Sofa-lovin'

Beats a 10K run

Christ, I love a study that states the bloody obvious. And lo! in the nick of time one has come along: An NHS funded study, published in the BMJ, has decreed that combining exercise with conventional treatments for depression does not improve recovery. Well, no shit, Sherlock. 
The brains behind this study coaxed out 361 sufferers of depression, half of whom were helped to increase their activity levels (by beating the black dog off with a large stick perhaps). By the end of the study, though, there was no difference in recovery between the two groups. Problem is that current guidelines suggest that those in the grip of this stinking disease exercise three times a week. 
What, may I ask, the frig? My experience alone could have shown how exercise is about as helpful to depression as setting fire to your own farts. Over the years I've done everything from running and aerobics to yoga and gentle strolls and none of it did anything to prevent the oncoming freight train of depression.
Worse, when I'm in the grip of the black stuff the last thing I am capable of is exercise thrice a week. Jesus, during my breakdown I barely got out of bed for an entire year. I'll be fucked if I was capable for going for a spin around the local velodrome.
See, it's easy to prescribe exercise but the monumental effort involved in doing it when you are depressed is one frig of a different ball game. And I don't know about you but the pressure to exercise at the weakest points in my life was pressure I could have done without. My feeling of supreme uselessness was simply compounded by the fact that leaving the house for a 20 minute walk was beyond me.
So thank fuck that urgings to exercise your way through a breakdown are being tested.   Yeah, the effort is great when you are perfectly healthy but when you are not? Well, perhaps it's OK to occasionally curl into a ball and mentally hibernate until your brain has healed itself. It sure as shit beats forcing your carcass through a list of physical jerks while all your body wants is sleep.
Yet again, thank fuck for the NHS. And studies that, for once, make perfect sense.

Snap!

Hanging on

Dunno about you, but something scared the shit out of me when I first went to my local psych unit. I had this Gothic image of my CPN caging me, screaming, when I flashed him the foetid recesses of my brain. Fuck knows why. Logically, did I really think that I was his first interaction with someone who was, er, brainally challenged? Then again, logic didn't come into it back then. In fact logic didn't come into many things at all.
Anyway, I'm burdening you with this information because I've been chatting to my mental health mole, K-Fix. And you know what? He tells me that when patients come to him, not only does he have professional experience of plot-loss but he has experienced it personally too. 
Now that shouldn't be a surprise. But it did make me realise that none of us are infallible. Here's what K-Fix says: "My first experience of mental health problems was when a friend of mine, who was a father figure to me, went to a hotel and committed suicide. No one knew it was going to happen and he hadn't told anyone that he was feeling this way. It was terrible.
"Then some time later I went through some personal difficulties and I too became depressed.  
"These experiences helped me decide to go into mental health nursing when I was in my 40s.  If nothing else all of this has given me an insight into what my patients are going through." 
And isn't that all any of us want? Someone who knows what we mean and how we feel when we sit there blubbering or raving or panicking? And OK, we want the expertise too but remembering that CPNs, therapists and counsellors have all had their shit times makes one frig of a difference to anyone else having a shit time.
So here's a mad idea. Perhaps we should grill our mental health professionals on their own personal woes before we start spilling our own guts. I know, I know, it'd never work but I'd be more than happy to hand my fevered brain over to someone who'd suffered from their own stint of brain fever. If nothing else it'd be a kindred spirit to cling onto and that's a good start for any recovery dontcha think?

The Other Side

K-Fix he ain't

Breakdowns. Who'd have 'em? Well, queer thing is that I've met someone who makes a living out of the bloody things. By that, I mean making them better, not actually causing them. Well, not that I know of. I shan't bore you with the details of how I've stumbled upon this mysterious creature but stumble I have and he's been glorious enough to tell me one or two things about life on the opposite side of the appointments diary. Let's call him, I dunno, a kraken fixer, K-Fix for short. Ooooh, how down wiv da kids!

Anyhoo, from here on in, as well as regaling you with the tales of the dark side I'll be regaling you with tales from K-Fix. He's offered to give us a taste of what it's like to wrestle with mental health illness from a professional point of view. I know! How cool is this guy? 

So, you know how, when the black dog pissed over your leg, that you thought you'd be bundled into the nearest asylum? Or the mortification you felt at sobbing and snotting your way through Tesco? Or how you thought your counsellor would come over all Nurse Ratched on you? Well, K-Fix'll be grabbing our sweaty paws and leading us through the lot of it. He'll bust some myths, explain away a few fears, reveal his personal experiences of mental health snarl-ups and generally be a cooling flannel on the fevered brow of depressives everywhere.

