Humans are a clandestine species. We procreate behind closed doors, and we get ashamed of our illnesses. I am not immune to that shame, despite being that weird modern phenomenon: a public depressive. Or rather, a public person who is susceptible to depression.
Not one to fear hubris, I wrote a book called Reasons to Stay Alive. As well as promoting the book I have – since last April – appeared on TV and radio and in newspapers like this one talking about my illness. I am publicly ill, or publicly recovering, and it is odd.
Sixteen years ago, when I developed depression, I knew nothing about the illness except how to suffer from it. The thing with depression is that it is outwardly quiet. It is as private as a dream. It is often invisible and always internal. For weeks, I didn’t even understand that what I was suffering from was depression, or “depression with generalised anxiety” as my own particular brand of it was euphemistically called.
On the inside, your head can feel crushed under a raging psychological tsunami, but outwardly you can look like a healthy 24-year-old man. Even when I got a little better, I found that reading and talking about depression could be hard.
But then a trusted friend told me to write about my own experiences, and feeling a now-or-never moment was upon me – 10 books into my career – I did. I imagined writing to myself at 24, when I very nearly tried to solve my life by throwing myself off a cliff. At the same time I tried to make something invisible visible, so people who know nothing about depression might understand the relentless, self-disintegrating nightmare of it.
People assume it was hard, in the sense of painful, to write. But it was easy. There was no painful return. It was less about return and more about – excuse the therapese – “letting go”.
Reasons to Stay Alive was always meant to be a side project, something between novels. So – welcome though it is - I wasn’t really ready for it to become a success. Every day since April, I’ve had the kind of emails from strangers that need responses. I’ve also been doing a lot of public events around depression. For someone who used to avoid telling anyone about their depression unless necessary, doing more than 50 public events (basically therapy sessions with people watching you) takes a toll.
That said, it has been incredibly rewarding to hear from actual live humans about how the book has helped them. To hear that your book has got someone back to work, or helped them empathise with their partner, or actually stopped them from killing themselves, has obviously made me feel the other stuff has been worthwhile.
But to be public about depression has baggage. These days, I can’t go on Twitter and moan about having a bad day (behind deadlines) without people starting to talk me down from the metaphorical bridge. It is like I am now on a permanent, subtle suicide watch. People I love have said that they “feel so guilty” about the book. Unlike many illnesses, depression is freighted with judgment and blame, which spill out beyond the sufferer. If you have a deadly disease of the stomach, your mother might not feel guilty about the bacon sandwich she gave you back in 1982, but depression works differently.
All of this does, however, show that I needed to write the book. I have learned that both depression and the stigma that surrounds it are bigger than ever. As suicide is now the leading cause of death for men under 50, there are few bigger health issues. Yet it is still an issue dogged by scientific and social ignorance. While we wait for universal answers, we must be willing to share our own experiences.
We must emphasise that depression happens to people, and not because of them. We must stress that however you feel at 24, you will feel different 10 and 20 and 30 years later. We must remind people that the divide between mental and physical health is a blurred one, and that just as no one is perfectly physically healthy, our minds are never spot-free either. And like bodies, minds change. They have their own weather systems. Hurricanes morph into breezes. Words, as the success of talk and written therapies show, can be medicine.
And, as I found, the act of externalising can help. Depression can wither in the light. Hope may be corny, but it doesn’t stop it being real.
Extract
The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same. The only difference is that the pain of life has rapidly increased. So when you hear about someone killing themselves it’s important to know that death wasn’t any less scary for them. It wasn’t a “choice” in the moral sense. To be moralistic about it is to misunderstand. I stood there for a while. Summoning the courage to die, and then summoning the courage to live. To be. Not to be. Right there, death was so close. An ounce more terror, and the scales would have tipped. There may be a universe in which I took that step, but it isn’t this one.
I had a mother and a father and a sister and a girlfriend. That was four people right there who loved me. I wished like mad, in that moment, that I had no one at all. Not a single soul. Love was trapping me here. And they didn’t know what it was like, what my head was like. Maybe if they were in my head for 10 minutes they’d be like, “Oh, OK, yes, actually. You should jump. There is no way you should feel this amount of pain. Run and jump and close your eyes and just do it. I mean, if you were on fire I could put a blanket around you, but the flames are invisible. There is nothing we can do. So jump. Or give me a gun and I’ll shoot you. Euthanasia.” But that was not how it worked. If you are depressed your pain is invisible. Also, if I’m honest, I was scared. What if I didn’t die? What if I was just paralysed, and I was trapped, motionless, in that state, for ever? I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough. Those reasons can stem from the past – the people who raised us, maybe, or friends or lovers – or from the future – the possibilities we would be switching off.
More about Reasons to Stay Alive
What is the single most important thing to tell someone depressed?
However much in the foreground depression feels, you are separate to it. This is going to sound cheesy but I’d say: You are the sky. A cloud comes and dominates the sky. But the sky is still the sky. Depression tells you everything is going to get worse but that’s a symptom. Don’t give depression power – constantly discredit it.
Your most unexpected message is that depression can be a force for good?
If you took away all pain, if everyone lived for ever, everything would be bland, flat and boring, there would be no reason for art, music, newspapers, love – because we would all be in a mono state of happiness. You cannot belittle depression, yet a lot of people would not undo that side of themselves because it changes your thoughts. It makes you appreciate things you would not have appreciated before: like just being alive. Thinking about death makes you analyse what life is. Anxiety makes you curious and curiosity leads to understanding. I wouldn’t be a writer without depression.
Buy the book
Reasons to Stay Alive is published by Canongate priced £7.99 and is available from the Guardian bookshop for £6.39.
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