Recovering from depression

There’s been a movement in the last couple of years to get people talking about their experiences with mental health, whether it’s on a national scale such as Mind’s Time to Talk campaign or Imperial’s own OpenMinds campaign. There’s also been a move to try and explain life with a mental illness to others who haven’t suffered one, a daunting task at best, but a project which has yielded really amazing work. My personal favourite is Hyperbole and a Half’s web-comic ‘Adventures in Depression’ (shown below) because it rings most true to my experiences of depression although, of course, everyone’s experiences are different. It also contains the use of stick men, which is a well-known Union favourite. What isn’t discussed as much, or at least what I haven’t picked up on, is what happens after you recover.

I’ll use the term ‘recover’ quite loosely here because it means different things to different people – for many, it isn’t a matter of curing a mental illness and being magically better, but more like finding a treatment program which works and that leads someone to feel like they have control over their life again. For me, I had several years of really quite debilitating depression when I was younger and now I don’t. I’m not currently receiving treatment for any mental health condition either.

I face a real temptation to simply close the book on that relatively long and painful aspect of my life. Talking about mental illness isn’t easy and when you pass as a neurotypical person 99% of the time, you pick up on thoughtless comments from others who assume you’re in on the joke. This year, I heard people say that they wouldn’t want a sabbatical officer who’d had mental health problems and, as a medical student, sometimes the opinions of my course-mates can be rather jarring. The idea of a doctor with mental health issues can be met with scorn, as a diagnosis is often equated to irrationality and instability, whereas patients with mental health problems can be seen as time wasters. Conversely, you can also find yourself excluded from discussions with fellow sufferers as you are assumed to be ignorant to these issues.

There are benefits to staying silent about mental illness and I’d be disingenuous to pretend there aren’t; you don’t have to deal with the associated stigma quite so harshly and you don’t have to worry about people treating you differently. What I’ve found difficult this year is the increased scrutiny you get as a sabbatical, namely the odd Tab article as well as your image on video screens all over the Union, which amplifies your normal human desire to present an infallible image to the world by the factor of fifty. I often tried to find some sort of middle ground between saying nothing and full disclosure, couching my illness as ‘poor mental health’ or other euphemisms rather than being explicit – in doing so I found myself in the strange situation of being anxious to disclose even that much and feeling like I’d copped out of saying anything meaningful.

I also feel a bit ridiculous talking about something that happened years ago and that I was fortunate enough to get through. I grew up with a parent with very severe mental health issues, including delusions and hallucinations, which led to them falling in and out of hospital, often under involuntary sections. For a long time, I was trying to battle the perception I had that unless your illness called for sirens and hospitals, it wasn’t really worth burdening anyone with. At the time, I managed to trick myself into thinking my condition wasn’t really that serious as I was still sitting exams and getting good marks, despite not attending around half of my classes in sixth form. I now realise that was absurd.

When you’re mentally ill, your perceptions often change in ways you don’t realise and even now, several years free of depression, I’m still realising how messed up some of my old, lingering thought patterns were. My view of recovery at that time was particularly wrong. When I was sick, I either envisioned recovery as some glorious light at the end of a hideous tunnel that I’d never reach or I’d see it as equally bleak as my current situation. The reality was somewhat different and I think it goes something like this: life can suck sometimes, whether or not you have a mental illness, and life also doesn’t care if you’ve had a mental illness in the past and could really use a break, thank you very much. What changes is yourself – the issues that would have knocked me sideways a few years ago, which ranged from major events to getting out of bed in the morning, I can now handle. And although some days are rubbish, I’m aware that the bad times are finite and I will feel happiness again. Sounds simple, but I would have scoffed at these concepts in the past. I also know how tempting it is to cling on to anything that offers you a chance of recovery when you’re ill, whether or not this is rational, be it a friend or family member or a treatment program or risk-taking behaviours that give you the illusion of feeling something else for even the briefest period of time. For me, I didn’t do well in any sort of formal treatment. I had counselling for a while but ended up just telling the counsellor what I thought she wanted to hear. After I was diagnosed when I was sixteen, I was referred to a psychiatrist to start drug therapy and CBT but that just freaked me out and it didn’t take me long to drop out. Instead, I was fortunate to have amazing friends who put up with me for several long, difficult years (no small feat given they were just teenagers themselves) and I was fortunate to come to Imperial when things were at their worst - a drastic change of scenery was probably what I needed most of all. For the vast majority of the population, that isn’t very feasible.

People often feel a lot of anxiety disclosing a mental illness whether informally to friends or formally to their departments in College. As Deputy President (Welfare), it’s hard advocating people to do things that I’ve personally found terrifying in the past and this article is one of many steps I’m taking to rectify that. Recently, I’ve joined up with the Counselling Service, Union Advice Centre and Disability Advisory Service to go around different departments in order to talk to students about mental health. One of the things I say in my talk is that although, in your head, you imagine people freaking out if you tell them you are having problems with your mental health, the most common reaction I’ve had to disclosure is people start disclosing themselves. I suppose I’m living proof as this article was prompted by a candidate for Disabilities Officer disclosing their own struggles with mental health on their public manifesto – for me the most compelling moment of the Big Elections so far. Still, I want to end this article with something positive and so I’ll talk about the moment that I realised I was getting well. I went to stay with a friend of mine (pictured above) who lives out in the middle of nowhere – her village doesn’t even have a post office and only recently got a pub. We drove out to one of the fields around her house and it was a late afternoon, so the sun was just beginning to set, and we had the car radio blaring as we drove around in the open, not another person in sight. It’s irrational but when you’re depressed the main problem is that you don’t see a way out and you lose hope of ever feeling anything again. For one moment, driving like an idiot and listening to canned pop songs in the middle of summer, I finally saw my life changing for the better.

I would like to share some massive moment of revelation that would be befitting of the end of a film, like staring out over the Grand Canyon for the first time (which I did some years later with the same friend), but no, my grand realisation occurred in the driving seat of a Ford Focus.

It was probably equally amazing.