Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (8 page)

I’m not sure I could cope with that. I’m not sure, even, that I can cope with myself. I have not been out in the real world for a week. I think it might be a shock. All those people, those lights, the harsh cold air of reality.

‘I don’t think so,’ I say.

She is indignant. ‘Why not?’ She beats at the chair with her fists. ‘Why not?’

I put on my coat, resort to rules and regulations. ‘You have to have permission from your psychiatrist.’

Grace starts to whimper. I feel exhausted. My unfamiliar shoes pinch. ‘We’ll ask the nurses,’ I say.

We walk to the nurses’ station. ‘Grace wants to come with me,’ I say, pulling wild please say no faces over the top of her head.

They look at Grace. ‘Now, Grace,’ they say, ‘you know you’re not allowed. You know what happened last time.’

I leave, without a backward glance. I don’t want to know what happened last time. I don’t want to hang out with mad people.

The air is cold and sharp after the cloistered warmth of the ward. Everything feels big and noisy, too bright. Cars hurtle past me, heaps of jagged metal. I shrink into my coat. Even as I shrink I think, how odd. I am not, by nature, a shrinker.

The people in the supermarket look strange, as if they have been recast to bigger proportions, painted in stronger colours. I choose a bunch of flowers, walk to a till, take my purse out of my bag, count out money, hand it over. As I do so, I marvel that I am capable of acting so normal. Except that I am not. My hands are shaking. Sweat is pouring down my back. The effort of being among people, among lights and noise is overwhelming. I want to sit down, right there at the checkout. I used to do this every week, with a trolley full of stuff and a world of recipes in my head. I used to do it and think about twenty other things at the same time. Now, it takes all my concentration to retrieve some money from my bag. I marvel at myself, at how competent I used to be.

I want to cry. I want to explain myself to the people standing around me. I want to say, ‘This is not really me. I am not like this. I am like you. I am not a patient from a mental hospital. I am just an ordinary woman whose mind has gone temporarily wrong.’

And that’s when I realise that all I want to be is an ordinary woman, in an ordinary supermarket, doing her ordinary, everyday shopping.

And I understand how unspeakably wonderful ordinary, everyday life is and how I long to be back there.

I grow to like group therapy. It is consoling, being with people who feel as I do. Sometimes, when the blackness eases in my head, I even feel bored. One of the therapists, let’s call her Meg, bores me. She wears crêpe-soled Mary Janes, toddler shoes with little buttoned straps, and bunched cheesecloth skirts. Her voice is very low, almost a whisper, so the group has to lean forward to catch her words.

‘Attention seeker,’ I think. I am picking up the jargon of therapy fast.

Meg’s hair is clay red, abundant with henna. She is thin; a skinny, whispery woman with a squeaky little temper and a banal way with words. If I met her in another world, I’d get no further than hello. Now, I have to pay rapt attention to her every word. She treats us as if we were children, scolding and encouraging us in turn. I want to punch her. Cheesecloth does that to me. So does depression. I find myself stranded in sudden, almost murderous rages. I can’t keep still, am filled with a fierce, restless agitation. Then, just as suddenly, I am hopeless and helpless with despair and apathy. I can find no middle way. I understand what they mean by an unbalanced mind.

Later, when I am well enough to research my illness, I discover that I may suffer from a form of depression known as agitated depression. The spectrum, major depressive disorder, covers a multitude of conditions. The manifestations of depression are not always passive and inert.

After I have tried to kill myself yet again, I discover the following passage by Kay Redfield Jamison, from her book
Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide
.

I can tick all the boxes: ‘agitation, alcohol, profound emotional upheavals, loss.’ Suddenly, I understood and just as suddenly, found it possible to forgive myself. I spent the months following my suicide attempts in an agony of guilt over trying to take my own life and abandoning my daughter. But when I read about myself in stark black and white, I understood that I was not a terrible, selfish and unfit mother. I was a walking symptom of an illness.

Jane, who took her ECT badly and threw up for two days, is feeling better. She can’t, she says, remember much—or at least not much in the short-term. Who was it brought her flowers? They’re very pretty.

This short-term memory loss goes after a few weeks. Long-term memory is not affected. At least, not usually. I am growing to hate the vague declarations of psychiatric treatment, the airy cross-your-fingers pronouncements. The treatment of mental health is an inexact science. But, as I am slowly coming to understand, depression is an inexact illness.

