Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

by Sally Brampton

  I bought a car. This is a more important statement than its casual nature might at first imply. I had not been able to drive for ten years, since the time that Molly was born, having suffered from a phobia of driving so intense it made me shake so badly I would come close to passing out. My heart would race and I would sweat until my hands slipped off the steering wheel—even in a stationary car. I was scarcely better as a passenger. It got so bad that I had to give up driving entirely and rely on Jonathan to take me everywhere. Looking back, I think the phobia may have been the first sign of impending depression. I was also very low for a year after Moll was born, although certainly not clinically depressed. Those two things make me understand that I may, even then, have been fragile in some way.

  Now I was on my own. I needed a car, and I needed to be able to drive. My new flat was some distance from Jonathan, although no distance by car. Molly had to be ferried between the two of us, and taken back and forward from school. She needed to be able to rely on me. More than that, I needed to be able to rely on me. I was determined to beat the phobia, just as I was determined to overcome my own mind.

  So I bought a new car using some of the money from the sale of the house, and had it delivered. I thought it might embarrass me into driving. I thought too, that by then, I might have overcome my fear.

  It sat in front of my flat looking shiny and new and utterly terrifying.

  It sat there for weeks.

  Finally, I called a driving school, and booked some lessons.

  ‘I have a new car which I am too frightened to drive,’ I said. ‘I need the calmest, and nicest, instructor in London.’

  A woman said, ‘Do you have a date booked for your test?’

  ‘I passed that eighteen years ago.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I have a driving phobia, and a new car,’ I said. ‘I need help.’

  ‘You need Geoffrey,’ she said.

  Two weeks later, Geoffrey appeared at my door. For a week, for three hours every day, we drove round and around the city. Then we moved outside London. We drove down the M25, up the A1, along the M1. Motorways held a particular terror for me. Even as a passenger, I had to close my eyes. Obviously, this was no longer an option. The first time I pulled out of the slow lane to overtake, Geoffrey applauded. At the end of the week, he shook my hand. ‘You’ll do nicely,’ he said.

  I discovered, again, that I love driving, rather like I discovered, once the depression had receded, that I love life. That both hold particular terrors for me has nothing to do with driving, or with life. The terrors exist in my mind. Learning to drive again went a long way to exhuming them.

  That summer, just after I had moved into my new flat, my mother was taken into hospital. One of the main arteries in her thigh had become blocked. There was little, or no, blood reaching her foot, which was slowly dying. The pain was excruciating. The consultant attempted to blow open the artery but the blood clot was buried so deep that the operation failed. She had a morphine drip by her bed, but it did little to help. She could not eat, because of the pain and the nausea from the drug. This went on for six weeks while we considered, with the consultant, what could be done.

  I drove up and down motorways to the hospital. Every time I saw my mother, she seemed to have shrunk a little more. By the time she left that hospital, she had lost four stone. I bought her cashmere socks, to warm her frozen toes, and massaged her foot and leg. In the operating theatre, they stuck needles in her leg and pushed balloons through her arteries. Nothing worked.

  There was only one thing to be done: amputation. My mother agreed to have her toes removed. There was no hope of saving them and little chance of saving her lower leg but it was worth a try. If the first amputation did not work, she would need a second, then a third, each one moving further up her leg.

  On the afternoon she agreed to the amputation of her toes, I walked out of her room and into the hospital corridor and burst into tears.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ Dad said.

  ‘Poor Mum,’ I said. There is something brutally shocking about amputation. My mother has always had very beautiful legs. I have a black and white photograph of her on my mantelpiece, taken in the 1960s, in Aden. She is dancing, wearing a silk dress and high heels. Her smile is radiant.

  Dad patted me ineffectually on the shoulder, looking vaguely alarmed.

  I drove home, ready to return the next day after the operation. My father called that evening, distressed and panicky. The hospital had discovered that his health insurance would not pay for the six weeks my mother had spent in hospital. It was a technical point. The insurers maintained that the procedures she had undergone did not constitute surgery. The consultant was furious, but impotent. We owed in excess of £20,000, which had to be paid the next morning.

  No money. No operation.

  My father said, did I have any savings? Fortunately I did, from the sale of the house I had owned with Jonathan. I had bought a smaller flat than I might otherwise have done, in order to put money aside in case I was unable to work. I did not know, at that time, if I would ever be able to write again. My concentration was still horribly awry. I could just about manage to read but still found it difficult to remember the beginning of a sentence once I had reached the end. Holding an idea, let alone a sophisticated network of thoughts in my head—in other words, meaning—was still difficult. What would happen once the money had run out, I did not know. And nor could I bear to imagine.

  The next morning, I met my father at the hospital and gave him a cheque.

  ‘This is all wrong,’ he said.

  Dad went to the accounts department and I went to see my mother. She was adrift in a sea of tears and pain.

  ‘They came into my room last night and asked me who was going to pay. I said I don’t know about money. My husband handles that. I told them to ask him. Imagine asking for money from somebody who is about to have a foot amputated.’

