Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (6 page)

Tom grew more and more miserable, until he was almost speechless with pain; handling his difficulties by shutting down emotionally or disappearing for days. I knew he could not bear to leave his children or break up the family even though, as he said, the relationship that should have pinned it all together was already broken. Only the surface remained intact. I did not want him to leave his children but I knew, too, that I could not bear him to leave me. He had to and so we agreed to part, again, only to come back together when the pain and longing grew too much for either of us to bear. And so it went on.

The crying grew worse. I was scarcely sleeping. I started to cry in unexpected places, at inconvenient times. One day, I cried at work. I was mortified. I never cry at work. I decided that I was exhausted, and took a week off. It was the end of June. I spent the days walking around London, wearing dark glasses, with tears streaming down my face. I walked for hours, every day. Looking back, I see that I was trying to walk my way out of depression.

I could not see colour, I could see only in black and white. I thought it was strange, but not unduly so.

Later, I found a quote from the American humorist Art Buchwald describing his depression: ‘Everything was black. The trees were black, the road was black. You can’t believe how the colours change until you have it. It’s scary.’

And I thought, so I’m not the only one.

At the time, I paid no attention to my monochrome world. Everything was strange. My life was strange. There were no fixed points left.

After that week of near total collapse, I went back to work. I sat through meetings, flew to Milan and Paris, tried to keep my staff inspired and lively. An editor is nothing if they cannot give inspiration, leadership, a sense of belonging. A magazine is nothing without people; without the people who make it, it does not exist. My job was to keep those people happy and anyway I had grown inordinately fond of them. I said nothing about my own misery. I hoped, passionately, that it did not show.

I felt so desperate that I asked a friend who knew about such things to recommend a therapist. Back then, I was not a person who did therapy, wanted therapy, talked therapy. I used to rather despise the notion, believing it to be the preserve of the severely emotionally damaged or the simply narcissistic.

I went, but unwillingly. I told nobody. The therapist practised out of a mean little room, decorated in shades of beige and sage, the unrelentingly dreary colours of analysis. There was a vase of dusty dried flowers, a box of tissues and a woman with unkempt hair who wore, to my cynical and weary eyes, a series of unnecessary scarves. I later discovered that this mannered Bohemia seemed to be the uniform of therapists of this sort.

Even as I shrank from my surroundings and the middle-aged woman in front of me, I cried. I had no idea why.

Even as I cried, I answered questions. What did I do? Did I have children? What was my relationship like with my mother? I felt, in a surreal way, that I was trapped at a dinner party with some impertinent stranger. Worse, with a stranger who, judging from her chilly impersonal manner, I was unlikely to discover anything about. She was steeped in Freud, in the analytical methods that demand from the therapist a blank, anonymous presence intended to throw the patient (their problems, as well as any solutions) into sharp relief. It was the wrong sort of therapy for me but knowing nothing about therapy or the various sorts on offer, I did not question it or her methods. I simply found it hateful; just as I grew to hate many of the other therapists I sat facing in the months and years to come. But I kept going back, just as I kept taking the antidepressants I thought did nothing for me. I did it because I did not know what else to do. I did it with reluctance, with no desire at all to engage. I did it because I thought that if I expressed my misery, it would go away.

A little while later, on a grey Sunday afternoon, I was sitting alone in my rented flat and feeling low. I turned on the television, for company. A photograph of Paula Yates flashed up on the screen and a voice said, ‘Paula Yates is dead.’ I turned the television off, and then turned it back on again, as if, by chance, I had tuned in to some unknown, extraterrestrial channel. ‘Paula Yates is dead,’ said the voice. ‘She was found in the early hours of this morning.’

I could not believe it. I loved Paula. We had been friends for twenty years. We met when I was a young journalist sent to interview her about her book,
Rock Stars in Their Underpants
. She was well known but not particularly famous. This was a few years before LiveAid and before Bob became, as she put it, ‘a saint’. And before she became, as she also put it, ‘the Antichrist’.

We started talking and we just carried on, for years. I used to spend weekends with Paula and Bob in the country, just so we could talk. She made me laugh more than anyone else I have ever known, except perhaps Nigel. Depressives, when they are not being depressed, are often the funniest, most blackly comic people around.

