5. Oh Yeah Life goes On, Long After The Thrill Of Livin' Is Gone

It's a funny thing depression, you really don't know that it's happening to you the first time, or rather you don't know that it's depression. You know you feel like shit but can't put your finger on it. It just creeps up on you and before you know it you have become somebody else, suspended in this weird place where everything seems pointless, tiresome, and too much trouble to bother yourself with. You just have to hope that either some one finds you and brings you back, or that your sense of self preservation will kick in and you'll call for help. I was 46 when it happened to me and I still can't think of a single reason why it happened.

I have heard depression described as many things, The Black Dog being a popular one after Winston Churchill used it to refer to his own black moods. For me it felt like I was dragging round a bag of rocks in my stomach the whole time. I'm not even sure I noticed that the "thrill of living" had even gone. I knew I no longer did the things I had always enjoyed but I just thought I had outgrown them and was very accepting of these changes as being part of growing older. It didn't strike me as strange that I had gone from being somebody who chain-read, sewed, knitted and baked for the whole neighbourhood to being somebody who hadn't done any of these things for months and remained glued to the settee. What I hadn't noticed was that I did absolutely nothing anymore, and living on my own there was nobody to notice my decline either. 

I've learned that symptoms of depression include reduced energy levels. I found it was more an internal battle of wills between Myself and I rather than a reduction in energy. No matter how hard I tried to persuade myself, or even shout at myself to get up and do something, I just wouldn't or couldn't. Some days it took absolutely everything I had got to make the journey from the settee to the loo. In fact the only positive thing to have come out it all is I stopped smoking, simply because I ran out of tobacco one day and just couldn't be bothered to go out and get some, I don't even remember having withdrawal symptoms. 

From time to time I would realise that things weren't quite right and try and do something to change it. I would set myself a challenge, like making a cake, based upon a bizarre theory whereby I thought that by forcing myself to do something I had once enjoyed, I would derive so much forgotten pleasure from it that the following day I would get up from my bed fully restored to my former self by the joys of baking that one cake. The hard bit was getting started.

I would spend the whole day promising myself that I would get up and start the cake the following hour, but as the day wore on and the prospect of the psychological beating I would inevitably give myself the following day for not doing it grew, I needed to make a move, so I negotiated that I would at least take the butter out of the fridge to come up to room temperature. That way, should I suddenly feel compelled to leap up from the settee and do it, all would be in place at a minutes notice and I would have no excuse. I knew this would buy me 2 or 3 hours reprieve. By the time the butter was soft enough to beat it was of course too late in the day to start baking, so I negotiated a trouble-free nights sleep on the understanding that I would make the cake first thing the following morning. That's how small my world had become.

I loved night time - it was always a relief to be able to draw the curtains and finally allow myself to give up trying for another day.

Of course the cake never happened. In fact as the week wore on the butter became a source of mounting anxiety, glaring at me each time I passed it, relentlessly demanding to be either used or placed back in the fridge. I simply  wasn't capable of making a cake. It all just seemed much too difficult, bothersome and utterly pointless, but I still had to rid myself of this particular source of stress.

I think I spent just about the entire day trying to make a decision about what I should do. The sense of failure that I would have felt from putting the butter back in the fridge would have been just too much to bear, so deciding that the guilt of wasting it would be the lesser of the evils, I threw it away and attempted to console myself with the excuse that it was probably too rancid to use after a week anyway. 

The truth was, the things I had once enjoyed had become burdensome chores which demanded skills way beyond my capacity at the time. My attention span had been reduced to just a minute or two at the most so I wasn't even able to read anymore or follow a film from start to finish. My memory seemed to be abandoning me completely. If I didn't write it down, it didn't exist and I seriously thought I had the beginnings of dementia. The smallest of decisions required hours of stressful deliberation and left me completely lacking faith that I had decided on the right thing at the end of it. Depression was dismantling me bit by bit, I didn't know what was happening to me or how I got here, and I had no idea just how ill I was.

I was very tearful at that time too. It seemed just about anything would set me off and I'd have tears streaming down my face for hours. I'd cry at the news, at dead soldiers coming back from Afghanistan, at people dying in road accidents, or incredible stories about people overcoming the odds and surviving horrible illnesses. I'd even cry over sad adverts on the tele and for the losers on daytime quiz shows. 

Then the real crying started - great heaving buckets of the stuff that came right from way down inside, uncontrollable incapacitating sobbing brought on by the sheer despair and hopelessness I was feeling. I cried a lot during that year and wondered just how long it would go on. All I could see was acres and acres of misery stretched out before me and there was nothing I could do about it. 

Then out of the blue, like a gust of fresh air and without shame, shock or disgrace, it suddenly occured to me that I wasn't as trapped as I thought I was.

At least 140,000 people in England and Wales attempt suicide every year. In 2010 nearly 6,000 of them were successful. That's an average of one death from suicide every 90 minutes. How I am not one of them is still a miracle to me and the thought of it fills me with horror. Depression is a fatal illness, yet it still seems to be poorly understood and still carries a stigma, spoken of only in hushed tones and kept "between ourselves".

If I could write a book then this is what I would have written: Prozac Nation Elizabeth Wurtzel has summed it up perfectly in a way I would never have thought possible to explain what suffering depression is really like. All I'm trying to do here is to exorcise a few demons, to think it through and understand what I went through, and to make sure I'm equipped to recognise and handle it should it ever happen again.