Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

by Sally Brampton

  This was a new form. I fell asleep as if I had been hit over the head, too fast, too violently. And then, a few hours later, I was awake again and always at the same time. I began to dread the clock, my startled, suddenly awake eyes staring at those luminous hands that always pointed at the three and the four; pointing the way, I began to imagine, towards hell.

  I felt odd in other ways. Food tasted strange, or dry, like dust. I lost weight quickly, about a stone in a few weeks. I was pleased in a vague, detached, way although I sometimes thought I should be happier about losing weight without even trying. In those odd moments of clarity, I was surprised by my lack of pleasure. I was thin and in my world, thin was good. I worked in magazines. I went to fashion shows. People told me how fabulous I looked while all the time I wondered who this stranger was who inhabited my skinny Earl jeans.

  I lost interest, too, in everything that I had once loved. My garden deserted me. It grew, unwatched and unappreciated. I felt indifferent to it and it, in turn, seemed indifferent to me. It did not seem to matter whether I was present or not. After a time I became resentful, feeling that the flowers mocked me, blooming in defiance of my listless misery.

  I did not pay much attention. My mind was on other, more important, things. If I could not sleep or eat or garden, it was for a reason. My ten-year marriage was dying and crawling painfully towards its conclusion. My husband, Jonathan, and I had begun to bicker destructively.

  ‘Does everything I do annoy you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  He turned away.

  I put my hands on my hips, addressed his reproachful back. ‘Well, that’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it?’

  He said nothing but I could hear, in his silence, the acid bite of my words.

  We had developed our own sad pattern. I attacked, he withdrew. There was no war, more an empty sense of defeat. Our misery was played out in a sniper’s no-man’s land, and there seemed nothing we could do to change the view. Or perhaps it was that neither of us wanted to.

  My life had changed in other ways. I had gone back to working in magazines, as the editor of Red, after a decade working as a writer in absolute peace and quiet. I was not used to so much noise, or the incessant, urgent demands of a staff of thirty, and found it, frankly, difficult.

  I had worked in magazines before; I loved the drama and the chaos of them. It did not occur to me that this time it would be different. Perhaps it was simply that I was older or perhaps it was merely my state of mind but I found the consuming obsession with celebrities and shopping trivial and infuriating. It was fine, in its place; but its place, to my mind, was small.

  I thought, too, that I understood the Machiavellian politics of office life. I thought, even, that I enjoyed them. I ignored the way they stuck, like the food I ate, in my throat.

  My marriage finally ended. There was no real resistance, just the occasional flurry of emotion; as much out of politeness or habit as regret. I found a flat and moved out. Jonathan could not, he said, face moving himself. He finds it hard. I do not, having spent my childhood doing it; or at least, I thought I didn’t, but that understanding came later, by which time I was drowning in an emotional backwash I could neither handle nor understand.

  I found a flat near the house so Molly could move easily between us. It was difficult, but curiously easy. We talked about it a lot. We stayed close friends.

  Jonathan went to see a therapist, about the marriage breakdown and other things. It did not occur to me that I needed to. I thought therapy was for other people but I was up to my neck in the denial that, as so many therapists have told me, I am so consummately good at.

  Jonathan reported back from his therapy sessions. ‘He says we’re so polite and considerate with each other, we’re like something out of the Guardian.’

  Yes, I thought, passionless. Dead. Beyond hope.

  ‘He wants to know why we don’t shout or throw china.’

  I laughed. So did Jonathan.

  ‘Has he understood nothing at all?’ I asked.

  Jonathan shrugged.

  At about the same time, I fell in love. Absurdly, insanely and catastrophically in love and with somebody I should not have been in love with. I had felt the pull of it for months, but had done nothing about it. I thought, even, that I might be going insane, thought that I was making the whole thing up. It was only, finally, when we came together that I knew that I had been right all along, that the hugeness of the emotion I was feeling did not exist in isolation.

  It didn’t help. I felt madder still, an insanity compounded by guilt and impossibility. Love, as the scientists tell us, is enough to change anybody’s brain chemistry. And I was in love, not just with my head and my heart but with my body and soul too. The connection was inexplicable, even to myself. And so I did not try to explain it.

  I was more lost than I have ever been. His name was Tom. It still is. When we met, he was with somebody else, in situation, but not emotion. We did nothing. It was like watching a car crash. There were children involved. We talked, we kissed, we made no plans. There were none to be made. There was just us, this thing that we could do nothing with, or about.

  We could not even ignore it.

  He sent me an email.

  Suddenly that mad email I sent you doesn’t seem so mad and incoherent, does it? I’ll find the quote…

  ‘But his flawed heart (Alack, too weak the conflict to support)

  Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, burst smilingly.’

  Whatever we do, whatever, will be completely WRONG.

  One thing. I’m glad, no, not glad, delirious, that this has happened, is happening, will happen.

  Love, come what may.

  I went to see my doctor for some sleeping pills. She told me that early warning waking was a sign of depression and prescribed antidepressants. I didn’t believe her, told her that I was not depressed but simply tired from getting so little sleep, that I had a few too many things on my mind.