  Yes, imagine.

  Once Mum had been taken down to theatre, I drove Dad home. On the way, we stopped at a pub for lunch.

  ‘If it doesn’t work, she’ll have to go to the NHS hospital for the next operation,’ he said fretfully. ‘We don’t have enough money to keep her in the private wing.’ He took a sip of beer. ‘She won’t like it.’

  ‘The NHS is fine, Dad,’ I said.

  It wasn’t. It was grim. This time, her leg was amputated high above the knee. It was her decision. She could not, she said, face two more operations or another that did not work.

  The next six months were difficult but my mother faced them with extraordinary courage and determination, getting used to her prosthetic leg and swapping the car for an automatic so she could drive again. She had scarcely found her new balance when she fell and broke her wrist.

  Dad fell too, and hurt his head and knee so badly that, at one time, neither of them could walk. His cancer seemed to be in check, although the medication affected him in other ways.

  I drove up and down motorways with food during that cold, bleak drawn out winter. Dad’s breathing became difficult as the result of the drugs he was taking and he was admitted to hospital. In a grim echo of the previous months, he was in the ward next to the one where Mum had her leg amputated. My younger brother, Tony, became badly depressed, about that and other things.

  I thought the spring would never come. The twiggy silhouettes of the shrubs I had planted in my new garden looked like barbed wire sticking out of the iron earth. I walked the length of it every day, peering at each stiff, brown branch and wondering when, or if, life would return.

  As the months passed, I discovered that reading was still difficult but I managed and I started to write again, at first tentatively and then with greater fluency. For two years, Corinna Honan, my commissioning editor at the Daily Telegraph, had been taking me out to lunch, buying me impossibly expensive food I could not eat and encouraging me to write again. Her kindness and constancy were touching. She particularly encouraged me to write
about depression.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘It’s too much.’

  ‘It will help. You’re not the only one. You’ll see.’

  So I wrote, trying to inject as much hope (as much for myself as anyone else) as I could. It was incredibly painful but, curiously, the actual writing of it came easily perhaps because I didn’t see it as a piece of journalism but as a way of connecting. I didn’t much worry about form or style. I just wrote what I felt and what I felt was that I had never read a brutally honest personal account of how it really feels to be severely depressed. When I was very ill, that sense of understanding and connection was what I most longed for so I tried to write and do for others what I wanted done for myself. I cried as I wrote, but it did not stop me writing.

  Nor did dark warnings from friends in the media who implied that such a vulnerable and exposed personal statement was a piece of professional suicide, marking me out as unreliable and unemployable. In short, labelling me as a depressive. I refused to be stigmatised or frightened because I felt it was fear (and the silence it imposes) that kept the stigma in place. Or perhaps I thought that I had nothing left to lose. I don’t know. I do know that sitting down to write that newspaper article broke the deadlock I had about writing. Not immediately (it took another two years to re-establish my career as a freelance journalist but only because it took me that long to become well enough to cope with the pressures of constant deadlines), but it gave me the confidence to at least try. As for the dark warnings, none of them came true. All I was met with was support and kindness. Everyone, it seems, has been touched by depression, either personally or through family and friends.

  The letters came pouring in.

  Every day is a struggle. I function, I don’t live. I identified with so many of your symptoms—not wanting to be in this world, wanting the pain to end, not eating, crying myself to sleep, waking up sobbing and constantly fed up of people asking me if I am OK. I feel a failure and ashamed of what I have become. I just wanted to say THANK YOU for allowing me to see that other people have been through the same, that I am not a freak and that I AM NOT ALONE.

  I read the letters with tears pouring down my face and attempted to answer each one but the effort of sitting with so much unhappiness was often more than I could bear.

  I don’t know if not killing myself and rejoicing in not feeling suicidal is much of a way to live. But I do know that after reading your story, I felt a little less of a freak and think it is good to be happy for even the smallest of empathies. I can’t talk to friends and family. I alluded to it once and got a blast about self-pity.

  Those letters did make me understand that I was not the only one. Some of them even made me laugh. And then cry.

  A few years ago I would have dismissed your article as being typical of a neurotic woman. Since then, I have experienced what you so vividly describe. Some days I didn’t get out of bed until midday. I had to force myself to eat. I was very tearful, which I felt was wrong for a man. Reading your article has helped, because it is reassuring to know that other people can feel this way. Having cancer in 1989 didn’t bother me but being depressed in 2002 was truly frightening.

  Slowly, the spring began to unfold, one day bleak and frozen but the next, a morning of such brilliant, intense blue it hurt to look. Green shoots began to appear on the hard brown sticks and the garden softened and swelled as if taking a deep breath of pleasure. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone and we were back in the grip of an iron cold snap.

  My moods, too, were changeable. One morning I would wake into an intense, almost electric energy, filled with good humour and possibility. It would last for a few days, during which I became euphoric and voluble—sometimes, alarmingly so—and then, just as suddenly, it would be gone.