So watch this space, my kraken-loving muffins. It'll soon be too helpful for words. And if the shock of that doesn't get you, K-Fix will.

Big Decisions

The inside of my head

I'll be buggered if I've noticed something oddball about my recovery from a breakdown: I haven't a bloody clue whether my judgement is sound. In fact, my ability to judge situations is now such a moveable feast that I'm about as bewildered as Katie Price after marrying a Muslim.
Now, I'm known for being loudly opinionated. And I continued to display this delightful quality throughout my mental decline and subsequent floundering. Problem is that during this stage of derangement my judgement of various situations didn't so much change as violently mutate. I'd utter stuff which, to me, sounded like distilled common sense while, to the rest of the listening world, sounded like the blabberings of a nutbag. For example, I was so convinced that I'd be locked away that I did all but stock up on postcards. And I was so absolute in my belief that I wasn't Kraken Junior's mater that I announced this to just about everyone who cooed over her.
Course, now that the clouds of doom are floating away I can see that these were the thoughts of someone who was keeping her right mind in a bucket in the shed. Yet when I make judgements now, I'm still not entirely sure what they are fuelled by: barkingness or crystal clarity. So every time I do make a decision about something, I dunno, whether to buy soup or go lion taming, I have to ask myself where my fevered decision is derived from.   
If it sounds exhausting, that's because it fucking well is. You know those people who analyse things to death? I think I've become one of them. Christ help me if I was expected to move house or take up a wildly different career. I'd think it into submission and then book myself into Broadmoor.
Course, this is getting easier. Seeing as no one, so far, has stumbled backwards, bug eyed, because I decided to plant lupins or wear purple eyeliner I'll assume that I'm not indulging in major lifestyle fuck-ups. I'll rely on social disquiet to alert me when my judgement becomes so alarmingly skewiff that I'm found casually barking messages in Klingon into a stolen policeman's helmet.
Until then, all I can do is practice. Practice at refining my judgements, that is, not speaking Klingon. I like to think I'll get better with time and then, God help the lot of you. I'll be back to my loudly opinionated self and that's when the social disquiet will really kick in.

Great Danes

Carrie-ing on. Geddit?

Whoa! What the frig have you been doing if you haven't been watching Homeland? Seriously, it's the depressive's telly of choice thanks to the goggling acting of Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison, the bi-polar, Sargent Brody-shagging/hassling CIA agent.
The series ended this week with Mathison choosing to undergo Electroconvulsive Therapy in an effort to rid her of her burgeoning illness. And, by Christ, it was the best depiction of a woman with mental health problems that I've ever seen. Seriously, there were moments when I forgot it was telly and I thought I was seeing into my own fevered mind. It made me do a little wee right there on the sofa.
Soaringly manic at one point, crashingly depressed the next, Danes' Mathison was a masterclass in what it's like to be fucked over by your own brain. While watching Danes go through all the stages of bi-polar disorder I had tooth-curling flashbacks to the moments when I have been engorged with panic, crippled with confusion, verging on hysterical, enflamed with rage and, finally, rendered physically and mentally immobile by impenetrable layers of darkness. 
Why in the fuck is it so rare to see anything like this on TV, outside of some Channel 4 come-and-see freak show? Because Danes' acting wasn't just a parroting of the realities of mental illness, it was done with what seemed to be a complete understanding of what it's like to feel scared, abandoned, angry, lonely, isolated and desperate. 
And, get this, it also made me feel ever so slightly proud to have a wonky noggin. In the grasp of her mania Danes managed to crack the conundrum that had dogged her and her colleagues throughout the series. I felt as if I'd been thrown a bone and reminded that while mental illness can be crippling there are lights along its long tunnel too. 
In those last few episodes of Homeland Danes' Mathison turned into some sort of idol for me. Not because she is superhuman, skinny and staggeringly glamorous, but exactly because she isn't. She's juggling her job with her mental illness and, just like the rest of us, the cracks show, gape and then you fall in. 
Thank fuck for that. Just when I, as a sufferer of depression, was feeling ignored by the world Homeland came along and gave me a teeny tiny voice. I can only hope that Danes' portrayal makes that voice louder and louder with every episode that passes.

