Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (24 page)

Slowly, the spring began to unfold, one day bleak and frozen but the next, a morning of such brilliant, intense blue it hurt to look. Green shoots began to appear on the hard brown sticks and the garden softened and swelled as if taking a deep breath of pleasure. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone and we were back in the grip of an iron cold snap.

My moods, too, were changeable. One morning I would wake into an intense, almost electric energy, filled with good humour and possibility. It would last for a few days, during which I became euphoric and voluble—sometimes, alarmingly so—and then, just as suddenly, it would be gone.

Somehow, that was worse. The contrast between the light and the dark felt almost unbearably sharp, and the dark a colder, bleaker place than I remembered when I spent all my time encased in it.

My psychiatrist changed my medication. I had begun to hate the side-effects of the tricylic drugs I was taking, which are known to affect memory, concentration and intellectual performance. I felt drugged and slow, even when my brain was pushing for action and the bloated constipation they induce made me feel generally lousy. No wonder they’re known as ‘dirty drugs’.

I went on Prozac. Pretty soon, I was intensely suicidal again.

I came off Prozac.

He felt we should try one of the new breed of SSRIs, Escitalopram, which had just been launched, and was said to be a more potent and selective inhibitor of serotonin reuptake than the older SSRIs as well as having a higher tolerability profile, which he felt might suit me.

He was right. I tolerated the drug pretty well, but my moods continued to shift alarmingly. Bright days were intense but the dark days were a deep and dirty black.

I began to drink again.

I had been stopping and starting for months, attending AA meetings on and off, but I could not convince myself that I was a drunk. I was simply depressed. The past year had been difficult. Of course I drank.

At about the same time, I met Elizabeth and went back into therapy. It was tough and difficult work as I sought to unravel the knots of pain that had somehow gathered within me.

Elizabeth, among her many trainings, is a specialist in alcoholism and addiction. With her, I knew I could not avoid or evade. I knew she could smell the drink on me when I turned up, hungover and withdrawn, for our sessions.

‘Your liver’s packing up,’ she said. ‘It can’t process the amount you’re drinking. Once that happens, it starts coming out of the pores of the skin which, as you know, is the body’s biggest organ.’

I knew that. I could smell stale alcohol on my skin, even after I had taken a bath. I was a mess, and I looked it. My face was bloated, my eyes narrow and reddened, my skin blotchy. I had constant heartburn and diarrhoea; I felt like I had been submerged in acid. Drinking made me gag. Every swallow tasted acrid and burning, like lighter fuel, but still I could not stop.

By then, I had switched from wine to vodka. I wanted oblivion, and fast. In the depth of my dirty black moods, wine took too long to have an effect. So did pouring a measure of drink into a glass. I drank straight from the bottle, usually in bed, in the afternoon. Then, I would finally fall asleep for a few hours and wake up, wretched and ill. There is only one cure for a hangover, other than time. Another drink. And so I would spend my evenings alone, cradling the bottle, slumped on the sofa in front of the television.

‘I know it’s a slow form of suicide,’ I said to Elizabeth.

‘You might die,’ she said calmly, ‘but you’ll go mad first.’

‘I thought I was already mad,’ I said, trying to smile, although my heart wasn’t really in it.

‘Alcohol rots the brain,’ Elizabeth said. ‘One of the final stages of chronic alcoholism is called wet-brain. It is truly horrible.’

I carried on drinking although I did not drink every day. I would stop for a week, ten days or three weeks. And then something, anything, would give me an excuse for another drink and I’d be off again.

Spring finally came. The earth grew warm and yielding. I began to plant up the garden, but in a mood of strange indifference. I kept telling myself that I was planting for the future, for the summer, the autumn, the next spring but I could find no pleasure in it. I still could not see a future. ‘The time I was really worried,’ Nigel told me recently, ‘was when you stopped caring about your garden.’

I called Tom, just to hear his voice. We had not seen or spoken to each other for a year.

‘I wanted to say I was sorry,’ I said. ‘I hope we are still friends.’

‘There is nothing to be sorry for,’ he said. ‘And of course we’re still friends. My affection for you has never changed.’

He did not suggest we meet, and neither did I. Since we parted, I had felt his absence so sharply it had become a presence, huge and constant. I missed him, every minute and every hour of every day. I did not say so.