  Somehow, that was worse. The contrast between the light and the dark felt almost unbearably sharp, and the dark a colder, bleaker place than I remembered when I spent all my time encased in it.

  My psychiatrist changed my medication. I had begun to hate the side-effects of the tricylic drugs I was taking, which are known to affect memory, concentration and intellectual performance. I felt drugged and slow, even when my brain was pushing for action and the bloated constipation they induce made me feel generally lousy. No wonder they’re known as ‘dirty drugs’.

  I went on Prozac. Pretty soon, I was intensely suicidal again.

  I came off Prozac.

  He felt we should try one of the new breed of SSRIs, Escitalopram, which had just been launched, and was said to be a more potent and selective inhibitor of serotonin reuptake than the older SSRIs as well as having a higher tolerability profile, which he felt might suit me.

  He was right. I tolerated the drug pretty well, but my moods continued to shift alarmingly. Bright days were intense but the dark days were a deep and dirty black.

  I began to drink again.

  I had been stopping and starting for months, attending AA meetings on and off, but I could not convince myself that I was a drunk. I was simply depressed. The past year had been difficult. Of course I drank.

  At about the same time, I met Elizabeth and went back into therapy. It was tough and difficult work as I sought to unravel the knots of pain that had somehow gathered within me.

  Elizabeth, among her many trainings, is a specialist in alcoholism and addiction. With her, I knew I could not avoid or evade. I knew she could smell the drink on me when I turned up, hungover and withdrawn, for our sessions.

  ‘Your liver’s packing up,’ she said. ‘It can’t process the amount you’re drinking. Once that happens, it starts coming out of the pores of the skin which, as you know, is the body’s biggest organ.’

  I knew that. I could smell stale alcohol on my skin, even after I had taken a bath. I was a mess, and I looked it. My face was bloated, my eyes narrow and reddened, my skin blotchy. I had constant heartburn and diarrhoea; I felt like I had been submerged in acid. Drinking made me gag. Every swallow tasted acrid and burning, like lighter fuel, but still I could not stop.

  By then, I had switched from wine to vodka. I wanted oblivion, and fast. In the depth of my dirty black moods, wine took too long to have an effect. So did pouring a measure of drink into a glass. I drank straight from the bottle, usually in bed, in the afternoon. Then, I would finally fall asleep for a few hours and wake up, wretched and ill. There is only one cure for a hangover, other than time. Another drink. And so I would spend my evenings alone, cradling the bottle, slumped on the sofa in front of the television.

  ‘I know it’s a slow form of suicide,’ I said to Elizabeth.

  ‘You might die,’ she said calmly, ‘but you’ll go mad first.’

  ‘I thought I was already mad,’ I said, trying to smile, although my heart wasn’t really in it.

  ‘Alcohol rots the brain,’ Elizabeth said. ‘One of the final stages of chronic alcoholism is called wet-brain. It is truly horrible.’

  I carried on drinking although I did not drink every day. I would stop for a week, ten days or three weeks. And then something, anything, would give me an excuse for another drink and I’d be off again.

  Spring finally came. The earth grew warm and yielding. I began to plant up the garden, but in a mood of strange indifference. I kept telling myself that I was planting for the future, for the summer, the autumn, the next spring but I could find no pleasure in it. I still could not see a future. ‘The time I was really worried,’ Nigel told me recently, ‘was when you stopped caring about your garden.’

  I called Tom, just to hear his voice. We had not seen or spoken to each other for a year.

  ‘I wanted to say I was sorry,’ I said. ‘I hope we are still friends.’

  ‘There is nothing to be sorry for,’ he said. ‘And of course we’re still friends. My affection for you has never changed.’

  He did not suggest we meet, and neither did I. Since we parted, I had felt his absence so sharply it had become a presence, huge and constant. I missed him, every minute and every hour of every day
. I did not say so.

  There was no going back but it seemed that I could not go forward either. My heart had broken and I knew no way to mend it, except with vodka. A few men appeared on my horizon, but either I did not take them seriously, or I was cruel in my indifference. All my affections and my certainties lay elsewhere.

  I had always thought that Tom and I would be together. It had seemed so clear to me, right from the start. I was wrong. Even in my absolute certainty, I had been wrong. Yet I could not believe it. Sometimes, I felt that it was just some cruel joke or even a slip of memory. We had not parted after all. It was a nightmare, a trick of my mad, deluded mind.

  I knew, though, that it was not and neither was I deluded enough to think that he would come back. I knew him too well, knew how he could pull down the steel trap of his mind and shutter away his heart.

  I dealt with the pain by drinking. I dealt with all pain by drinking. Severe depression does not suddenly lift or disappear. It recedes slowly and, even as it recedes, can suddenly reappear in brief but violent onslaughts. I knew I was not helping it by drinking, but during those assaults I was in such agony, I did not know what else to do. I took to wandering the London streets late at night, buying vodka from late-night stores, sitting on walls and drinking straight from the bottle. I was not frightened of being mugged or murdered. I thought that as I had failed to kill myself, somebody else might do the job for me.