She had been away for the summer, was full of life and plans for the future. How could she be dead? We had talked on the phone only the day before and had arranged to see each other the following week. More than that, over the past year we had spent a long time discussing our mutual difficulties, and how we were trying to handle them. And, even though Paula was in a far darker place than I was, she still kept trying to pull me through. ‘We must be strong,’ she kept saying, ‘we’ll get through this. I know we will.’

And now she was gone. I shouted at her face, laughing on the television screen. ‘You promised. You promised that we’d both get through.’

Miss Marigold, I called her, because, like Susie, Paula loved cleaning, just as she loved her pink rubber gloves. She wore them with diamonds, a cocktail frock and high stiletto shoes. She wore them as you would imagine Paula would. None of it was fake; it was simply the way she was. She even wore cocktail frocks on Sunday mornings, in the garden.

She loved her pink rubber gloves because she loved to clean, to try to restore order to her somewhat chaotic life. When she was admitted to the Priory with severe depression, they sat her in the hospital garden and filled her room with torn-up pieces of newspaper. Then she was taken back to her room and made to sit there, amid the torn-up newspapers, without cleaning up.

She thought this was hysterical. ‘The press kept saying I was put away for drug and alcohol addiction. Actually, they locked me up for being a housewife.’

She turned her stay in the Priory into a fine, comic turn, punctuated with stories. I remember her sitting at lunch, regaling me. Her face was free of make-up and she was wearing the tortoiseshell glasses she so rarely used in public. She looked pretty, and so alive.

‘I used to walk up and down the corridor in the Priory,’ she said, ‘with Tiger in my arms, whispering into her ear, “You are my heroine.” And suddenly, all the doors in the corridor would shoot open and all the druggies would stick their heads out of the doors and say, “Heroin? Did somebody mention heroin?” ’

And then she threw her blonde head back and laughed in that hiccupping, infectious way she had.

I changed therapists, hoping for relief. I disliked the second one more, even, than I had disliked the first. She worked out of a larger room, but one decorated in the same dreary beige and sage. Her hair was set and blow dried, like a helmet. I wanted to mess it up, rumple it out of shape. She wore camel skirt suits and sat stiffly, hands clasped in her lap. She talked hardly at all.

At the time, I did not know that there are many kinds of therapy or that the particular sort she practised was wrong for me. Nor did I know that she was wrong for me, simply because I did not like her and could not warm to her.

I thought therapy was a sort of magic, that you just kept talking and the very act of talking unlocked some forgotten key. I did not know that there are good therapists and bad therapists or even that a therapist might be good for one person and bad for another. I knew nothing except that I was in pain and that I must do something, anything, to get rid of it.

Very soon after Paula died I was sacked as editor of
Red
. Almost the last thing I did before I left was to write her obituary. The management wanted more celebrities, more shopping, more make-up secrets. They wanted fewer words. I didn’t argue. I knew, before they said it, that I was the wrong person for their job. I had always known it. The magazine I wanted to make, and the magazine they wanted to sell, were two different creatures.

I should have left months before; should have admitted defeat and made a graceful exit. I should have admitted I was wrong, had always been wrong in even considering the job about which they pestered me for six long months before I agreed to take it. I should have listened to my instincts and understood that I could never have done what they wanted.

Except that I could not admit it. I could, and would, admit nothing. Even as they sacked me, it was all, I said, fine. I said that it was the way of the world. It was corporate culture. It was the way magazines are. I said it was all manner of things—except the truth.

The truth was that I believed that if I was really good at anything, I was good at editing a magazine. I had believed it for years, since the success of
Elle
. I had been told it for years. So the failure of my editorship of
Red
was not simply the failure of a job. It was the destruction of an absolute truth about myself.

With it went a large part of my identity. With it came an overwhelming sense of loss, on top of all the others. I was crap at my job, I was crap at marriage, I was crap at love. I had lost at them all. A good friend had died. I had lost her too. And depression, as many experts have pronounced, is almost always about loss.

I did not know that at the time.

I left the job quickly, by the end of the week. The following Monday, I woke, as usual, at three twenty. There was a storm, rain lashed at the windows of the bleak, rented flat in which I was living. It was cold, and damp. I had run out of cigarettes and the shops were closed. I wanted to go home, to the house I had known and loved for ten years. But I was already at home. I could not go to work. There was no work. I wanted my child but I knew that in that state, I wasn’t much of a mother. I wanted my friends but I did not know how to tell them what I felt.