There was no going back but it seemed that I could not go forward either. My heart had broken and I knew no way to mend it, except with vodka. A few men appeared on my horizon, but either I did not take them seriously, or I was cruel in my indifference. All my affections and my certainties lay elsewhere.

I had always thought that Tom and I would be together. It had seemed so clear to me, right from the start. I was wrong. Even in my absolute certainty, I had been wrong. Yet I could not believe it. Sometimes, I felt that it was just some cruel joke or even a slip of memory. We had not parted after all. It was a nightmare, a trick of my mad, deluded mind.

I knew, though, that it was not and neither was I deluded enough to think that he would come back. I knew him too well, knew how he could pull down the steel trap of his mind and shutter away his heart.

I dealt with the pain by drinking. I dealt with all pain by drinking. Severe depression does not suddenly lift or disappear. It recedes slowly and, even as it recedes, can suddenly reappear in brief but violent onslaughts. I knew I was not helping it by drinking, but during those assaults I was in such agony, I did not know what else to do. I took to wandering the London streets late at night, buying vodka from late-night stores, sitting on walls and drinking straight from the bottle. I was not frightened of being mugged or murdered. I thought that as I had failed to kill myself, somebody else might do the job for me.

This was my private behaviour. In front of Molly and my friends, I tried to put on a good front and act as normally as I could. My worst drinking was when Molly was with Jonathan, which she was for five days at a time. Often, I would spend that time alone, avoiding the phone, never speaking to another person. On the day before Moll came home, I would stop drinking and sober up for her arrival. I would stay sober for the five days that she was with me and when she left, and I was alone again, I would drink again.

Then, one morning, when Molly was due to stay with me for the weekend, I walked up the road to buy some food. When I drank, I rarely ate so I rarely bought food for myself. The only time I ate was when Molly was with me.

So I went to the supermarket, still badly hungover and detoxing from the levels of alcohol I had been absorbing for the previous few days. The experts say that it takes a year for alcohol to leave your system entirely. I had been off drink for a day. My mood was fiercely low although the sun was shining. It was a beautiful day.

I stocked up on organic vegetables, fruit juice and good red meat. As I filled my supermarket trolley, I said to myself that I was a good mother. I knew how to take care of my child. I just did not know how to take care of myself.

I had no intention of drinking until I found myself next to a shelf full of vodka and decided that a quarter bottle would straighten me out, stop the terrible sweating, shaking and the intense pain that was always gathered at my throat.

There were no quarter bottles, they had run out. So I grabbed a full bottle, reasoning to myself that I would drink only one glass, so I could be steady and calm and happy for her when she arrived.

By the time Jonathan dropped Molly off at my flat at lunchtime, I had drunk over half the bottle of vodka. I had been crying for three hours. My mood was as black as I had ever known it, but I tried to be cheerful around her.

I managed to make her some lunch and then she disappeared downstairs, to play on the computer. I went and lay on my bed, the bottle of vodka next to me. I was very drunk and very low. I was also terrified. I was in sole charge of my child, and I was completely out of control. It had never been that bad, even in the depths of depression. I knew, then, that I would die, either by intention and taking my own life or by some stupidly avoidable accident. Either way, I would die.

I could hear Molly, downstairs, singing. As a small child, she woke up singing and went to sleep singing. It always made me smile. I took such pleasure in her happiness. Let joy be unconfined.

As I lay there, I knew that I could kill that joy stone dead if I went on as I was. Worse, I knew that I would.

I called Jonathan and told him that I had stepped over the line, that I was drunk and suicidal, in sole charge of our beloved child.

He came and sat with me, and we talked. I was incoherent and talked of nothing but depression, despair and death. Jonathan listened.

Then he said; ‘I think you need to go away, into rehab. You’re an alcoholic.’

I was shocked. ‘Is it that bad?’

He said, simply, ‘Yes.’

When he left, he took Molly with him.

She gave me a big hug. ‘Get better soon, Mum.’

That night, I stopped drinking. The next morning, I got on the phone to my psychiatrist.

He said, ‘You have become dependent on alcohol. It often happens in severe depression. You medicate to stop the pain, and end up with not one, but two, mental illnesses.’

I was booked into a treatment centre, an addiction unit based inside a large psychiatric hospital. My diagnosis was straightforward. Severe clinical depression with severe alcohol dependency.

I called my parents, to tell them I was going back into hospital. ‘But you’re better,’ Dad said.

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Yes, you are. You’re better. You seem so much better.’

