Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (14 page)

Two years after we returned to England, my mother went out to Oman to join my father and I was sent to an English boarding school where 750 girls were treated much as I imagine a farmer might treat battery hens, fed and housed with cold, humourless efficiency and with only one end product in mind: our education.

Just like those battery hens, we were weighed as soon as the new term started and four weeks before it ended. This was presumably because it was the beginning of awareness of anorexia but the treatment for weight loss was punishing in itself.

One term I did lose far too much weight. I was a teenager, growing fast and the food was so vile as to be inedible. I was also desperately unhappy. When they weighed me towards the end of the term, I was far too thin. I couldn’t possibly be sent home in that state. What would my parents say? So, for a week, I was forced to take all my meals in the sanatorium where they could watch me. If you refused to eat, they simply held your nose, shovelled the food into your mouth and held it shut so you were forced to swallow. I soon learned to eat.

The sanatorium, anyway, was not a place to linger. It was certainly not a place in which to be ill or seek comfort. It was staffed by a matron who took any illness as a personal affront and dealt with it as briskly and sharply as possible. She did not, either, believe that a girl was sick unless her thermometer told her so and I am still in the habit of believing that I cannot possibly be ill unless I have a high temperature to prove it. And the temperature of depression is, of course, low.

I was sufficiently clever to do well, at least in exam results, and sufficiently bright to cloak inward disrespect with an outward cloak of obedience so was rarely in trouble. As for the rest, I was good at sport, captain of this and that, and good, too, at making myself liked. Popularity, as I learned very early in life, is a useful defence against bullying, of which there was a great deal. The bullying left no marks; or at least not of a physical nature. Teenage girls are mistresses of the most insidious forms of emotional manipulation and torture, the worst of which is the practice known as ‘Being Sent to Coventry.’

Coventry, rather like depression, is a cold, unforgiving place; lonely, silent and dead. When you are sent to Coventry, nobody speaks to you or even acknowledges you. It is as if you don’t exist, as if you are dead. It can go on for hours, or days, or weeks. For me, it went on for two weeks, which, in a boarding school from which there is no escape and not even a moment’s respite, is the most extraordinary torture.

To this day, I have no idea why. The girl who led the offensive would give no reason. Perhaps she simply did not like me. You can say that it does not matter, that it is long gone. But it left its marks, the most serious of which is my mistrust of human nature and its unpredictabilities.

I said nothing to anyone. There was nobody to complain to, other than the teaching staff, who dealt with bullies with heavy-handed interference. My situation, anyway, was too isolated and vulnerable. My parents were thousands of miles away, so my letters home took at least five days to arrive and then another five for an answer to appear.

In any case a member of staff checked our letters, presumably for signs of unhappiness that could then be addressed. Instead, the practice served only to make us more than ever secretive and contained. What stiff, formal little letters they must have been. As for the telephone, long-distance calls were events attached only to births and deaths. It was the days when you still had to book a call, to somewhere as foreign as Oman, three hours in advance.

I did once protest about something that was bothering me in a letter smuggled past the checking system but succeeded only in upsetting my parents so badly that I never tried it again.

I remember opening the reply from my mother, remember exactly where I was standing, on the path just outside the dining room. I remember the smell of fried bacon and burnt toast. We had just finished breakfast. Letters were always handed out after breakfast. For a child at boarding school whose parents live abroad, that is the best day of the interminable week. The letter from home day.

In the letter, my mother said that I had upset my father terribly. He had opened the letter while she was away. She wrote that I should never distress him like that again, that it was not fair.

I read the letter and then I threw it in the bushes by the side of the path. And I thought, I’m on my own.

It sounds dramatic and, to my childish mind, it was. I was thirteen but it was as if I made an absolute decision that I had to do everything alone, that I could rely only on myself. It has taken me years to unlearn that lesson. Emotional self-sufficiency might be useful in some ways but it is useless when it comes to good relationships.