Meg bores Jane too. We decide to liven things up a little by seeing who can say loony most often. We’re not allowed to say loony in the loony bin. Apparently, it’s too much reality for our poor heads to cope with.

My personal loony best is five, although Jane says I cheat. ‘Talking about Looney Tunes does not count.’

‘Nor does saying you wore loons in the seventies.’

They don’t like jokes in group therapy. Humour is a defence. I am in denial, they say, which is just another word for smartass. I use humour to hide behind, because I cannot bear to feel my feelings, cannot face the truth. I use too many words, they say. I hide behind language. I intellectualise my feelings and then explain them away.

‘Stop using your head, Sally. How do you
feel
?’

‘How can I tell you how I feel if I don’t use words?’

‘Just feel the feelings.’

‘Feelings are thoughts,’ I say. ‘Thoughts are words.’

They sigh. I can see the word ‘difficult’ captured in bubbles above their heads.

‘Feel the feelings,’ they say, again.

And then what? My feelings are stuck in my throat. The feelings that I can’t, actually, put into words.

My psychiatrist tells me that it is time for me to leave the hospital. Not because I am better, but because my health insurance has nearly run out for that financial year. I have been in the hospital for two weeks. It has never occurred to me that I might be forced to leave and nor have I ever thought to ask how long I would be staying. When I was admitted, I was in no state to think about anything, let alone the intricacies of private medical insurance. I just thought that I would stay in hospital until I was better. Isn’t that what happens when you are very sick?

I stare at him numbly.

‘We need to keep the remainder in lieu,’ he says. ‘In case you need a back-up.’

‘A back-up?’

‘We may need to readmit you. And I’d like you to do individual therapy, at least twice a week, perhaps more. You will need money for that. There’s a therapist I’d like to suggest.’

I ignore the suggestion. I don’t want a therapist. I want to be better. I want to be a person who doesn’t need therapy. I want to be the person I used to be. Hospital was supposed to fix that, to fix me. That’s why I agreed to it.

I say nothing. I can think of nothing to say.

‘It’s early days yet,’ he says.

That’s the odd thing about depression. Two weeks in hospital for any other illness seems like a long time. In depression, it is nothing, a brief interlude. In depression, time loses all meaning. The average stay in hospital is six weeks. Some of the people in the unit are staying for three months or even six.

Suddenly, I feel terror at the thought of leaving these safe, airless confines.

‘How am I going to cope?’

‘Why do you think you can’t?’

My psychiatrist looks at me with dispassionate, professional interest. His prognosis is that my depression is not so bad now, at least in practical terms. I can wash and feed myself. It is less likely that I will kill myself, although about that nobody can be sure. Least of all, me.

I look away. Of course I can cope. I am an adult. I have run businesses, houses, marriages. It is absurd to think I can’t, it is my imagination, my poor deluded mind. I hear him say something about attending after-care a couple of mornings a week and getting used to life again. I imagine myself making my way from my flat to the Tube, walking free in the clear, cold air, looking like every other person on the street. Except that I am not like them. I feel too much. I think too much. I can get nothing in proportion. My emotional thermostat has malfunctioned. It is set on full alert. I imagine a red light flashing from my forehead.
WARNING. WARNING. SYSTEM CORRUPTED. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPERATE
.

I look at him and something of my panic must show in my face because he smiles at me and says, ‘It will be easier than you think.’

I see that he is trying to be kind.

‘Perhaps,’ I say.

I have seen people leave this hospital and seen the fear and elation in their faces as they say goodbye. I have seen their terror but never felt it. Until now.

I go and find Jane.

‘I’m leaving,’ I say.

Her face registers nothing. ‘Why?’

‘The insurance has run out. I have no choice.’

‘Are you OK?’

I stare down at my feet, at our feet. Neither of us is wearing shoes. We are barefoot in this asylum. Her toes are square and practical, like her hands. My nail polish has chipped, giving my feet a ragged crimson and white edge, like the frill on the petal of a carnation.

‘I’m scared,’ I say.

She gives me a hug. ‘Of course.’

I am glad that she doesn’t tell me I’ll be fine.

Sarah comes to the hospital to get me. I am moving back, temporarily, into the marital home. Everyone thinks it’s better if I’m not on my own. Everyone except me. I think it would be much better if I were on my own. My ex-husband Jonathan is being kind. Everyone is being kind. It makes me feel like an invalid. I’m not sick, I want to say. I’m just not myself.

