The merits of knitting in treating depression

It’s amazing how many people are depressed and alone, on the slopes of mountains around the country, enduring insomnia, or walking the roads in despair

ONE DAY in my childhood, my grandmother saw me playing with her knitting needles. “Stop that,” she commanded, because there was thunder and lightning outside, and she feared that the stainless steel needles might conduct electricity from the sky, down into my fingers.

Which may be why I never pursued knitting as a career, though I don’t regret it, and I don’t usually brood over all the knitting I never did. But one day last week, as I was getting my hair cut, I was forced to think again about the merits of a knitting life. A woman beside me gave a sigh, and the hairdresser said, “That doesn’t sound too good,” and the woman said, “I was up half the night, knitting. If I’m depressed or can’t sleep, I just knit,” she explained. “It takes my mind off other things.” I didn’t ask what the other things were, but I suspect that, like me, she spends her nights drowning in negative emotions, weeping into the pillow and flailing herself for the mistakes of a lifetime.

In fact I’ve been suffering so badly that someone advised me to find a therapist. Which is fine, except that I am temporarily lodged in Leitrim, and Leitrim is an intimate world, and even if there are therapists working locally, I wouldn’t visit them for fear of being identified in the waiting room by some neighbour. And besides, Leitrim therapists are probably overworked at the moment, because of all the stress that has been generated since people learned that the county may soon be turned into an industrial mining zone.

And I certainly would not go to Dublin just to see a therapist, because it’s too far, and trying to survive in the traffic or on the train might exhaust me even further.

My only hope was to find someone online. And that I did; a wise old man with a Phd who is, I hope, going to talk me through my anxieties via a Skype link from New York.

I actually know lots of other people around the country who are also sad, and it’s a great comfort to e-mail them now and again and exchange anecdotes about how dark the night can be.

In fact it’s amazing how many people are depressed and alone, on the slopes of various mountains up and down the country, enduring insomnia, or walking the roads in despair, or listening to CDs in their cars like The Mindful Way through Depression, and Swamplands of the Soul. Gone are the days when we could pray our way out of sorrow.

In the old days, a bad summer, like the one just over, was liable to bring on an apparition of the Virgin Mary in some remote corner of rural Ireland around which the collective unconscious of the nation could gather and be consoled; but not any more.

I mentioned all this to the knitting woman in the hairdressers, and she picked up my last point and said that in fact there was an apparition of the Virgin Mary in her parish when she was young.

“Our Lady appeared in the trees. Two girls were going up for milk to the big house when they saw her along the avenue. They saw her in the trees. And it went on for a long time, and it was a huge sensation. And people would be ferried out from the town on the back of lorries every evening.

“And there was a young lad who used to climb up into the trees, and he’d be making a joke of it all, shouting – She’s coming! But one evening didn’t he fall out of the tree and break his leg. So that put a stop to him. And there was another man who made a business from the apparition.

“He cut branches off the trees along the avenue and sold them. And he made a fortune out of those twigs, even though they weren’t even from the right tree.”

She sighed again, another mighty sigh of sorrow.

The hairdresser said, “You’re definitely not in good form today.”

She said, “I should be on tablets. But what can I do?”

I said, “Did you ever consider going to a therapist?”

She said, “I went one time with the knee.”

I said, “That was probably a physio- therapist; I meant a psychotherapist.”

She frowned at the word psycho, and said “Oh my God, I wouldn’t go to anyone if they were unwell!” “And besides,” she added, “I have my knitting.”