My mother cannot remember the letter, or writing it. She felt accused when, in the worst of my depression and in trying to untangle some of the reasons for my misery, I asked her about it. She grew angry and tearful.

‘That never happened,’ she said. ‘Show me the letter. If I wrote a letter like that, then show it to me.’

And that’s the trouble with trying to untangle the possible reasons for pain. Emotional pain is subjective, and so is memory. Did it happen? Is it real? Did I make it up? It is real to me and perhaps that’s all that matters. For many years, I did not ask for help because I expected my pleas to be rejected. This was most apparent when I was struggling with depression and the final descent into breakdown. I could not, rather than would not, ask for help. When confronted by any severe emotional difficulty, I shut up and shut down.

It was not just that one incident, of course, but an accumulation across my childhood and is simply a detail in a greater picture of a family in which difficult feelings are never discussed. I doubt we’re alone in this. If my experience in a psychiatric unit, which actively encourages all and every expression of emotion, and seeing the struggle people have in saying how they really feel is anything to go by (and I think it is) then I know my family is in no way unique.

After five long years, I finally found the courage to ask my parents to take me away from that boarding school and let me go to a kinder place; which they did, to a sixth-form college where I also boarded and where I was very happy. It was also where I met Sarah, who has been one of the great gifts that life has given me.

So it was not boarding school itself that I hated so much as that particular school. Nor is being sent away to boarding school a cause of depression—many people are perfectly happy. For others, it may be a precipitating factor. However, one therapist told me that out of her clients, eighty per cent were sent away to boarding schools. All bear quite severe emotional scars.

There was an added reason for my silence. I always felt I should be grateful. My childhood in all its various countries was, in many ways, a privileged existence. We lived in large and often beautiful houses. We had servants. We travelled the world. The ex-patriot life can be astonishingly glamorous although it can, equally, be wretched. Nobody mentions the wretchedness.

And there’s another reason to feel grateful. I was privileged enough to be given an expensive, private education paid for by my father’s company. We could not have afforded it otherwise. And if we were sent away to boarding school, it was for practical reasons. There were no decent schools in the countries where we lived. By sending us away to school, my parents were only doing what was best for us. Besides, what were the options?

All this was drummed into me during my childhood and I understood the reasons to be grateful. It’s just I never actually felt them. I just felt wretched and could not say so, or why.

Before I had a breakdown, I used to believe that misery was something to be left in the past, that there was nothing to be gained from going back over it. Which is why, from the minute I escaped that school, I swore I would never have any contact with it again. And I never have, despite the letters that periodically arrive from people I knew there, who track me down at whatever newspaper or magazine my name happens to appear in. As I have no good memories to share, I prefer not to say anything at all. The letters go in the bin; the emails go unanswered. Not out of malice nor even any memory of any of those girls I was at school with; I can scarcely remember their names or their faces. I recall that most were pleasant and friendly. I have no argument with them. It is the emotions that I associate with them that I find impossible to tolerate.

As for the school, I never mention the place, never acknowledge I even know of it, let alone spent five years there. Just one memory is apt to make me miserable so, until severe depression forced me to confront my demons, I kept my face turned resolutely to the future and believed I had succeeded in wiping most of that time from my mind. ‘It happened,’ I thought. ‘It’s over. Deal with it.’

Which would have been fine and is the way that most people deal with past unhappiness except that for me, well into my thirties, even the words boarding school were apt to send me into immediate distress. When Jonathan said, simply in passing, that one day Molly might like to go to boarding school, I dissolved in such a storm of tears that he was at first astonished, and then deeply worried.

Once I had calmed down I simply said that I hated my school and wanted no more mention of boarding schools. I didn’t dwell on my tears or even think about them and I suspect that had I not become so severely depressed, I would never have gone in for any self-examination.

To be brutally honest, were it not for the insistent clamour that sometimes still rages at my throat or the dark and desperate moods that periodically drag me down I would, even after endless hours of therapy (during which I became adept at leading therapists down every dark alley except the one that troubled me the most: that school) happily leave the memories of that place well alone.

