Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (7 page)

One day, soon after I had been admitted to hospital, she turned up and announced that the kids in her school were stupid.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because when I said that my mummy was in hospital, they said not to be so stupid, that you didn’t go into hospital with depression. They said all their mummies get depressed.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said that it wasn’t stupid, that proper depression isn’t just being a bit sad, it’s an illness and sometimes you have to go into hospital to get better.’

‘And what did they say?’

She shrugged. ‘They were cool about that.’

I always managed to be cheerful when Molly came to visit. It was only after she left that I fell apart. Going into hospital was the easy part. Staying there, and slowly beginning to understand just how ill I had become and how serious severe depression truly is, was terrifying.

The first time I had to attend group therapy, I cried. I howled. I hung on to my bed, sobbing, as three nurses tried to drag me from my room and take me to the therapy room where all the other patients were gathered.

‘No, no,’ I begged. ‘I don’t want to go in there. Don’t make me.’ I had not seen the therapy room, had not left the safety of my own room for the twelve hours since I had been admitted to hospital. The nurses eventually gave up, left me in a damp huddle on my bed, shaking with fear. I could try again, they said, that afternoon.

My psychiatrist was summoned.

‘You seem rather distressed,’ he said.

Distressed? Distressed is when you’ve lost your purse, not when you’re locked up in the mad house. My instinct was to punch him, to deck him with a swift left hook. It was often my instinct with my psychiatrist. His language was always so temperate, so measured.

Necessary, I suppose, in the face of madness. But maddening, nonetheless.

‘I don’t want to go in there.’

‘It would be helpful if you did,’ he said.

I sighed. In what was left of my rational mind, I knew I had a choice. Except that it no longer seemed like much of a choice. Either I could not attend group therapy and go on being depressed. Or I could attend and be terrified.

I felt like I was back at boarding school. I have a horror of institutions, of being locked away. Yet I was the one who had agreed, voluntarily, to be locked away. So I lay weeping on my bed as the man in the dark suit talked. And as he talked, I knew I had a choice. I also knew it was no choice.

I was, as they say, fucked.

It’s no picnic, a psychiatric ward. They fill up your time with group therapy, every morning and every afternoon, for two-or, sometimes, three-hour slots. Everybody gets a turn to speak, although not everybody does. Some days you don’t want to, you just want to be quiet and listen. Some days you don’t want to listen either. Or perhaps it’s more that you don’t want to hear.

There was a young woman in our group—let’s call her Sophie although it was not her name. Sophie was in her late twenties; pretty and rosy-cheeked with auburn curls. You might smile to see her pass you on the street. Her mum and dad sexually and physically abused her from the age of eight. She ran away from home when she was fourteen. She’s just found out her mum’s in hospital, dying. She wants to go and see her but she’s too frightened. Not just of her mother, but of her own anger.

She says her mother was certifiable, a real nutter. When Sophie was twelve, she stood in front of her and pulled out her own front teeth with her bare hands. Sophie tells the story, deadpan.

‘Seems stupid,’ she says, ‘to be frightened of a toothless old hag.’

Her dad fucked her everywhere, up her bum, in her mouth.

He died two years ago. Sophie’s having a hard time dealing with that. She says that now she’ll never know why he did what he did.

Afterwards, the therapist asks us if we have any comments. What she actually says is, would we like to share Sophie’s pain? Nobody could do that, not even Sophie. She’s wrapped it up tight and hidden it away because it’s too horrible to contemplate. The therapist wants to get it out in the open, lay it out on a slab like a piece of bleeding meat. She says it’s what’s crippling Sophie with depression.

When she says that, you can see the fear in Sophie’s eyes.

When she says that, I feel like a fraud. What right do I have to be here? I have not suffered as Sophie has. How dare I claim her pain? Or any pain?

I listen to the others. A man has lost his job. He cannot get over it. Without his job he does not know who he is.

A woman is terrified of her children, who are very small. She says she does not know how to be a mother and they will find her out.

It took me a while to understand that there is no direct line to depression, although a history of abuse is a more direct line than almost any other. Otherwise it has no lineage, no red markers other than vague talk of genetics and predisposition, stressors and reactors. What may devastate one person will leave another entirely unscathed. It is all terrifyingly vague. Much like my head.

And then there is Jane. She’s very funny, very smart and very, very sad. She cries most of the time. It’s no big deal. We all cry most of the time.

