Depression Part One - Getting in the Box

I’ve been hearing a lot about people struggling with depression and anxiety recently, and I’ve been meaning to do a post about it. It was impossible to fit everything into one post, so this is the first of two posts. This one is about depression itself and the next one will be about recovering from it.

I have been lucky in that I haven’t suffered with depression as a result of my CFS/ME, but many people do. It is unsurprising that when faced with a future of debilitating fatigue and reduced quality of life, many people become clinically depressed. I am fortunate that I fought depression much earlier in my life and as a result I am able to prevent it returning. I can only imagine how awful it must be to have depression and CFS/ME.

I developed depression in my late teens, and anxiety symptoms sometime later. I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. I just got on with things, but I was miserable and cried a lot. I began to have a niggling doubt at the back of my mind, that all was not well.

And I proved to be right. One day whilst staying at my boyfriends flat in my first year at University, I had a complete breakdown. I was trying to study for my exams and really struggling, and all of a sudden I thought ‘I can’t do this!’. I broke down in tears, my boyfriend (now husband) was out at a lecture and I just did not know what to do with myself, but I phoned my mum, who very sensibly told me to go and see a doctor. And that was how it began. 

I struggled with it for the best part of four years, I took antidepressants and I had counselling and eventually some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). I had to drop out of my degree course for a year and go and live at home. My poor boyfriend suffered greatly, watching me fall to pieces.

It is impossible to explain it to someone who has never had it, but I will try anyway. For those of you that have had it, my words will probably make a lot of sense. 

My husband once told me about a dream he had where he was being chased by a tiger, to deal with this he turned round and picked the tiger up and put it in a box. This is him all over, he’s very practical and can deal with any problem. But it illustrated how normal people deal with problems, they put them in a mental box until they are ready to deal with them. People with depression get confused and put themselves in the box instead of the tiger, and shut the tiger out. This is fine to begin with but then more and more tigers come and you have to make the box stronger and stronger to keep them out. However, not only does it just keep problems out, it keeps all the good things out too. It keeps out happiness and laughter and fun and love and everything positive in our lives. Until one day you realise you have trapped yourself in a prison and you are totally and utterly alone. You cannot feel anything good or bad, you become numb and isolated. And with the isolation come feelings of guilt and fear and pain and they are in the prison with you. Outside there are all the problems you avoided growing bigger and bigger and battering at your walls, along with all the good things in your life. You are completely cut off from them in a prison you have unconsciously built. So what do you do? If you stay inside you will remain numb and dead and isolated, if you take the walls down you have to deal with the problems that you shut out, which have now grown to enormous proportions. It’s not much of a choice, both prospects appear equally ugly. And there is one final thing, if you are trapped in the box, if you are depressed, you fundamentally believe, in fact you know, you can never recover, you can never be happy and normal again.

You become someone else in that box, another version of you, and it whispers evil things to you. Telling you the only answer is to end it all. It is a horrible and insistant voice, but in that moment it seems like it is wise and I understand why many fail to resist it. I always knew what I would do and how I would do it if the day came when I would follow it’s advice, but thankfully it never did.

It’s not a box for everyone, sometimes it’s an actual prison, or an attic, or a locked room, or a deep hole. It was only in the later and more minor stages that it felt like a box to me. In my worst stages it was a rock in the middle of a vast ocean. I was stranded on it and the water was rising. The shore was far, far away, and that was where the people I loved were. If I wanted to get back to them I had to cry out the whole ocean, because it was an ocean of tears, and if I didn’t cry it out it would drown me. 

It is possible to recover from depression. I know it is, because I’ve done it. But it is the hardest thing I have ever had to do, and I needed a lot of help to do it. I am so glad that I managed to find myself and become ‘me’ again. If CFS/ME is a battle of the body, depression is a battle of the mind. It has one distinct plus point over CFS/ME, it can be fought. CFS/ME can only be beaten by submitting, depression can be beaten by fighting.