A friend of mine, who works as a teacher, texted me a couple of days ago to ask permission to use a blog entry of mine for a lesson she was planning. I asked which entry, and she said she was after the one I'd written yesterday. I can only assume she'd misread the date on my last entry, but it did rather spur me on to thinking I ought to get back into writing on here.
So, it's been a year since my last entry, and it has been quite a year. Quite a hell of a year really. The long and the short of it is that I was diagnosed with depression in August 2008, and since then I've been on anti-depressants and have been attending counselling for some of that time. I'm now in the process of coming off my medication, all being well, which I'm very glad of, but it has been a pretty rubbish time all told.
Depression, and most mental illnesses, are not terribly well understood. I can only imagine that it's quite hard to quantify, categorise, diagnose and treat illnesses which take place entirely within the patient's head with very few outward symptoms. I'm inclined to believe that depression is frequently misdiagnosed, be that false positives for want of any other diagnosis or false negatives for lack of the patient perceiving any problem or the doctor spotting it. There's also a very palpable stigma surrounding mental illnesses which follows from the lack of understanding, which makes it rather hard to discuss with people.
One of the people I was able to discuss things with was a tutor of mine on a professional course I'm attending, who informed me that he'd also suffered with depression at university. He said that he'd found the most crippling thing about it to be the utter loss of motivation that comes with depression, and I absolutely must agree. Depression can rob you of the desire to do anything at all, with the ultimate potential result of not even wanting to get out of bed in the morning. I was never that bad, but I can certainly attest to a lack of motivation to do anything productive, be it work, study, learn new things, go out... I found myself wanting to do nothing but kill the time, and would perhaps have gone on that way until time killed me. I could spend hours in front of the TV or computer, watching rubbish, playing games I didn't particularly enjoy, constantly refreshing forum pages on the web, for no other reason than that it passed the time. I didn't find it easy to take pleasure in many things, or to take pride in anything I did manage to do. This is bad news for married life, family life, work life... you name it. Perhaps tied in with the lack of motivation is the hopelessness - the lack of belief that things can ever be better, or that you can change anything. I have an irrational fear at the best of times whenever I'm ill or have a headache or a hangover that I will be left feeling that way for the rest of my life. Depression extended that despair to bring in fears about my work, my capacitiy as a husband and father, my potential to be happy. It's very hard to go through life with such a bleak outlook, and it's not a wonder that I was occasionally suicidal.
I'd been feeling like that for quite a while - I wouldn't even like to guess how long, maybe years - when I went to the doctor's in August last year. Depression is assessed using a little 10 questions survey, which seems a rather blunt instrument for such a complex and varied condition, but such is the lot of the GP handling hundreds of patients with every ailment going. Either way, the computer program "confirmed" my depression and I was duly prescribed anti-depressants and counselling, which I think it's fair to say have helped quite a lot, though not without their problems, mainly relating to the medication. Anti-depressants are somewhat renowned for their side effects, and it's not unusual to have to try numerous types before finding something that doesn't leave you fast asleep, wide awake, sick as a dog or even more suicidal than you were before. Even given all the potential side effects it can essentially boil down to choosing between actual depression and a collection of potentially depressing side effects. Mercifully the first pills I tried were largely OK for me (though a friend of a friend tried the same brand and got the shakes and chronic insomnia - go figure) though with some rather cruel side effects. No sex drive while depressed? No sexual ability while on anti-depressants. No motivation to do anything while depressed? No ability to concentrate while on anti-depressants. Still, at least the desire to step in front of a train was fading.
So, here I am a year on. I've finished counselling for now and I'm slowly coming off the pills. I'm feeling more positive about things and a lot more motivated to get on and do things. The difficulty now is in making up for lost time and picking up the pieces of everything that was damaged in the interim. I've a fair bit of catching up to do in my marriage, my studies, my employment... It's quite difficult trying to make up the ground on everything, as though I've been in stasis for however long while everything around me has slowly decayed.
Still, I am at least still married, still a father, still employed and still alive. In other news, my second daughter has been born and I've bought a Mac, so it hasn't been a totally rubbish year.