‘I’m not, Dad.’ I didn’t tell him about the alcohol. I couldn’t bear to. ‘Maybe this time. Third time lucky. I’ll be away for a month, twenty-eight days.’

‘Twenty-eight days? That seems like a long time.’

Not a long time, I thought. Not where I’m going.

‘Yes, I know. I’ll call you when I get out.’

‘Can’t we call you?’ He sounded fretful. I knew then that he was really worried.

‘They don’t like us to take calls. I’ll be fine, Dad. I promise.’

‘I’ll try anyway,’ he said.

‘Thanks Dad.’

‘I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

I called Jonathan. ‘I’m going into rehab. I’m going to get better, I promise.’

‘I know you will. Somebody asked me yesterday if I thought you had the strength to get through this. I said, if you tell Sal to turn left, she’ll turn right. But if she decides to turn left, she’ll turn left.’

I laughed. Then I cried. More than anything, I hoped that he was right.

Step One

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable
.

Annie works for a large, corporate law firm. She is forty-five years old and has fine blonde hair and skin so pale, it’s almost translucent. She has been a heroin addict since she was sixteen. Now, she takes methadone, the legal substitute. She started taking it to get off heroin. That was ten years ago. She used to get methadone on prescription from the NHS, but these days she pays. It was too humiliating waiting in line with the other smack heads at the chemist to be given her state-approved daily allowance.

Annie’s eyes are blue, I think. It’s hard to tell, because most of the time they’re half closed. Her head lolls forward then jerks sharply back as a counsellor asks her a question.

‘Annie? Annie! Are you with us today?’

‘Yes,’ Annie slurs.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Tired.’

‘Tired is not a feeling. It is a physical state. How are you feeling?’

Annie’s eyes snap open and her voice is strong and clear. ‘Fucking pissed off.’ I am amazed to discover she is Irish. I have never heard her speak before.

‘You’re obviously feeling better.’

Annie’s head rolls forward again. ‘Wanna sleep,’ she slurs.

Until last week, Annie was drinking one and a half large (that is, duty-free size) bottles of vodka a day; a chaser for the methadone. She decanted the vodka into an Evian bottle and kept it on her desk, at the law firm. When they got her to the unit, she was half dead. Most of her major organs were on the verge of packing up. They kept her in bed for five days while they detoxed her. Three times a day she has to visit the nurse to get massive vitamin shots; mainly B12, because alcohol leaches it out of the system. A lack of B12 is implicated in depression.

Annie is not depressed, she says, except about the injections in her arse. Oh, and about being in rehab where she does not want to be. She says she likes being half dead. It suits her. She cannot imagine having, or wanting, a life without alcohol or drugs. Something to take the edge off because, ‘life sucks, doesn’t it?’ She is only here because of the law firm. Shape up or ship out, is what they said. She can’t afford to lose her job, even though she hates it. She needs the money to pay for the drugs and alcohol. It does not seem to occur to her that if she got off the drugs, she would not need the money, or even the job. She could take work that she likes. She’s lucky, although she does not see it that way. Her company is paying for her four weeks in rehab—to the tune of £4,000 a week—or, at least, their health insurance is paying.

The brewery Pete works for is paying too. He is part of a team, delivering beer to pubs around London. He can’t drive. He has been drinking since he was eleven, so he has never been sober enough to learn. He heaves the barrels and crates off the lorry and carries them into the pub, where he is given a pint of beer for his pains. He has his first pint at six in the morning, when he clocks on for his shift. He reckons he drinks around eighteen pints of beer a day plus a few whisky chasers in the evening, when he goes down the pub with his mates. Some nights he doesn’t make it home; he passes it out on the grass verge outside the pub.

Pete reckons that eighty per cent of the blokes who work at the brewery are alcoholics. He was unlucky. He got caught, drunk on the job. Or rather, he was unlucky that somebody finally noticed. He was drunk for thirteen years on the job. Pete doesn’t want to be in rehab either. What’s the point? All his mates are drunks. If he doesn’t drink, he won’t have any mates. And what’s the point of a life without mates?

‘How are you feeling Pete?’

Pete scowls at the floor. ‘Stupid.’

