Moon rising.
Hi.
My name’s Janet.
I get depressed.
I have thought for many months about writing this post. It was one that needed to be written when I was in a quiet and calm mood. Many would advise me not to write it. I probably should not. The nice JobCentre people told me that I cannot put it as a health issue on my record. “Puts off potential employers,” they said.
I have a bad habit of interpreting “you shouldn’t” or ” you must not do that” as a dare. I do not like to back down from dares too often.
On the morning of 31st December 2009, I found that Mark O’Neill ( aka @marxculture ) had written The Most Difficult Posting.
Since Mark has been one of the people who has been supportive to me during some very dark moments during 2009, I considered that this was my prompt to write my ‘most difficult posting.’
I have never been diagnosed officially. Unofficially, a GP, a CPN (Community Psychiatric Nurse), and several experienced (and properly qualified) counsellors have considered that I am one of the minority of people who is congenitally depressed. They think that I am probably bi-polar.
Detail of ceramic walnut
A gritty reality
Why have I never been diagnosed officially?
The gritty reality is that unless I cause a nuisance by making a serious attempt to commit suicide or try to kill someone else, the National Health Service has insufficient resources to diagnose me in under 30 years. I am simply not a priority. This is not a complaint. There must be a great number of people who are far more in need of the scant resources.
Those of you who know me or have met me will know that I have a sense of humour and am really quite a cheerful person. I am very experienced at putting on a cheerful façade. I probably smile more often than non-depressed people.
I have coped most of the time by burying myself in work, and keeping how I really feel mostly to myself. I have been used to ‘protecting’ people from myself. I do not wish to make them feel uncomfortable or helpless in the face of the darkness inside me.
Work as addiction or prophylactic?
Work has been my main addiction. I had a secondary addiction to cigarettes but gave those up in February 2009. I have put all my energy into work. I was working very long hours. I have been told that few people work such long hours. I slept little.
‘Little’ sleep for me meant, 20 years ago, restricting myself to 5 hours a night to try to prevent the vivid anxiety dreams. In more recent years 5 hours became a hedonistic luxury. I usually slept for a total of between 3 and 5 hours, sometimes about an hour at a time. Sometimes during 2008, I did not sleep at all during a 48-hour period. I do not usually fret about not sleeping. I just try to relax, but I am not good at relaxing.
Gender divide?
Is there a difference in how those with depression are regarded according to their gender?
I am not saying that there is. I am simply raising the question and making observations from my own experience.
Surfer on a bitterly cold November day.
Our culture generally does not consider panic, anxiety or tears as manly. I think that it must be particularly difficult for young men in their teens and early twenties to admit to such feelings. Their peers are at the height of behaving in risky ways, being macho, competing. The expression of some strong emotions by men, however, is admired and regarded as exemplary. Currently in our society, the passion of sportsmen and their fans is considered normal, even when extreme. There is also a tradition of the Romantic: not fluffy and cuddly hearts-n-flowers romance but the passionate highs and lows of Romance typified, for example, by Lord Byron.
Women are expected to react to the world more emotionally than rationally, but generally their emotions are regarded as less valid, and disregardable. Despite the examples of strong, passionate historic females, British women are not expected to express themselves passionately.
I am not ancient (yet!) but throughout my life I have encountered attitudes that women are not expected to be logical, intellectual, and knowledgeable about matters beyond the domestic. It continues to bewilder me as to why those attitudes persist.
In recent years, I discovered a little about the extent to which one of my great-great-great-great grandmothers, Mary Fildes, was a political activist in the early 19th century. She was a Radical, proactive in the struggle for universal suffrage for men, and mother of at least five sons. She was on the speakers’ platform, and subsequently injured, at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. Even on the scant documentary evidence I have found so far, it is clear that she was very passionate about the need to create a better, fairer society. Had she been born in the mid-20th century, I fear that she would have been patted on the head, given Valium, and told to focus on being a full-time mother.
How much is our culture still slanted towards expecting girls and women to be quiet, compliant, submissive? Think about the response to, and negative terms used about, women when they are merely assertive, let alone when they are angry about something.
How have people reacted when I have tried to express anger or frustration with the unfairness of our society? Generally, I hear people say to each other: “Just Janet showing some artistic temperament” or “she’s just being a bit of a drama queen.”
Photograph of sculptural barrier.
Chemical cages
There has been a tradition of medicating women to alleviate (or cover up) the symptoms of depression. 19th century novels mention women especially taking laudanum.