We didn’t become friends straight away, although I noticed her at once. It was her face, mainly. It’s one of those faces that in any other life you’d say was open and friendly. The lines around her eyes say she laughs all the time. Or used to. Depression does funny things to faces; it’s as if they’re wrapped tight in cling-film so they take on a pale and plastic quality. Sometimes, they glitter. Then there are the shadows under our eyes, stark as violet bruises. Everybody has them.

Jane’s skin is green. Not pea soup green, but that delicate shade that tells you somebody is sick. It doesn’t just happen when you’re sick to your stomach. It happens when you’re sick to your soul.

And Jane’s sick. Really sick. She’s been this way for four years, although she says she has no reason to be depressed. Nothing bad has happened in her life. ‘If it had,’ she says, ‘it might be easier. To understand,’ she adds, as an afterthought.

Jane is dangerous. Not to anybody else, just to herself. Really, in a physical sense, we are only dangerous to ourselves. In every other sense, we are dangerous to all the people who love us. We destroy their happiness, their peace of mind, their certitude. Depression does not only destroy those it directly touches.

She keeps trying to kill herself. Her mum’s so anxious about her she can’t eat, but Jane, who loves her mum, says she can’t help herself. She just wants to die. She’s on twenty-four-hour suicide watch. All day and all night somebody sits outside her door, which must, at all times, remain open.

It’s not just the suicides they check. They look in on everyone, at random times during the night. They never knock, which I don’t like. I may be depressed but I’m still human.

‘They think if they knock, it gives you time to hide the razor blade,’ somebody said. I have no razor blades; they went through all my stuff when I arrived. They even took away my disposable razor. They were impressed I had enough energy to care about having hairy legs. I didn’t, really. But I do now.

When they come into my room, they always say the same thing. ‘You’re awake!’ As if that’s a surprise at four in the morning in a mental hospital. I reply that I am always awake at that time. They say something about getting my psychiatrist to increase my sleep medication and then they check their charts and see that I am on the maximum dose.

‘Just try to relax,’ they say, ‘let your mind drift.’

Relax? Drift? Have they any idea what my mind is doing? But I say nothing. They are only trying to be kind.

Jane thinks the expression, suicide watch, is funny. ‘Can’t they phrase it in another way? It sounds like, “hey, guys, watch me die.” ’

I say, ‘Why do you want to die?’ I am fascinated. Before I got here, I had no idea that anybody else wanted to die.

‘I don’t want to die. I just don’t want to be here any longer. I don’t mean this place,’ she says, making a gesture that involves the ward. She points to her head. ‘I mean, this place.’

On the second day, a doctor comes by with an official looking form, the Beck Depression Inventory. It is a series of questions that attempt to measure the severity of your depression.

I score thirty-two.

‘Is that bad?’ I ask.

‘Anything over nineteen is severe depression. Under that, it’s moderate, dropping to mild.’

‘Oh.’

‘But there are people here at fifty,’ the doctor says.

I think he means to cheer me up. My throat closes at the idea of so much pain.

‘I see you ticked that you want to die.’

‘Yes.’

‘How would you like to die? Cancer, Aids, car crash?’

I look at him. ‘I might be depressed but I’m not mad. Pills, of course.’

He smiles. ‘Some people prefer cancer. It leaves them no option. It takes the responsibility out of their hands.’

Jesus.

Eighteen months later, I understand, after I have tried, twice, to kill myself and failed. Well, obviously, I’ve failed. It’s harder than you think to die, even when every fibre of your being is focused on death. Rehabilitation units are filled with people with shattered legs who’ve tried to kill themselves by throwing themselves off high buildings.

By then, I don’t just want terminal cancer. I long for it. Not for the sympathy. I want no attention. I have too much of that already. I just want not to exist.

Jane’s been in and out of this hospital five times. She is constantly, chronically, unrelentingly suicidal. But she is good, like most depressives, at hiding it. So good that the last time she was here, she was allowed out for a walk.

She went for a walk and then she went to a pub, where she drank five large gins. Not because she wanted a drink but because she wanted an anaesthetic. Psychiatrists call depressive drinking, ‘self-medication’. Then she bought four hundred paracetamol, all from different chemists. She ripped open the packages and hid the pills down her socks, in her coat pockets and in her jeans. It took her two hours to pop the pills out of their white plastic holders. When she walked back into the ward, she was rattling.

‘True dedication,’ she says.

‘You’re nuts,’ I say.

She laughs. ‘No!’ she says. ‘Really?’