The S-Word

Outdated in more ways than one

And you wonder why there's still a stigma attached to depression and suicide? Jesus, I've just listened to a news story on a radio show which included the details of someone who committed suicide several years ago. Problem is that the entire story was discussed at length but without a single mention of the S-word. Instead the person who had taken an overdose was said to have "died from depression". Excuse me?
Look, while depression really is a matter of life and death how on earth did the brains behind this story manage to discuss suicide without actually mentioning suicide? That takes a certain kind of genius, like the nuts who produce tampon adverts without using the word 'period' or Tena Lady ads that never, ever refer to wee.
What in the fuck is wrong with using the word 'suicide' when talking about suicide? Apart from the fact that this Medieval approach to a modern problem simply bolsters its outdated stigma, do the producers actually realise the impact this has upon listeners? Anyone feeling suicidal or living through the suicide of someone else gets just one message from the refusal to use the S-word on a show like this and that's another S-word: shame. 
As if thinking about killing yourself doesn't feel mortifying enough, now there's some implied hush-hush about the issue on a radio show. It's like telling sufferers that just when they felt freaky enough, society can make them feel even freakier.
Anyway, what in the frig did the producers of this show think would happen if they mentioned suicide? That there'd be a wave of listeners stampede towards Beachy Head or a run on paracetamol in Tesco?
The point is that this sort of refusal to speak openly about suicide simply makes the problem worse. It encourages suffers to keep their feelings to themselves, to rebuff help and support and to just plough on until suicide becomes the only, and shameful, way out. Just when they feel at their lowest, society comes along and stamps a heavy, dark boot onto what's left of them.
Thank fuck, radio discussions like this one are on their way out. Increasingly the media is treating suicide with the sensitivity and honesty and acceptance that it deserves. It's clearly not enough yet though, is it? Let's hope that any sufferers who were privy to this show realise that there's a problem although, this time, it's not with them.

Scaredy Cats

Not in Kansas any more

If there’s one really bloody hideous thing that comes gift-wrapped with the onset of a breakdown it’s this: fear. And not just any fear. I mean the sort of fear that makes sweat run down your back and freeze in the crack of your arse. And once it has set in it isn’t half a bastard to shake off.

It’s only recently struck me that this hairy demon of terror pervaded my every waking – and unconscious – moment when I was in the midst of my nuclear size mental meltdown. There was the fear that I was going mad, that I’d already gone mad, that I was going to be locked up, that Kraken Junior would be taken away, that my family would abandon me, that I’d never recover, that my mates would turn their backs on me, that I would never work again, that I would never contribute to society again, that I would never feel happiness again, that I’d forever be branded a failure as a human being, that the Tories would drag me through the streets and rub my nose in my illness and that the next time I decided to make a cuppa my shrunken brain would fall out of one ear with the pressure of it all. And that’s just when I was awake. When I was asleep the nightmares took over wonderfully efficiently, thank you very much.

This fear was one of the worst things about being on the business end of a breakdown. I continuously felt as if I was one utterance away from being bundled into a hospital van or left to the terrifying earnestness of the Social Services. Each time I was met with support the black-hearted little bastard sitting on my shoulder would whisper fresh threats into my ear.  “The GP will think you’re nuts”, “You think that counsellor will let you walk out of here?”, “That psych’s going to call the police on you”, “You think the therapist will let you see your kid again?”.

Which, oddly, was how the darkness became punctuated with the tiniest shards of joy. I recall telling my counsellor that I was having suicidal thoughts and he received this news with such a stunning lack of shock that I almost inverted myself with relief. He didn’t call in an armed unit, the Social Services or even press any hidden panic buttons. He just said, “OK” and proceeded to chat about it as if we were discussing the scandalous price of chicken breasts in Tesco.

You know those films where the star can see a huge friendly rabbit or some other weird creature but no one else can? The fear is like that. You feel it, live it, eat it and sleep it but no one knows it’s there. Not a single soul. So telling someone that, if they look slightly to your left, they might see that frigging enormous black dog slobbering all over you is one fuck of a leap.

It’s a leap that’s worth, well, leaping though. With every admittance of my mental state the fear has gotten smaller and smaller. It’s still there, the hairy little bastard, but it’s got one of those stupid little Alvin and the Chipmunk voices now, rather than a booming James Earl Jones number. The cold sweat still runs down the crack of my arse from time to time but something I’ve learned keeps me ploughing on though it: all I’ve done is get sick. And now I’m getting better. Perhaps there really is nothing to fear but fear itself after all.