? Don’t you remember how sick you were? Are you mad?’

Well, yes.

So why am I writing this book? I’m writing it because, although I dislike the confessional, I was (and continue to be) so repulsed by the stigma around depression that I determined I must stand up and be counted, not hide away in shame. If I have any talent, it is the ability to communicate, and to get published. So I wrote a personal account of my suicidal depression for a newspaper, the
Daily Telegraph
. In return, I got 2,000 letters and every one of them said, ‘Thank God I’m not alone.’

I cried when I read those letters. I knew just how they felt. In reading those letters, I felt less lonely too. It was then that I knew I had to write this book and not just for other people but for myself. I never want to feel so alone again.

When that article was published many people said I was brave. Perhaps, although I don’t believe that confronting an illness is necessarily an act of courage. The stigma surrounding depression just makes it seem that way. I wish I could say it was bravery that drove me to pin myself like a butterfly to the pages of a national newspaper, but it was actually anger.

I admit that my anger took me by surprise. But then, so did depression. I had never thought about its implications, or its consequences. The more I inhabited it, the more I came to see the fear and the shame surrounding it. The more depressives I met, the more I came to understand that we are not simply fighting an illness, but the attitudes that surround it.

Imagine saying to somebody that you have a life-threatening illness, such as cancer, and being told to pull yourself together or get over it.

Imagine being terribly ill and too afraid to tell anyone lest it destroys your career.

Imagine being admitted to hospital because you are too ill to function and being too ashamed to tell anyone, because it is a psychiatric hospital. Imagine telling someone that you have recently been discharged and watching them turn away, in embarrassment or disgust or fear.

Comparisons are odious. Stigmatising an illness is more odious still. Bad enough to be ill, but to feel compelled to deny the very thing that, in its worst and most active state, defines you is agony indeed.

It is an illness. That is its beginning and end. It is neither a moral flaw nor an immoral state. It is not a matter for shame, guilt or secrecy. I wish that I had known that when I first became ill. I wish that I had not spent so long trying to manage the unmanageable because I was so ashamed. Or ignorant. Or both.

There is no correct medical term for the illness of depression. It is known, variously, as clinical, major or severe depression. I shall, for the most part confine myself to the description ‘severe depression’, simply because I think the term describes the illness best.