  I was vaguely outraged by her suggestion that I was depressed. I am not a person who does depression. I am a person who always copes. I am strong. Or so my thinking went at the time.

  She listened to me patiently then suggested a counsellor. The NHS waiting list was, at minimum, six months. I let her put my name down although I knew that, in six months’ time, I would be better.

  I insisted, again, on sleeping pills. She refused, prescribed me antidepressants, explaining that as the depression lifted, so my sleeping patterns would return to normal.

  I took the pills. I continued to wake at three twenty every morning. I thought that she was wrong in her diagnosis. The antidepressants did nothing for me so I could not be depressed. I just had too much on my mind.

  Two months later, I started to cry. I woke, crying, and I went to sleep crying. In between, I washed my face, got dressed and went to work. It still did not occur to me that I was depressed. I was just sad, about the ending of my marriage, about loving somebody who I should not love.

  Four months after we separated, Jonathan became involved in another relationship. I was pleased for him. I wanted him to be happy. I knew, from my lack of jealousy or pain, that our marriage was truly over. Even so, I carried the guilt of its ending like a thundercloud. I was the one who had moved out. Was it all my fault? Had I not tried hard enough?

  ‘You did try,’ Jonathan said. ‘You kept trying to talk about it but I wouldn’t. I just hoped it would go away. I knew it was over, that we had been unhappy for a long time. I couldn’t face doing anything about it; I couldn’t even face facing it. So, thank you for being strong enough to do it.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  He grinned at me. ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’

  We are still good friends, even now. We see each other often and not just because we share a child. I call Jonathan in times of trouble, or celebration. And he calls me. This confuses some people. They think we are weird to be so happily separated. They wonder why we bothered.
We don’t. We both know we have the sort of relationship that survives separation, but not intimacy.

  Nor did our friendship stop the pain of a marriage ending. It did not diminish the agony of ripping apart a ten-year marriage, a house, and a life. Perhaps, even, our friendship made it worse.

  ‘Why are we doing this?’ I said, one day, as we were packing up the family home.

  Jonathan looked sad. ‘Because there is no other way. We both know that.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and went back to packing up boxes of china and glass.

  We dismantled our marriage slowly; it took us over a year to sell the house. During that time, I moved twice, into different flats, and moved in and out of the family house twice too. It was unsettling, but I was already unsettled.

  I kept on taking the antidepressants. They did nothing, but my life was a mess. No drug has the power to tidy away that degree of mess.

  I was physically unwell too, with an underactive thyroid, or hypothyroidism as it is known, diagnosed a year previously. ‘It’s only mildly underactive,’ my GP said. ‘Borderline. Nothing to worry about.’

  And so I didn’t.

  Mental health professionals, however, take malfunctioning thyroid glands very seriously, for good reason. The thyroid, which governs everything from metabolism to mood function, used to be known as the gland of emotion. It is hugely implicated in depression. According to one report, twenty-five per cent of women in psychiatric units have an underactive thyroid. Often, it is only borderline, which is why its implications regarding severe depression are often missed by general practitioners who tend to regard a mildly under-functioning thyroid as bothersome but not serious. There is, too, an enormous variation in function.

  As my own psychiatrist told me later, ‘Normal is a piece of string. What’s normal for one person is off the chart for another. And NHS blood tests for thyroxin are notoriously insensitive.’

  I knew none of this at the time and, taking my lead from my GP, did not take its implications seriously even though I had felt extremely unwell before I was diagnosed. I was tired all the time and not normal fatigue but bone-weary exhaustion. I slept as if I had been knocked unconscious and struggled to wake in the morning, dragging my leaden limbs through the day. I was always cold; my fingers white and numb even during the summer, when I kept a heater going at full blast in my study. If I got too cold, I found it almost impossible to get warm again and resorted to lying in a bath with the hot water running. My arms and legs ached constantly, so painfully that, at times, I took painkillers every four hours. And my weight, which had been the same all my life, kept going up despite eating very little. Stranger still, my eyebrows started to fall out and my skin was so dry I was almost bathing in moisturiser. I felt constantly low and depressed but I was working too hard and had a small child who needed me. I was ripped in half by guilt. Of course I was depressed and tired.

  ‘It’s your age,’ a locum GP said. ‘You’re probably menopausal.’

  He was a young man, with ears that stuck out and were so red and shiny it looked as if he scrubbed them daily.

  ‘I am in my forties,’ I said with as much outraged dignity as I could muster in the face of his blank, young indifference.

  He did not look up from his notes. ‘Exactly.’ His eyes flickered across the pages. ‘And you have a small child and you work.’ He looked over at me as if to say, what did you expect?

  Eventually, my own GP put me on a small dose of thyroxin, 50 mgs a day. ‘To see if it has any effect,’ she suggested. My body temperature shot up. The weight fell off. My energy returned. But still, I couldn’t throw off the mood, the low feeling that seemed always to envelop me like a cold, grey blanket.

