Gareth O'Callaghan, the broadcaster and writer, couldn't work out what was wrong with him. Then his doctor diagnosed depression. He describes how he fought his way back to health.
Depression was some strange and mysterious liability I had always associated with the elderly, the bereaved and the long-term unemployed. Hardly a disorder that would hijack a young, otherwise healthy and successful thirtysomething, but it did.
Three years ago, I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression. Despite such a precise medical description, I was left none the wiser about what was wrong with me. I wanted to die, for no reason other than there seemed to be no point in living with an intolerable pain that was slowly, invisibly electrocuting me, a pain I couldn't reach.
For years, I had endured a life I despised. I felt ill-made for life's demands. I looked on while chatting with friends, always feeling detached from the art of communication, from the connection of conversation. I always felt I was only peering over the window sill of life while others were fully engaged.
Depression must be one of life's greatest anomalies. Most sufferers find it impossible to describe, and most people who have no experience of depression find it almost impossible to understand. In the three years since being diagnosed - I have now made a full recovery - I have delved deep, looking for the answers to the questions I've spent much of my life asking.
I was a tall, skinny kid with little or no self-confidence or self-esteem - the main ingredients for fighting depression. All I needed was the catalyst, and that came in the shape of sexual abuse at the age of 11. My perpetrator was a member of a religious order. The abuse took place on a scout holiday and continued for almost a year. He ingratiated himself with my parents, became the perfect family friend, stayed under our roof and terrified me with threats lest I ever told anyone how he was destroying my tender young life.
Four years later, racked with guilt, confusion, shame, anger, self-reproach and self-hatred, and suffering from severe bouts of obsessive-compulsive disorder, I decided to tell my mother what had happened or kill myself. Thankfully, my mother's love and empathy got me through one of the most traumatic periods of my young life.
But the seeds of depression were firmly sown. Bullying at school and in the workplace followed. A business venture some years later bellied up, leaving us financially ruined and compounding the inexplicable feelings of hopelessness I was beginning to feel almost daily.
Ironically - it remains an aspect of my depression that seems completely contradictory - my radio show kept my head above water. For some strange reason, I was able to garner the strength and resilience I needed to go on air and perform. I put this down to the power of music to focus the emotions.
My depression destroyed my ability to feel what I wanted, when I wanted to. My feelings thwarted me, became twisted and illogical. When everyone around me felt happy and content, I felt miserable, angry and confused. Gradually, the pleasant emotions refused to register while the negativity took on a brutally sharp knife edge.
It became difficult to eat regularly, as if my biological appetite-prompter had blown a fuse. I stayed in bed longer, resorting to returning to bed at every opportunity.
Outwardly, I had just about managed to maintain the looks and appearance that defied my condition, but that soon crumbled. Three years ago, the depression took its firmest grasp on my body and mind. I lost weight rapidly: three stones in six months, enough for a remark that I looked as if I had HIV. Suicidal thoughts plagued my life. For no apparent reason, I imagined death as a welcome release from the excruciating pain I was feeling, a pain that wouldn't show up on any scans or screens but was becoming unbearable.
Another strange irony of my depression was the horrendous catalyst that forced me onto my eventual road to recovery: the suicide of a close friend. We had both known of each other's pain, but we could not bring ourselves to discuss this monster that gave us so much in common but kept us so far apart. The morning he died, my life - what was left of it at that point - fell apart. Whatever straws I had been clinging to for dear life disappeared. In the weeks that followed, my spirit disintegrated. It was the most devastating feeling I can recall: helpless, hopeless, paralysed and abandoned.
Three weeks later, my wife hurt her back while gardening one afternoon. The following morning, a Saturday, she was unable to get out of bed. I rang our GP, who offered kindly to call after surgery finished. He spent an unusually long time upstairs with her, which made me think she had seriously injured herself. Unknown to me, I was the topic of huddled conversation. When he came downstairs, he asked me to sit down. He asked me a series of questions. My answer to each one was yes. He smiled kindly, as is his nature, and told me I was suffering from severe depression.