‘It’s the worst death. It takes weeks and then your liver finally packs up.’

‘I know. They told me that when they found the pills.’

She wants to go for a walk now, but her psychiatrist won’t let her. ‘I’ll wear slippers,’ she pleads, ‘so I can’t run fast. I’ll shuffle slowly, like a mad person. A nurse can follow on behind. I’ll wear a nightie and a coat with no pockets.’

The answer is still no.

‘Please. I just need some fresh air.’

She tries another tack. ‘I could go out on the terrace. Sally could come with me. She’s responsible.’

I know what the psychiatrist is thinking. The terrace is three floors up. Sally is clinically depressed too.

‘It’s not as if I was going to jump,’ Jane grumbles to me later. ‘I want to be dead, not a paraplegic.’

Her psychiatrist reckons this is their last chance to crack Jane’s immoveable depression. Crack: that’s the word he uses. When I hear it, I think of depression as the shell around a nut. We are trapped fast inside it.

Jane’s down for ten courses of ECT. Her first is tomorrow, at ten in the morning. ‘When the national grid goes down,’ she says, ‘you’ll know I’m under.’

They’re going to do it in her room, wheeling in a machine and attaching electrodes to her head. She shows me where. They have to strap you down, to stop your body jerking too violently and breaking bones. Or your neck. The procedure only lasts for two minutes.

‘What if it doesn’t work?’

She draws a finger across her neck and shrugs.

I have a stalker. Her name is Grace. She’s a tiny Spanish woman in her sixties. She wears big round dark glasses and follows me wherever I go, crying in a low whimper.

She tugs at me constantly. ‘Why am I here? Why I am here?’

‘Because you’re sad,’ I say, ‘Just like everyone else.’

‘But I never get any better.’

‘You will.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because everybody does.’ I am lying. Not everyone does. But it is what I want to believe and so I say it out loud.

‘No,’ she cries, punching me on the arm with a tiny fist. ‘I won’t, I won’t. I won’t get better.’

It’s what everyone thinks, of course. Nobody thinks they’ll ever get better. They think they’ll cry until eternity.

I want to buy Jane flowers, to cheer her up before her ECT. There’s a certain, grim sanity in that thought. So I go to the nurses’ station and ask permission to leave the hospital, to go to Sainsbury’s, which is down the road.

They look doubtful.

‘I’m not mad,’ I want to say. ‘Just sad.’ Instead, I say, ‘It’s just down the road, I won’t be long.’ It’s weird having to explain yourself, to ask permission to go to a supermarket. I haven’t done that since I was a child. I haven’t been locked up since I was a child at boarding school.

They say that they have to call my psychiatrist. I need his permission to leave the ward.

I go and sit in my room and wait.

Grace sits with me. She pulls out a crumpled piece of paper from the big plastic handbag she carries everywhere.

‘What does this mean?’ she says.

I look at the paper.

‘It’s the drugs you’re on,’ I say.

‘But what do they mean? What are they for? Why do I have to take so many?’

Why? Why? Why? I know just what she means, but I have no answers. Since I have been here they have doubled the amount of antidepressant medication I was on, then doubled it again. My original dose wasn’t enough, they said, to touch the sides. I think I’m on a lot now, but I have no way of knowing. I take my pills with blind submission. Just as I take the tranquillisers and sleeping pills they give me.

I shrug and hand back the piece of paper to Grace. ‘I don’t know about your drugs. I’m not a doctor.’

She subsides into a small, quivering heap in the chair by my bed. I lie on the bed and stare up at the ceiling, feeling Grace vibrate beside me. Even in her stillness, she is agitated. She suffers from severe anxiety, as well as depression.

A nurse puts her head around the door. ‘You can go out,’ she says to me.

I swing my legs off the bed, search for my shoes. I haven’t worn proper shoes for a week. I put them on. My feet feel stiff, uncertain.

Grace is bolt upright. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To get some flowers for Jane. She has her first bout of ECT tomorrow.’

Grace clutches her bag in excitement. ‘Can I come?’

I look at her. I have listened to her in group every day, twice a day, for a week. I know all about her dead daughter and her cold, unfeeling husband. I know that she cries all night, that she is half-blind with tears. I even know what size shoes she takes (two). But I don’t know how mad or sane she is. I try to picture her in the fresh veg section in Sainbury’s. She’s so small, I could fit her in a shopping trolley, like a toddler. And then I imagine losing a mad Spanish midget in a supermarket.