He scuffs at the brown carpet with a grubby trainer and blushes as he feels twelve sets of eyes trained on him. We are sitting in a circle, in morning therapy. The counsellor goes round the group, asking each of us in turn how we are feeling. All we talk about are feelings. They say that addicts are bad at locating feelings, or even knowing what they are. They’ve kept them at bay for so long. Addicts say that they are good at feelings. It’s just that they don’t like them much. Having too many feelings is why they drink.

Pete hates feelings. He says they’re rubbish. Nobody in his family has feelings. Or, if they do, they never talk about them.

Therapy starts at 9.30 a.m. and goes on until 12.30, when we stop for lunch. At two o’clock, we start again, until 5 p.m. Then it’s free time until supper at 6.30. At 7.30, we pile into a mini-bus and go to an AA meeting, or a CA meeting (Cocaine Anonymous) or an NA meeting (Narcotics Anonymous). It doesn’t matter if you don’t do coke or smack; you still go to the meeting. An addict is an addict is an addict.

I like the CA meetings best, even though the amounts of coke I’ve done in my life scarcely qualify me for the kindergarten user league. It was an eighties thing; everybody did it, hoping it would turn them into smart, funny contenders. It made me paranoid and aggressive, so I stopped. Lucky, I guess.

CA is filled with young men in their late teens or early twenties dressed in hoodies and baseball caps, crackling with testosterone and energy. Their voices are fast and loud and impatient; they rarely finish one sentence before they’re tumbling over the second. Hard to imagine what they were like when they were wired on coke; a blur of sound and muscle.

One of them, Jamie, is in the unit with us.

‘You all right princess?’ he says, whipping off a baseball cap and bowing a shaved head low over my hand. He looks up with liquid brown eyes. ‘You’re new. They treating you right?’

I smile at him and shrug.

‘They’ve got to be tough, see.’ He jabs a brown finger at his skull. ‘They’ve got to get in here and get the addict out.’

Jamie is seventeen and has been doing drugs since he was thirteen. ‘Only skunk, in the beginning.’ Skunk is the super-strong version of dope, also known as weed, pot, or marijuana, depending on your age. It is thought to cause psychosis or, in some cases, schizophrenia in young men; or at least in young men who may have a predisposition to mental illness. And who’s to know?

From skunk, Jamie graduated to coke and alcohol, sometimes doing twelve grams of coke a day. My head reels at the thought, not to mention the expense. Jamie’s parents are rich; he gets what he wants, when he wants it. As a lark, he liked to drink cocaine in slammers, a gram of coke dumped in a glass of champagne and straight down the hatch. ‘I was stupid,’ he says, although whether he is referring to the drugs poisoning his young system or a waste of good coke is hard to say.

Jamie bottled a bloke because he didn’t like the way he was looking at him. He regrets that. He picked up the nearest bottle off a bar, smashed it and rammed the jagged glass edges straight into the man’s face. It wasn’t the first, or the only time. He smashed up a car, a Merc, because it was parked in the wrong place outside his parents’ house and he has been banned from so many clubs for violence, he can’t remember all their names.

Now he is staring into my eyes in drama therapy. We have been paired up in role play. His face is two inches from mine.

The therapist says, ‘Everyone, I want you to say out loud the emotion you are feeling right now.’

Jamie doesn’t blink. ‘Love,’ he says.

Two days later, Jamie leaves. He has done his twenty-eight days.

Timothy stares after him. ‘I hope he makes it.’

Timothy is gay and smiling. He is in his forties, with glasses and sandy brown, clean-cut hair. His shirts are laundered and his jeans pressed to sharp creases. He is meticulously well mannered, except when he’s drunk. When he arrived at the unit, they had to carry him up the stairs, fighting and swearing like a trooper.

‘Get angry,’ the counsellor says. ‘You won’t get sober until you acknowledge the way you really feel. Get in touch with your emotions. Stop being so pissing polite.’

Timothy sighs. ‘Fuck off and leave me alone.’

‘You’re faking it,’ the counsellor says.

‘I’m not,’ Timothy says mildly. ‘Really, I’m not.’

Timothy worked around the world, moving from one foreign posting to another. He loves to live abroad but he has been transferred back to head office in the UK, where they can keep an eye on him. Timothy is clever and learned but often passed over for promotion because of, ‘a few little incidents’. Only his desperation to get sober reveals how much those lost promotions hurt. ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘Really.’

‘No, you’re not,’ Rosie says. ‘You’re well pissed off.’

Timothy smiles. ‘Probably. But I only know that when I’m drunk.’