If losing my job had been my only loss that year, I doubt I would have fallen so hard or gone so low. Loss, or abrupt and unwelcome change, causes stress, and extreme stress, according to the scientists, changes the chemistry of the brain. Those chemical changes are always found in those suffering with severe depression. Depression doesn’t cause the changes. Depression reflects them. And my brain was changing, fast.

It was October. That’s when it got really bad. I told nobody. I did not know what to say. I was too ashamed, and confused. I still had a place to live, money from a redundancy payout, a child I adored, friends I loved, work if I wanted it. What right did I have to be depressed?

I thought that if I opened my mouth to talk, the tears would start and they would never stop. And so I avoided talking, to anyone. I sacked the therapist, by letter. In the letter, I lied. I said that I was better, that I had no more need of her services. She wrote back. She said that I was more in need of therapy than anyone she had ever met.

I thought she was mad, or greedy, but I think now that she recognised the stress I had been through within the space of ten months. She saw the danger in that accumulation of loss and perhaps, even, that I was on the edge of a breakdown. It was just that she did not tell me. Or perhaps she knew I did not want to hear.

Three months later, I was admitted to hospital with severe clinical depression. In all those losses, I had lost myself.

People generally think of a nervous breakdown as a sudden, cataclysmic event rather than the gradual erosion of a person, a slow and sad disintegration of a human being. Inevitably there is some story in a newspaper of a man who has suddenly gone mad with a shotgun, of a woman who has driven herself and her young children over a cliff.

This is madness writ large; this is a breakdown of dramatic force but for most they happen, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

On the day I finally lost touch with reality, with my life, I had gone to see Jonathan and Molly in our family home. I had been awake, as usual, since three twenty and crying since I woke. I could see no future and neither did I want one.

But I had a child, who I had promised I would go and see. So I got dressed, which seemed to me such a superhuman feat that I was trembling with exhaustion by the time I was ready. I stumbled down the road, holding tight to the low garden walls because I found it hard to see where the pavement ended and the road began. The noise of cars was deafening and brutal. Every time one flashed past, my whole body jumped in sympathetic response, leaving me shaken and fragile.

I said nothing to Jonathan of my state when I arrived at the house. I was hoping to get through the day, just as I had hoped to get through all the others. It was January but the sun was brilliant, our kitchen filled with the cold, hard light of winter sunshine. The light seemed too harsh; I longed for the cloistered gloom of my bedroom, the curtains drawn fast against the sun.

I had, too, a pronounced sense of unreality but I put that down to the strangeness of our situation; married but unmarried, friends bound together by past intimacy and that most precious of all things, our child.

In the kitchen, everything looked the same, yet utterly different. The coffee pot had been moved from its usual place and I could see, just from a glance, that nobody had wiped down the door of the fridge. It had gathered a faint yellow sheen.

I looked away. This was not my house any more.

It was Sunday morning, which, throughout our marriage, had followed a particular routine. This morning was no different. Jonathan was sitting at his usual place at the kitchen table, his back to the window. I sat opposite him, also in my usual place. Molly, as was usual, was watching television in her playroom. The newspapers were spread across the table and we, as usual, were talking.

It was all so normal, yet everything was different. Perhaps that was why I could make no connection. It looked, to me, like a scene from a play that I was witnessing. I could not say that I was even engaged enough to be watching it. Any focus was absent. I felt a sudden, claustrophobic grip of terror and of grief. Terrible grief.

Jonathan finished telling a story. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘how are you?’

I was staring out of the French windows at my beloved garden, which I had spent ten years creating. I loved that garden, used to spend every moment I had in it. I knew in which corners the snowdrops would be blooming, the white hellebores bursting from bud and the viburnum flinging out its cloying pink and white scent. Once I would have been out there on my knees, watching the snowdrops push their pointed, green noses out of the hard, cold ground. I would have been welcoming the spring, celebrating every moment of extra light, counting down the lengthening of the days. Now, it seemed meaningless.

‘What?’ I said.

He laughed. ‘I said, how are you?’

‘I can’t do this any more.’

Jonathan frowned. ‘What can’t you do?’

‘All of it. Any of it. I can’t get back to myself. I can’t seem to make sense of anything at all.’

‘Sal, what are you talking about?’

I dropped my head.

‘Sal?’