Then the pharamaceutical companies started to introduce benzodiazepine drugs in the early 1960s. One of the most famous (or infamous) of these is Valium. They are undoubtedly very useful drugs in all kinds of situations; but should they be used to tranquilise someone who simply needs to talk to someone who can listen properly?
It must seem to people who have never experienced a prolonged period of depression that it is an easy illness to fix with today’s anti-depressants. GPs still seem to want to prescribe them as a secondary or even primary treatment. I can understand that. People with depression appear to be in pain and the natural urge is to alleviate that as quickly as possible.
Wet sand and light, Janet E Davis, 2009.
I have resisted being prescribed anti-depressant pills for two decades. I was first given anti-depressants in 1988. It was difficult to find something suitable. I hated the dark blue capsules that had a tranquilising effect. It made me feel worse because it slowed my mind, clogged it up. Deep inside I felt more depressed. The burgundy pills were better but if the dose was not high enough, I would experience a sensation like somebody switching off the light. One moment I was fine, and the next second I had plunged straight into blackness. It was a strange experience.
They prescribed lithium for me. I was told that it would even out my mood swings so I could feel calmer and more balanced. I tried it for a few months. It was like being trapped in a thick, impenetrable bubble. I could see and hear people, but I could not touch them and they could not touch me. Deep inside me, very deep inside where nobody could see or hear except me, there was a tiny shrunken version of me who was howling in pain, screaming to be heard.
I expect that lithium is very helpful for some people. I hated it, and stopped taking it without discussing it with my GP (I have discovered since that it is regarded as highly dangerous to stop taking it abruptly).
Lights reflected on wet sand in the evening. Photograph by Janet E Davis, 2009.
Around that time, I had moved and so had a new (male) GP. I explained my recent medical history, stated very clearly that I wanted neither anti-depressants nor tranquillisers. He gave me a prescription. I decided to check what the pills were before taking them (in the days before Google and Wikipedia made such information so readily available). I discovered that he had prescribed a tranquilliser. I never took the pills and avoided seeing that GP ever again.
It was probably around that point, 20 years ago, that I decided that it was best to suffer as quietly as possible. I concentrated on work and on being helpful to others. I learned to be extremely wary of trusting people.
“A different kind of normal”
A counsellor told me that she thought that I am “a different kind of normal.” I like that phrase.The more I have thought about it, the more useful I think it is. There are a lot of people out there who are “a different kind of normal.”
People born with an inclination to be depressed and anxious are just one kind of the differently-normal. There must be an advantage to the human race in having such people or else our genes would have vanished in prehistory.
So, some of the benefits:
Worrying makes us very good at forward planning.
Photograph of rainclouds approaching by Janet E Davis, 2009.
We are very aware of our environment and of the people around us. I think that our ancestors helped their tribes to suvive in prehistory because they were able to plan ahead to avoid the worst problems threatening their communities’ survival such as famine, drought, and storms.
We tend to be very good friends to have. We generally learn to listen and observe others very early on in life. We will listen to people because we understand the importance of active listening.
We tend to be explorers of the imagination, abstract ideas, the physical world. We are innovators because we are concerned with making the world a better and safer place in the future.
We dream, and at least some of us share our dreams. When not depressed or anxious, we are able to have moments of intense joy which we would rather express and share than feel obliged to suppress.
We can have a wicked sense of humour when depressed and a great sense of fun when not depressed. We have a tendency to be charming and flirtatious because we want to make others smile and laugh.
Photograph of a shiny high-heeled black boot.
People have tutted at me for offering them information with a smile. When I was young, middle-aged people tutted at me for dressing in a style that they considered looked outrageous. I aim to dress outrageously again as I grow old, and to make all ages tut with disapproval.
I have to restrain myself from dancing down the street or in a shop when I hear certain music. I want to sing the music in my head even if I am on the bus. Some are puzzled but most smile or laugh with understanding when they catch me playing catch-me-if-you-can with the waves on the seashore, or squeezing all the soft toy birds in a shop display to make them sing.
I would be a lot less depressed if people listen to me properly sometimes, and if they do not try to make me think and act in the same way as the ‘normal’ majority. I feel obliged to live in a much greater level of isolation than most ‘normal’ people can withstand.
Our definition of ‘normal’ has become very narrow. Why is it necessary for everyone to look and think the same?
Do not judge me by how I get anxious when I see a wasp. Wait until you see how very calm and effective I am in a work crisis that causes my colleagues to run around like headless chickens.
Just think what a dull or deadly place the world would be if everyone thought and behaved in the same way…
I probably should not have written this post but…I am used to people looking aghast as I go striding in, in big boots, where angels would fear to tread…
Shop display of boots made for walking!
Janet's Jottings 