Which is, of course, entirely self-defeating. I am the one paying for therapy. I am the one for whose benefit it is performed so such contrariness is simple self-sabotage. It was not the therapists I was leading down dark alleys, but myself.

This is why therapy is so terribly difficult. Or, at least, good therapy. Good therapy is incredibly hard work. In order to truly engage with it, you first have to truly engage with yourself. But why bother? Only because, at some point in our lives, unresolved pain is likely to kneecap us and at times and in ways that we least expect.

It was the psychotherapist Carl Rogers who first used the line, ‘what we resist, will persist’. You can keep difficult emotions at bay for a very long time, even for a lifetime but for most of us, at some point in our lives, they will demand to be heard. Usually, it takes some cataclysmic event—the breakdown of a relationship, the death of someone we love, a career that goes suddenly, brutally wrong—for us to feel our own pain.

We might have felt it, a little, before. It manifests itself in all sorts of ways from headaches to inexplicable back pain, to stomach ulcers or drinking too much, to getting blasted on drugs, eating too much or too little. Every addiction is a manifestation of emotional distress. Nobody becomes an alcoholic or a binge eater because they love alcohol or food, they simply use excess alcohol or food to dull the pain that they are unable to express in words.

Finally, when everything else fails to soothe us, when the drink or the food or the shopping or the sex stop making us feel better, then come the tears and overwhelming despair, anxiety or depression. Most of this, of course, is unconscious. What does seem to be true is that patterns of destructive or negative thinking stop us from recovering from depression. And staying recovered. If those behaviours or patterns of thought have their roots in childhood, or the family, then they must be worth examining and challenging.

Our family depression can, I think, be traced to my mother and before her, I suspect, to her father, my grandfather. Had I not been searching for the genetic roots of my depression, as well as that of my brothers, I would never have come across a type of depression known as dysthymia, a chronic condition that can wreak havoc on a person’s life and happiness.

There are the diagnostic criteria, as set out by the World Health Organisation:

It is an almost precise portrait of my mother. Her discontent has always been obvious in a tightly wound tension, constant insomnia and an apparently insurmountable fatigue. The demands of her life sometimes seem too much for her to bear, and I remember spending much of those two years when I was nine and we lived together in England, fetching and carrying for her, worrying about her and generally trying to cheer her up.

The effects of dysthymia are not confined to the sufferer; as with every depressive disorder, it affects all those around it. As a family, we have always tiptoed around my mother as if treading on eggshells. If she is happy, the atmosphere is good and the rest of the family is happy. If she is unhappy, we all suffer.

My mother is funny, lively, extremely clever and intensely social. When she is well it is almost impossible to recognise the creature that she can become and who, anyway, she tends to keep confined to the privacy of her own home. Few of her friends would recognise this portrait of her but the presence of those outside her immediate family seems to act on her like a tonic and she is able to throw off her mood, at least for a couple of hours. She is best, always, in company.

An article in the February 2005 issue of the
Harvard Mental Health Letter
, a newsletter issued by Harvard Medical School describes dysthymia thus:

As the Harvard Mental Health description suggests, it is difficult to see whether my mother’s depression is an inherited predisposition, the result of a lonely and disrupted childhood or of a troublesome marriage exacerbated by social isolation in the many (often difficult) countries in which my parents lived. Perhaps, as in the case of most depressive disorders, it is all of the above.

My mother was an only child whose parents worked in the theatre so were travelling for much of the time and living in digs. It was unsuitable for a small child so she was packed off to live with her aunts, who ran a nursing home for the elderly, in which she spent most of her young life. My mother, who rarely even mentions her childhood, once said, in a rare moment of candour, that she didn’t have a mother until she was eleven, or at least not a mother who was in any sense present.