  When, eventually, I was taken into hospital with severe depression, they trebled the dose of thyroxin, to 150 mgs a day. The maximum dose is 200 mgs a day. The amount I had been taking was far too low, even though the blood tests my GP had done indicated that the levels of available thyroxin were back to normal.

  My ruinous love affair continued. We fell more and more in love, ran towards each other and away again. We were as intimate with each other, and as estranged from each other, as it is possible to be. We did not see each other for weeks on end and then came together in cataclysmic passion.

  Tom grew more and more miserable, until he was almost speechless with pain; handling his difficulties by shutting down emotionally or disappearing for days. I knew he could not bear to leave his children or break up the family even though, as he said, the relationship that should have pinned it all together was already broken. Only the surface remained intact. I did not want him to leave his children but I knew, too, that I could not bear him to leave me. He had to and so we agreed to part, again, only to come back together when the pain and longing grew too much for either of us to bear. And so it went on.

  The crying grew worse. I was scarcely sleeping. I started to cry in unexpected places, at inconvenient times. One day, I cried at work. I was mortified. I never cry at work. I decided that I was exhausted, and took a week off. It was the end of June. I spent the days walking around London, wearing dark glasses, with tears streaming down my face. I walked for hours, every day. Looking back, I see that I was trying to walk my way out of depression.

  I could not see colour, I could see only in black and white. I thought it was strange, but not unduly so.

  Later, I found a quote from the American humorist Art Buchwald describing his depression: ‘Everything was black. The trees were black, the road was black. You can’t believe how the colours change until you have it. It’s scary.’

  And I thought, so I’m not the only one.

  At the time, I paid no attention to my monochrome world. Everything was strange. My life was strange. There were no fixed points left.

  After that week of near total collapse, I went back to work. I sat through meetings, flew to Milan and Paris, tried to keep my staff inspired and lively. An editor is nothing if they cannot give inspiration, leadership, a sense of belonging. A magazine is nothing without people; without the people who make it, it does not exist. My job was to keep those people happy and anyway I had grown inordinately fond of them. I said nothing about my own misery. I hoped, passionately, that it did not show.

  I felt so desperate that I asked a friend who knew about such things to recommend a therapist. Back then, I was not a person who did therapy, wanted therapy, talked therapy. I used to rather despise the notion, believing it to be the preserve of the severely emotionally damaged or the simply narcissistic.

  I went, but unwillingly. I told nobody. The therapist practised out of a mean little room, decorated in shades of beige and sage, the unrelentingly dreary colours of analysis. There was a vase of dusty dried flowers, a box of tissues and a woman with unkempt hair who wore, to my cynical and weary eyes, a series of unnecessary scarves. I later discovered that this mannered Bohemia seemed to be the uniform of therapists of this sort.

  Even as I shrank from my surroundings and the middle-aged woman in front of me, I cried. I had no idea why.

  Even as I cried, I answered questions. What did I do? Did I have children? What was my relationship like with my mother? I felt, in a surreal way, that I was trapped at a dinner party with some impertinent stranger. Worse, with a stranger who, judging from her chilly impersonal manner, I was unlikely to discover anything about. She was steeped in Freud, in the analytical methods that demand from the therapist a blank, anonymous presence intended to throw the patient (their problems, as well as any solutions) into sharp relief. It was the wrong sort of therapy for me but knowing nothing about therapy or the various sorts on offer, I did not question it or her methods. I simply found it hateful; just as I grew to hate many of the other therapists I sat facing in the months and years to come. But I kept going back, just as I kept taking the antidepressants I thought did nothing for me. I did it because I did not know what else to do. I did it with reluctance, with no desire at all to engage. I did it because I thought that if I expressed
my misery, it would go away.

  A little while later, on a grey Sunday afternoon, I was sitting alone in my rented flat and feeling low. I turned on the television, for company. A photograph of Paula Yates flashed up on the screen and a voice said, ‘Paula Yates is dead.’ I turned the television off, and then turned it back on again, as if, by chance, I had tuned in to some unknown, extraterrestrial channel. ‘Paula Yates is dead,’ said the voice. ‘She was found in the early hours of this morning.’

  I could not believe it. I loved Paula. We had been friends for twenty years. We met when I was a young journalist sent to interview her about her book, Rock Stars in Their Underpants. She was well known but not particularly famous. This was a few years before LiveAid and before Bob became, as she put it, ‘a saint’. And before she became, as she also put it, ‘the Antichrist’.

  We started talking and we just carried on, for years. I used to spend weekends with Paula and Bob in the country, just so we could talk. She made me laugh more than anyone else I have ever known, except perhaps Nigel. Depressives, when they are not being depressed, are often the funniest, most blackly comic people around.

  She had been away for the summer, was full of life and plans for the future. How could she be dead? We had talked on the phone only the day before and had arranged to see each other the following week. More than that, over the past year we had spent a long time discussing our mutual difficulties, and how we were trying to handle them. And, even though Paula was in a far darker place than I was, she still kept trying to pull me through. ‘We must be strong,’ she kept saying, ‘we’ll get through this. I know we will.’

  And now she was gone. I shouted at her face, laughing on the television screen. ‘You promised. You promised that we’d both get through.’