His words came as a huge relief, as if he was helping partly to lift this horrible spook off my shoulders. Relief came in knowing that I hadn't some incurable cancer or some terminal illness that was zapping my soul. He prescribed antidepressants, explained what I could expect in the coming weeks and asked me to stay in regular contact.
Unfortunately, the relief I felt that morning was short lived. "What now?" was a question that surfaced in the days and weeks that followed. I knew my medication was only a beginning, a crutch to give my life back a degree of acuity, balance and perspective. Within six weeks, I got the lift my GP had described that morning.
"You'll know it when it happens. Make no mistake - you'll feel it," he told me. And I did.
But that marked the beginning of a hard slog that I kept reminding myself I had no choice but to undertake. The choice was clear: remain in this semi- lucid, slightly distant state of what felt like a heavily medicated twilight zone or find the source of my pain, remove it and do the spadework required to give me the life I wanted.
I was faced with a brick wall of ignorance. There seemed to be no answers to the questions I was asking. I devoured books, surfed the Internet, went to lectures and talks given by eminent "experts" in psychiatry and psychology. They told me little if anything. Most of them had learned about my pain and suffering, and the subject of depression, from textbooks, CT scans and pathology reports. They knew what I was suffering from but none knew what it was like to suffer from this disintegrative condition.
They told me it was a chemical imbalance. I refused to believe them. Others explained it was a genetic disease, hereditary in people who suffer from depression. I told them there was not one scintilla of proven evidence to support this argument.
Their rebuffs and hard stances made me feel stigmatised. I tried to explain that depression is not rocket science, unlike what the psychiatric profession and the pharmaceutical companies would have us believe. Depression is a multimillion-dollar industry. It makes a lot of people very, very wealthy, and if health is wealth, then they seem to be getting it badly wrong.
Sadly, many sufferers remain in the dark for most of their lives, because they're often led to believe there is no other way than to stay on the tablets. It was crucial for me to find a simple description for what I had always understood to be a highly complex condition. I found it after much consideration, deliberation and consultation. Depression is simply an inability to control what and understand why we are feeling the way we are feeling at any given time, when we really want to feel something else. By simplifying it, it becomes easier to understand. Simplification removes the stigma. At least, it did for me.
My new book, A Day Called Hope: A Personal Journey Beyond Depression, became my way of healing my life. It stands alone as a journal of personal experience, giving me a chance to flesh out the strange pain I felt and put words and colour on its many guises, and a guide to remind me of what works and what doesn't. Expression is the opposite of depression, I now believe beyond doubt.
Once we start to attempt to express the twisted emotions, even though they make no sense, we begin to put a shape - our personalised stamp - on our feelings again. With expression, for me, came the ability to build on the hope I started to feel once I started to talk.
A Day Called Hope by Gareth O'Callaghan is published this week by Hodder Mobius, £10.99 in UK.
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If you think you are suffering from depression, it's important to get to a doctor. If you don't like your GP, find a new one. This may be difficult if you live in a small town, but it's crucial to your health and well-being. A grumpy, uncaring GP who appears to show little interest will do even less to alleviate your depression.
It's also important to be aware of the difference between feeling down and suffering from depression. We all have bad days, but they usually pass. If you have been feeling lethargic for a long time, are unable to sleep, are sleeping excessively, are waking early in the morning, have lost weight or your appetite, have no interest in sex or are having self-reproachful, morbid or suicidal thoughts for no apparent reason, you may be suffering from depression.
Overcoming it requires unwavering acceptance of five key points:
Hating and resisting depression maintains it. We have to accept that we can't change who we are, but
we can change our values and beliefs.
Recovery must begin with a complete overhaul of our lives. This requires a three-pronged approach, involving nutrition, physical fitness and spirituality.
We have to put closure on the past if we are going to move forward. Depression is a form of stagnation that can be overcome only by focusing on what can be rather than what could have been.
We are responsible for nobody's else's happiness, only for our own, in the same way that nobody else is responsible for our happiness except ourselves.
We must live within what is possible. Remember, many people who win large sums of money suffer depression within a year.