Of the two maiden aunts, the elder was a dominant character, the younger a weak, almost childlike figure who was often bullied by her older sister. The younger confided in my mother, herself only a child, seeking her out for comfort and a place to unload her troubles. It must have been a lonely, not to say alarming, existence for a small child, deprived of her parents and under the care of two adults, neither of whom had any experience of children and one of whom was scarcely an adult herself.

Then there were the war years, evacuation and a boarding school. Her parents adored her, but they adored each other too, often to the exclusion of anyone else. I had seen this first hand, having spent a great deal of time with them during holidays from my boarding school. While they were always welcoming, they also seemed faintly surprised to find somebody else in their midst. It must have been doubly difficult to be their child, conscious of their intense focus on each other but never quite included and often sent away for long periods of time. Perhaps this is why my mother has always demanded singular amounts of love and attention from those around her.

Then there was her married life, trailing around the world after my father, living in alien and often difficult cultures, particularly for women, her children sent away to school in another country. My mother’s lively intelligence never suited the coffee mornings that dominate ex-patriots’ wives days.

My mother was also, and I think this is particularly important for a woman of her independent nature and intelligence, unable to work because there was no work for women in the countries to which my father was posted. She was part of that generation of women who were expected to be entirely dependent on their husbands; their confidence so diminished that they often became frightened by the demands of the wider world and hid that fear behind a stubborn and defensive domesticity. I know I would have hated it and I am so like my mother, I cannot believe it did not do her harm.

Neither did my mother find the solace and comfort she needed in marriage. My parents have endured a troubled and sometimes frankly unhappy relationship, but are still together after fifty-two years. In that they are no different from many other couples of their generation who stayed together despite an obvious incompatibility. Age has mellowed them and they are perhaps happier than they have ever been. Whether that is an argument for staying in a difficult marriage, I really don’t know.

I do know that their unhappiness had a profound impact on me and on my younger brother, Tony, who spent the early part of his adult life convinced that he would never marry or have children because he could not tolerate the possibility of the misery that would inevitably follow.

Happily, he did marry and have children. He has, in effect, broken the treaty although it has not always been easy for him. So has Michael. Then again, they were less connected to my mother who used me as her confidante and, too often, as the dumping ground for her disappointment and bitterness with my father. Perhaps she mistook me for an adult, not understanding that in the presence of our parents, we are always children. I listened, for hours, to her dislike of him and her desire, never actually carried out, to leave him. If ever I suggested that she should leave, she would either tell me that I didn’t understand, or find some reason why it would be impossible.

I love my father very much, and found it increasingly difficult to listen to my mother’s litany of his failings. I love my mother too, and felt sorry for and sad about her unhappiness. I was torn, and the only resolution I could see was to walk away from both of them but I could not do that either. For better, or for worse, they are my parents.

It is not, I fully believe, my mother’s fault. She has never had any help with her emotions or her depression and lived through a period of history when any analysis of feelings was not considered useful. She is aware that she gets depressed, but does not know how to deal with it or, even, how severe depression can become. When I telephoned her to say that I had just been diagnosed with severe clinical depression and was to be admitted to a mental hospital, her first response was to say, ‘I’m so depressed, I need the bed next to you.’

When I recounted that remark to a therapist, she shivered in protest, as she did when I said that my mother came to visit me only once, and briefly, in three psychiatric units. My father did not come at all. This might seem astonishing, and when I look at it dispassionately, I feel quite astonished myself, but I know it was not out of indifference, it was because they would have thought it better to leave me to the experts.

Some people say, ‘Oh, it’s just their generation,’ but there were plenty of elderly people visiting their sons and daughters. I said nothing to them at the time because it seemed to me that there was nothing to say; it was merely symptomatic of the emotional distance that exists in my family as well as the stigma that creates an impenetrable barrier around those who suffer from mental illness.