Half my stuff is still at the house. The rest is at my flat, which I was in the middle of doing up when I had the breakdown. And that, I suppose, is the way I feel too—neither here nor there.

Sarah stands next to me, her hand on my shoulder. I can feel her need to take me away from all this, from mental illness and hospitals and back to the person I used to be; the person she has known and loved for thirty years. She wants it to be OK, wants this to be just a brief and difficult interlude, a sudden hiccup in an ordinary, unblemished life.

Except it is not like that. I know that this is a beginning, not an end. I linger at the door, staring at my empty room. It is just another hospital room now. I have taken away the cashmere shawl from the chair with the wooden arms. I used it to hide the cushions, which are sick green polyester. I have packed up my old American quilt, which I used to cover up the ugly woven beige and brown bed cover. The flowers in the vases are all dead.

I think back to a time when I was staying in New York, in a brown and orange Howard Johnson hotel, decorated with hideous, unerring precision. The first thing I did after I checked in was to rehang the brown and orange flowered curtains so that the cream lining faced in to the room. I could not bear to sleep amid that cacophony of colour. Every morning, the maid rehung the curtains to face the right way. Every night, I changed them back again. We never met, but we knew each other’s character. Neither of us was the losing type.

‘Are you OK?’ Sarah says.

I step into the corridor. ‘I don’t know. I think so.’

We drive through the black February afternoon. London seems jammed with headlights and noise. It is very cold.

‘Promise you’ll call me every day,’ Sarah says.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I say.

‘Really,’ Sarah says.

‘Really,’ I say.

‘I mean, really call, every day,’ Sarah says, her expression faintly exasperated. She knows me too well. I don’t call her every day, of course. Like all depressives, I like to disappear.

When I came out of hospital, everyone thought that I would be immediately better. I knew otherwise, but said nothing. I could feel the fragility in myself but hoped that I was wrong. If I had known, then, that it would be two years before I felt anything other than black despair, I might not have made it through. I’m glad I didn’t know. If I had, I might have tried to kill myself earlier. Everyone thinks that a suicide attempt is a reaction to something. For me, it was a reaction to nothing. It was a year after I left hospital that I tried to kill myself. A year of blank and terrible loneliness. A year of no improvement.

‘You have resistant depression.’ That’s what my psychiatrist said. I did not know, at the time, what it meant or what its full implications really were. I thought he meant that my resistance was temporary, that it was a passing phase. I did not understand that, in medical terms, it meant that no drug on earth could cure or even touch me.

I thought of a nurse in the psychiatric unit, bringing me my daily drugs. ‘Time for your smarties,’ she said.

I wanted to hit her. I wanted to say to her that they were powerful and dangerous drugs, not harmless sweets. I am not a recalcitrant child who needs my medicine sugared with words. I have not lost my mind, simply mislaid it.

She carried them on a white plastic tray, tipping them into my palm from a tiny cardboard cup then stood over me, gimlet-eyed, to make sure I swallowed them. Some people save them up to kill themselves. Which is pointless. The new breed of SSRI medications will not kill you. The older varieties, the tricyclics, are better for suicide, although you have to take a lot.

In those early days of my illness, I had not touched real despair, although I thought that I had. Real despair came later. Back then, I struggled hard to get better, hanging on to moments of optimism or clarity as if they were passing boats in a stormy sea. My fragility constantly took me by surprise.

Soon after I left the hospital I was standing in the kitchen at home making a cup of tea. Molly, who had just turned nine, jumped out from the shadows and said, ‘Boo!’

I screamed, dropped the cup of scalding tea and burst into tears. Once upon a time, I would have laughed.

Moll shrunk against the wall in terror. ‘Sorry Mum. Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ she cried, holding up her arms as if to ward me off.

I longed to comfort her, to say that everything was all right but I could not speak. I could only cry in great racking sobs and shake, as if I was having convulsions. Molly fled up the stairs, crying for her father.

I collapsed, hysterical, on the floor amid the spilt tea and broken china and as I sat there sobbing, I remembered, ludicrously, a phrase from some long forgotten black and white movie. ‘It’s her nerves, poor thing. Her nerves are shot to pieces.’

‘I am shot to pieces,’ I thought, feeling that my skin had been turned inside out and now the nerves, the blood vessels and the organs were all exposed to the cold and the light. Everything hurt, physically hurt. The shaking would not stop.

