MIND MOVES:It took a long time to realise I was depressed
IT TOOK a long time for me to realise I was depressed.
If I try to trace my way back through the muddle I was in up until about three months ago, I find myself back in Transition Year, upstairs in my bedroom wondering why I wasn’t able to enjoy myself the way everyone else seemed to, and wondering when the whole process of growing up would start to seem exciting rather than merely terrifying.
In his 1956 artistic study, The Outsider, Colin Wilson describes a certain cast of mind which looks at the world "too much and too deeply". The image I have in my head is of someone standing at a window and looking in.
Unfortunately, though, the glass distorts the things you’re looking at. The details of whatever situation you find yourself in become overwhelming. You’re in a café, you’re talking to someone, and you’re not even able to listen to what they’re saying: the other customers’ cups grate too loudly on their saucers, you’re worried you’ve offended the waitress because you forgot to say “please”, and of course you don’t want your mate to realise you’re not paying attention. Everything ends up stewed down to its component fibres because you’re looking at it all so hard.
You’re seeing too much and too deeply, and holding all those details together in your mind is taking all your effort.
One of the hardest things people find about dealing with someone who’s depressed is that they can sometimes seem to be “off in their own little world”. It’s a charge I completely accept, because I knew I was choosing to live in my own little bubble.
Apart from particularly violent fits of temper when that bubble was burst by stuff like exam results and having to live with other people, I was able to ignore how awful I felt much of the time. I can’t say I was happy in there, but I was safe from pretty much everything – except from myself, of course. Even though nothing could touch me, I could still see through the skin of that bubble, and it scared me: the past, with all the things I winced to think of; the present, which just looked like a whole load of wasted time swirling down the drain; and, most of all, the future, with all its attendant decisions about careers, relationships and insurance companies. The worst thing, though, wasn’t the terror: it was the sense that I needed to be scared in order to function.
The fear and gloom just became the backdrop and loomed across everything. Friends, girlfriends, nights out, nights in, failures, successes, work and play: it was a full life, that was for sure, but I couldn’t see any of it except through the smoked glass of my grim moods.
I eventually took myself in hand because I met someone special. I made an appointment with the college health service in April of this year, which equipped me with the tools I needed to get going.
I’m sceptical of definitions, but hearing that this thing I’d been living with was called “depression” meant I could isolate and, to a degree, contain the situation. I was also put on a mild dose of anti-depressants, and, in practical terms they give me just that extra little bit of resolve when it comes to getting through the day.
I used to hope there would be a time when it would magically disappear. I used to imagine that somehow this would all be worth it, that some day I would make my “great escape”, and that somehow I would be able to exchange all these sufferings for a reward. Life doesn’t work like that. Depression doesn’t work like that. It’s not a problem you can solve, it’s not a disease you can cure: it’s a condition that you live with, and it’s something that you need to work to control.
Luckily, though, the more effort you put in, the stronger you get. At the moment, it’s enough for me to be able to keep back the gloom, but I know that someday I’ll be strong enough to get to the root of it.
It took me a long time to realise I was depressed, but that realisation marked the starting point of what now feels like a whole other life.
Tim Smyth is a youth adviser to Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (info@headstrong.ie)
Tony Bates is on annual leave