Just before she was admitted to the unit, Rosie smashed up her flat in a drunken rage. She doesn’t drink every day, only every few weeks or so, but when she starts, she disappears into a drunken binge that lasts for five days. ‘I lose myself,’ she says. ‘I turn into somebody else.’

Rosie is funny and clever and lives with Sam, who she loves very much. She has a good job and two cats, who she also loves very much. She is in her early thirties and very pretty: blue eyes, peachy skin, glossy auburn hair. When she’s drunk she smashes her fists through doors, screams abuse at strangers and wakes up in unfamiliar beds with naked men, one or sometimes two, who she does not recognise. Her peachy skin is often covered in bruises.

She thinks she is worthless and rotten; somewhere deep in her soul there is a writhing mass of maggots that eat away at her. Sometimes, she gets drunk, to try to kill them. And when she gets drunk, she gets very angry.

Rosie is in the middle of a police case, trying to get a family friend convicted for the sexual abuse he inflicted on her between the ages of eight and thirteen. When she told her mother, her mum didn’t believe her. Or, she said she did, but then she went on being friends with the man who had raped her daughter.

It wasn’t her mum but Rosie who went to the police, when she was in her late twenties. It has taken four years to gather sufficient evidence to build a case. The police are hopeful, even though it happened many years ago.

Rosie wants to be sober when they take the man to court and sentence him. ‘I want to see his face clearly, when they send him down,’ she says. ‘I want to know that I am believed, that somebody is listening to me.’

‘What if they don’t send him down?’ the counsellor says.

Rosie looks away.

In rehab, we spend twenty-eight days getting acquainted with the first three steps of the Twelve Step programme. This is the system of recovery devised by the founders of AA, themselves all former, chronic alcoholics, back in the 1930s. It is based on both practical and spiritual principles and involves acceptance, accountability, faith, trust, self-examination, responsibility and, crucially, helping others. It is believed by its adherents (and by most experts in the field of addiction) to be the best treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction, which is why it is practised in so many drug and alcohol rehabilitation and treatment centres across the world.

There are, obviously, twelve steps in the programme and successful recovery from alcoholism involves learning as well as putting into practice each of the steps and using them as a blueprint for living. As in any other practical (or spiritual) programme, it can take months or even years to fully grasp the principles that lie behind what seems, at first, an intensely simple collection of ideas.

Our first task in rehab is to complete Step One, which we are asked to repeat daily, if not hourly:
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable
.

We do that by telling our life stories, unvarnished, unblemished, no grubby little detail spared. We tell them out loud in front of the group, and then we write them down; five examples of how powerless alcohol has made us and five examples of how unmanageable our lives have become because of alcohol.

And then we read out loud what we have written and we tell it over and over again until, finally, we might be able to see (though not everyone can; denial is a powerful component of addiction) how powerless we are over alcohol, and how unmanageable our lives have become.

We write down the time, say, that we had an important early morning meeting at work and how we said we’d have just one drink the evening before. And how that drink turned into five, or ten, and we were so trashed in the morning that we forgot the meeting. Or pretended to forget. And how we had another drink to make us forget that it mattered or to stop the shakes enough to allow us to crawl, late, into the office. The unmanageability is how we lost our job because we forgot the meeting and appeared in the office, reeking of drink but claiming flu.

We needed another drink to forget how we shouted at the MD for being an uptight arse for sacking us over a little bit of harmless fun. And then we seethed with resentment against that MD and blamed everyone else, except ourselves, and most particularly not the drink.

We didn’t blame the drink because we needed another drink to stop the guilt and the shame which came from shouting at the boss about stuff that was our fault and about letting everybody, but most particularly ourselves, down. We needed the drink so we could hide the truth from ourselves and say it didn’t matter.

And then, of course, we needed money to buy the drink. So we took some grubby little job that was way beneath us. Then we needed another drink to forget the time and the energy that had been spent on our education to turn us into the smart, functioning human beings who we’re fast pissing away on drink, and to forget the love that our mum and dad lavished on us and the sacrifices they made on our behalf. We needed another drink to stop that shame too, and then we needed another because our lives were so piss-awful, who wouldn’t drink?

And then we write down in our notebooks, and across our hearts and our minds,

‘It’s the first drink that does the damage. If you don’t take a drink, you can’t get drunk.’

And then, because it’s so hard to think that we cannot take another drink, ever, we write down,