My family’s apparent lack of concern as well as the fear and secrecy surrounding a stay in a mental hospital made me feel inexpressibly lonely and, of course, only made my condition worse. And it was not just family. One of my closest friends, closer than a brother, failed to send even a card, let alone visit. This is a man who, when I had flu, sent fleets of cars carrying orange juice, magazines, flowers and grapes to my bedside because he could not be there himself. Yet, after I left the psychiatric unit, he was bewildered to be met by tears and anger at his absence. ‘But I thought that was what I was supposed to do,’ he said, himself in tears. ‘I thought I was supposed to leave you alone.’

Why? In which other illness are we supposed to leave people alone? This is an aside, I know, but it may be important for anyone who does not know what to do when a friend or loved one is in a mental hospital. Go and visit them, unless they are too ill to see people or have expressly said that they don’t want visitors. The nursing staff will tell you if that is the case. Send them something, whether it is love, flowers or a card. Let them know that you care, and that they matter. Don’t wait to be asked. The depressive is in no state to make that sort of demand. They scarcely know their own mind.

As for my mother, her inability to express her true feelings has, over the years, caused her great unhappiness, resulting in a constant, simmering frustration and an irritation that she tends to vent on my father. It is extraordinarily painful to watch. My father, as many men before him have done, simply withdraws and becomes yet more silent. It is not in his emotional make-up to take such things personally, which, of course, manifests in indifference and only makes my mother’s behaviour worse. She wants a reaction, even a negative one, and the frustrated need to get a response blinds her to her own escalating and sometimes cruel behaviour.

Similar wars of attrition are being fought, even now, in countless houses across the land. My parents are far from unusual. As a child who loves both their parents, it is heartbreaking to watch but it is the fate of many children, whatever their age, caught up in an unhappy marriage. Loyalties are torn to breaking point and children, for whatever reason—and there are many theories about this—will always feel responsibility for their parents’ happiness. It is, in brutally biological terms, in their best interests. A child must depend on its parents—it has no choice—so it will deny and internalise any difficulties by withdrawing and shutting down. Either that or it will become difficult, or wayward or actively aggressive. Anything to get the attention of its parents, to distract them from the hostility, overt or otherwise, that they are waging on each other.

If a parent is too absorbed in their own problems or misery, they have little time for their child’s demands. Their own needs come first. Their own emotions are paramount so their tensions and arguments are played out in full view of their children. Self-absorption is a powerful thing; it blinds us to all manner of destructive behaviour—even towards those we love the most.

The worst, and most profound impact of my parent’s unhappiness with each other was on my understanding of relationships. If you are raised in an atmosphere of tense and sometimes poisonous silence, or witness a relationship in which two adults rarely touch or kiss, you are unlikely to learn how to have a good relationship yourself. Or, even, to know what a good, intimate relationship might look like. As a result, I have always felt it is better to be alone and at the same time, I long for connection. It is not a happy place to be and if depression is precipitated by stressors, then one of the greatest we can endure is the breakdown of our intimate relationships. Most research into the effect of unhappy marriages on children focuses on the impact of divorce, assuming, somewhat precipitously, that all marital unhappiness ends in divorce. There are fewer studies of the effect on children of long-term, chronic and often unspoken marital misery that continues over decades, but those that do exist are pretty conclusive.

A study by E. Mark Cummings, a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, examined the impact of parental conflict on children’s future behaviour. It found that the manner in which parents handle everyday marital conflicts has a significant effect on how secure their children feel, and, in turn, significantly affects their future emotional adjustment. Destructive forms of marital conflict—such as personal insults, defensiveness, marital withdrawal, sadness or fear—set in motion events that later led to emotional insecurity and maladjustment in children, including depression, anxiety and behavioural problems.

According to research done by Alan Booth and Paul Amato at Penn State University, marital conflict among continuously married parents was associated with less contact and greater emotional distance between parents and their adult children, irrespective of whether the parents’ marriage had ended in divorce. Although not previously studied, this finding suggests that even children with continuously married, rather than divorced, parents can feel caught between the two. Moreover, growing up with discordant parents is linked with elevated levels of psychological distress, even after children have left the parental home.