And so I said the only thing I knew to be true. I said, ‘I don’t know how to look after Molly. I don’t know how to keep her safe. I don’t know how to be here for her.’

‘But you’re a really good mother. She adores you.’

‘It’s not that. It’s not safe. I’m not safe. I want to die.’

It was the first time I had said it to anybody. The first time I had said it out loud. I had been struggling hard for nine months and I knew, then, that it was over.

Jonathan went very still. ‘What did you say?’

I looked out at my garden. ‘I want to die. That’s all I want. Every single day, all I want to do is die.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

I said nothing.

‘Sal? How long?’

I turned my head so he would not see my tears. Why? I had cried in front of him before. We had been married for ten years. ‘Weeks, months. I don’t know. A long time.’

‘Why didn’t you say something?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t feel safe.’

‘Where don’t you feel safe? In your flat? Out on the streets? Here?’

I raised my hands, clutched them around my head.

‘Here.’

Neither of us knew what to do. It was obvious, even to me, that I needed help but I had no idea how to go about getting it. Neither of us knew a psychiatrist. Neither of us knew anything about psychiatrists and while I had seen those two therapists for a short while, I realised that I knew nothing about mental illness. I did not even know what mental illness was. I just knew that I was not right.

Fortunately, Jonathan is not a man to allow ignorance to be any impediment. ‘You’re going to bed,’ he said, ‘and I’m getting on the phone.’

When I woke, it was dark. Jonathan had, through a friend of a friend, made contact with a psychiatric hospital. They would see me the following morning for an assessment.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘Apparently they have to assess you, to see if you need to see a psychiatrist.’

‘OK,’ I said, although the word made me flinch.

Jonathan made me stay in bed and cooked me scrambled eggs for supper, although I protested that I was not, actually, physically ill.

‘I think it’s best,’ he said.

And it was. I was so tired I could hardly sit up. The eggs were perfect but the plate was scorching. I watched the eggs fry before my eyes.

‘The plate’s too hot,’ Jonathan said.

I smiled. He never burns food, only plates. I ate the eggs, to please him. They tasted like scorched rubber.

The next morning, Monday, was grey with rain. The hospital was a place I was to come to know well in the years that followed but at the time, I was so confused and frightened I remember little of my surroundings or what was said, except it was a male nurse who conducted my assessment. He had a clipboard and the room was green. I remember that. Green is supposedly the most psychologically soothing of all colours, presumably because it is found in nature. All mental hospitals are painted green, in one way or another. I have come to hate green rooms.

The nurse asked me questions. About food. About sleep. About pleasure and about pain. And then he put down his clipboard. ‘You need to see a psychiatrist as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘I’ll see who’s available.’

I met the nurse again, a year later, but did not recognise him. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It happens all the time. You weren’t quite all there when we first met. How are you doing?’

I looked around me. I was back in the hospital.

‘Not good,’ I said.

The psychiatrist was expecting the imminent arrival of his fourth child. He kept his mobile switched on. ‘Just in case,’ he said. It lent the proceedings a somewhat surreal quality; this child who was waiting to be born, and this woman who was wanting to die.

The psychiatrist was short and slightly stout with dark hair and eyes that were a little too close together. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt and an anonymous tie. His expression was neither indifferent nor sympathetic; it was simply clinical. It was as if he was conspiring to be almost entirely anonymous. Which, I suppose, he was. I was the focus of our interest, not him.

‘You don’t appear to be very well,’ he said.

I was leaking tears; slow, grey cold water. They slipped down my face in silence. I hardly noticed them. We talked for a while. Or, rather, he asked questions, and I answered them. About my disrupted sleep, my indifferent eating, my disintegrated marriage, my ruinous love affair, my stalled career; about my family, friends, my child. About pleasure (none), pain (too much) and hope (entirely absent). It was not a conversation so much as a list of situations and symptoms.

‘Do you think about death?’ he asked.

‘No, not death as such. I think about not wanting to be alive.’

‘Have you thought about particular methods of dying?’

‘I don’t care. Just so long as I do.’

He nodded as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a person to say. Which, I suppose, to him it was. ‘How long have you had those thoughts?’

How long? Two months? Six? A year? Time seemed to have lost all meaning.

‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. I keep trying to sort my head out, to think my way out of this, and I can’t. Nothing is actually wrong. My life is fine. I have somewhere nice to live, lots of friends, work if I want it. I don’t understand why I can’t pull myself out of this.’