Once I had quietened down, I went to find Molly. Jonathan had put her to bed. He was quietly furious. ‘What was all that about?’

‘I don’t know.’

He said nothing. I could see the look on his face. He thought I should know.

I shrugged helplessly. ‘She gave me a fright.’

‘You frightened her.’ His tone was accusing. I realised, then, that he thought that I was better. I had been in hospital. I was cured. I wanted to believe it too, but I knew it wasn’t true.

‘I’m sorry.’ I did not know what else to say. How do you say to someone that you are not in control of your own senses, that you have frightened yourself as much as you have frightened your own child? I looked like me. I sounded like me. But I wasn’t me.

‘I’ll go and see her,’ I said.

‘She’s very upset.’

‘I know.’

Moll’s light was out so I knew she was on best behaviour. I longed for her to be busying herself around the room, desperately trying to be quiet as she arranged her Beanie Babies in random piles—or random, at least, to the naked adult eye.

She was humped under her duvet.

I found her blonde hair and stroked it. ‘Sorry darling.’

A whisper emerged. ‘You frightened me.’

‘Yes, baby, I know. I didn’t expect to find you behind the door.’

A small hand emerged from the duvet, a blue eye peeked out. ‘Sorry, Mummy. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘You didn’t baby. It wasn’t your fault. I upset myself.’

She scrambled up, put her arms around my neck. ‘Is it the depression thingy?’

‘Yes. I’m not quite as well as I thought I was.’

‘Didn’t the hospital make you better?’

‘They tried very hard but it takes longer to get properly well.’

‘Poor Mummy. Never mind, you’ll feel better soon,’ she said, patting me on the back. She did that often when I was ill, her arms wrapped around me, her little hand busy on my back. ‘There, there,’ she murmured into my neck. ‘There, there.’

It is what I used to say to her when she was tiny.

I remember little of the months between the time that I left hospital and went back in again, except that there were eight of them.

I moved back into my flat and struggled through the days and nights. Everything I did, or tried to do, was blanketed with depression. Time lost all meaning, the days and nights went topsy turvy.

There is an entry in a journal I kept erratically. It reads: ‘People call. I answer the phone. In that way it is a good day.’

The telephone, which I have never liked, became a torment. I answered it less and less until, eventually, I stopped answering it altogether. My friends knew to leave a message and, when I was feeling stronger, I would call back. Feeling stronger sometimes took days or even weeks. The only person I could bear to call was Sarah and then, not as often as I should. I did not, at this time, know Nigel. I met him in the second mental hospital.

‘Leave me a message every day,’ Sarah said. ‘You don’t have to use many words. Just “I’m good” or “I’m bad” or “I’m shit.” Just so I can hear your voice.’

Just so she knew I wasn’t dead.

Often, I lied, said that I was feeling fine even as I wondered how I could get through the next minute, let alone the next hour. If I could convince Sarah that I was feeling fine, perhaps I could convince myself. Perhaps, saying the words out loud would make them so.

Sometimes it took me hours, a whole day, to pick up the phone. Often, I practised speaking before I telephoned, trying to inject the words with just the right amount of lightness, attempting to get to the end of a sentence before my voice collapsed. If Sarah’s answer machine picked up, I knew I could usually manage a brief message. If she answered the phone herself, I knew I would be found out.

She always knew if I was low, no matter how hard I tried to pretend, no matter how hard I practised the right, careless tone. I could lie to her. My voice could not.

‘I thought we had an agreement,’ she always said, ‘I thought I could rely on you to tell me the truth.’

The truth? The truth was that I wanted, passionately, to be dead. How do you tell your best friend that? How do you tell anyone that?

I had, by then, abandoned all pretence of work. My editors, on various newspapers and magazines, called less and less. As I did not return their calls, they understandably gave up. I could not bear to explain to them that I could not write or even, by that time, read. Words made no sense to me. I made no sense to me so how could I make sense to anyone else? If journalism is about anything, it is about making sense of the world in which we live.

Words, sense, the very identity that kept me moored and anchored to the world had abandoned me. I was lost and that loss was catastrophic. Who are you when you are no longer who you are? What do you do with a self that is no longer your self? If you don’t know who you are, how do you go on living? If you cannot live as yourself, who and what is it that you are living for?

My daughter.

I went on living for Molly. She was my bright star, the fixed and living point in my dead universe.