He said that a marriage breaking up, moving house three times and being sacked from a job, all in the space of a year, didn’t seem fine to him.

‘Even so,’ I said. ‘None of it is bad enough to make you want to die. People go through it all the time.’

‘It is enough,’ he said, ‘to send you into depression. You can’t think at the moment, let alone think your way out of depression.’

I shrugged. ‘Most people get depressed when a marriage breaks up.’

He looked at me in silence for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not like this. You have severe clinical depression.’

‘Oh.’

‘Now I’m going to tell you something you won’t like.’

I thought he already had. ‘What?’

‘I think you should go into hospital,’ he said, ‘and as soon as possible.’

People react badly to mental hospitals. A friend told me recently that when her husband heard that I was being admitted to a psychiatric unit, he was appalled. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘that can’t be necessary. She can’t be that bad.’

No, not bad, or even mad. Just sad.

As for me, I was neither upset nor appalled. For the first time in months, I felt hope. I was going into hospital. I was going to be made better. I thought they would fix my pain, put a plaster cast on my broken head. A few days in bed, some medicine and I would be good as new.

It wasn’t quite like that. It wasn’t like that at all, just as a mental hospital was not as I imagined it at all. Not that I had ever spent much time imagining it. It was, to be perfectly truthful, the last place I thought I would ever find myself.

The first unit I was in took up a floor in a big London hospital. My psychiatrist chose it because the food was good. If that sounds arbitrary, that’s because it was. There’s little to choose between mental hospitals, even posh private ones. Food is a good enough reason although, as it turned out, it was enough to drive anyone mad. All food orders had to be placed two days ahead. As few of us there could even remember who we were, let alone what day it was, the food we had ordered on a Tuesday night for a Thursday lunch was a constant and not always delightful surprise.

Really, when it came to a mental hospital, I cared about only one thing.

‘I must be able to smoke,’ I said. ‘If I can’t, I shall go mad.’ I paused. ‘Madder,’ I added.

He did not smile. Psychiatrists don’t like jokes about madness. They’ve heard them all before.

‘I’m sure you can smoke,’ he said.

Of course I could smoke. Most depressives, as I was later to discover, smoke. There’s even research that claims that of the several thousand chemicals in cigarettes, one, or several, may affect mood in much the same way as a group of antidepressant medications called monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs). These MAOIs effectively increase levels of specific neurotransmitters involved in the regulation of mood. So smoking may be a way that depressives try to self-medicate their symptoms. If private psychiatric hospitals instituted a no-smoking policy, half the rooms would stay empty.

The psychiatric unit was modern and light but the rooms had hospital beds and sharp, dark hospital smells. The windows were locked fast and the doors to the ward were reinforced plate glass with automatic locks. There was no way out. But I had a room to myself, and a door that closed, for which I was grateful. Not that it stayed closed for long. An endless stream of doctors, nurses and in-house psychiatrists eddied in and out of the room, taking my pulse, tapping my chest, taking blood, filling in forms, asking endless questions. I had no idea that depression was so medical.

On the first night, three nurses lined up at the end of my bed. They were all from the Caribbean, their black hair bound in tight, bouncing braids, their smiles white and strong and they looked so much like a hip-hop version of the Three Degrees, I could not help but smile in return.

They talked in syncopated rhythm, too, each entering on cue as the other finished speaking.

‘We are the night shift.’

‘If you need us, all you have to do is press the bell or come to the nurses’ station.’

‘But we’ll be checking you every fifteen minutes all through the night,’ finished the third. ‘Just to be sure.’

‘To be sure of what?’ I asked, even as I realised that I was on suicide watch. They would be checking me to see that I had not killed myself.

‘To be sure that you’re happy, honey,’ said the first.

Molly, then nine, came to visit me and was enchanted to discover that my bed went up and down if she pressed a small red button. We sat in the bed for some time going up and down, up and down.

‘Are you sick?’ she said.

‘Well, I am now,’ I said. ‘I’m sea sick.’

She laughed for a bit. ‘But proper sick,’ she said. ‘Are you proper sick?’

I told her what my psychiatrist had told me, that depression is an illness, like pneumonia. When it gets really bad, it needs doctors and nurses and a hospital bed to make it better.

She thought about that for a bit. ‘OK,’ she said.