Its six months since Mental Health Awareness Week. Six months since I wrote the first blog. In some ways it seems to have flown by and yet somehow it seems a long time ago too. So much seemed to happen in the immediate aftermath of that week, I wanted to give it some time before I wrote anything more. Back then I didn’t know if I needed or wanted to write anything more either. I was really mindful of not bombarding people with information about the same thing so they end up scunnered listening to it. Brexit springs to mind. I think we’ve all reached our limit with that issue. Might as well add Stormont to that too. But time has passed and here I am. Tapping away again
I suppose one of the reasons I didn’t know if I’d write any more was that I didn’t know what there was left to write. I’d told my story. Told those who didn’t know about the lows of the disease. What it’s like under the hood. I’d let others who were suffering know that they weren’t the only ones. Of course they probably knew that but to read about someone they knew or knew of and how they’d been to the same dark corners seemed to resonate with those who’d been there too. But of course, my journey with mental health still goes on. Even though it’s a good one now. And I guess that’s the reason I’m writing this now. How much more or how many I’ll do I don’t really know, but I’m going to start with a few things that have arisen from the feedback I had from May.
One of the things I’ve learned from talking to people and from the messages I’ve been sent is how little those without experience of depression know about how it affects you. In a lot of cases these people had someone close to them who was currently or had recently been struggling. I was quite surprised by this. How I had seemed to help someone, who quite often I didn’t know, gain a better understanding of an illness someone close to them was suffering with. Then I realised that was exactly why I wrote the blog in the first place. To explain to my own family what depression was like. To tell them about the hood and the rat and the boxes. To let them see what it was that happens. I started to wonder why that was. Why are knowledge and understanding so low? The reason I think, is sufferers struggle to talk. We prefer to keep depression in the shadows and deal with it there. I guess I was lucky that I can write because I couldn’t talk the way I did in the blog. For me to sit with my family and tell them everything I talked about it that week would’ve probably taken me an hour to do. To churn out all that information. The biggest hurdle though wouldn’t have been time. It would’ve been to be able to do it without breaking down. I know for a fact I couldn’t have done it. And that’s why I never talked about it. I didn’t want them to be able to look me in the eye and see me vulnerable. See me at my weakest. See that I couldn’t handle something I felt I should have. So even after they knew I had depression, I avoided the subject. Cut them short on any questions till the message settled. Don’t ask Adam. He doesn’t want to talk about it. The truth though was I didn’t want to talk about it because I couldn’t. Even now, when I’m really feeling good, I still find it hard to keep my emotions in check when talking about mental health. I’ve been asked to talk at a few events lately and they’ve gone ok but before hand that’s the thing I was worried about. Will I be able to hold it together? And I worry if I can’t, will people think that the hood has started to rise and billow. They’ll think that we’ve asked this boy here to talk about something and he can’t keep a handle on the subject matter. He’s about to break down in front of us. The truth is I don’t think that will ever go away. That emotion. I carry it with me after 2016. Sometimes it bubbles to the surface when I talk about the low times. And sometimes it happens when I talk about things that aren’t particularly emotive. Sometimes I can talk about the hard stuff and I don’t break stride – there doesn’t seem to be any rules. I don’t think I spilled a tear in my kitchen writing the blog and yet as I said earlier, I couldn’t talk about that stuff. I’m sure as time goes by I’ll get better at controlling things, but as I said, I don’t think it’ll ever go away. In the last few months I’ve grown to accept that. I’d go as far as to say I’m fine with it. Mental health problems can rarely be seen from the outside, I think of that emotion as a scar on my brain that sometimes bleeds when I pick at it.
So I guess when people don’t get any ‘real’ information about depression and what it’s like they, they form opinions from the limited knowledge they do have and their own non depressive logic. And as we seen back in May, depression is not a logical disease. I suppose what I mean by non depressive logic is people maybe look at someone with a mental health condition and even though they may know something’s not right, they think it should be. If we take my own example back in 2016, my life from the outside seemed to be going great. An almost young and fresh(ish) 35 year old getting married to a most definitely young and ‘daisy button fresh’ 28 year old. Decent job, own house, driving a very racy Volkswagen Fox, good friends, good family etc etc Things should’ve been sweet, but as we know that wasn’t the case. If people were have to found out I had depression at the time without the full explanation, sympathy may have been at a bit more of a premium than it was in May. What’s he got to be sad about? A few years ago an old school friend of mines wife was off work with stress due to a conflict at work. I didn’t know at the time but she’d had some problems with post natal depression in the past when her kids were born. She seemed fine and in good form whenever I seen her. Just her usual self. It sickened me. Stress my arse, lying at home, probably on full pay and nothing wrong with her. Get it together, go to work and get on with it. Some of us are busting a gut at work every day. It all changed of course when I was sitting in the doctor’s surgery in October 2016. I’m embarrassed now of how I thought about her. Worse than embarrassed, I’m ashamed of what I thought. How I judged her. I thought I knew the full story when I didn’t. I didn’t have the information. I was using logic that didn’t factor in something I didn’t understand so therefore wasn’t acceptable to me. To be fair, I think that line of reasoning I had used is probably pretty common. A roll of the eyes, a shake of the head and a mutter of ‘just pull yourself together.’ Not of course to the persons face, but when they’re not around. Maybe to ourselves or maybe to another logical being that thinks the same.
Another problem that kind of follows on from this one is that because people aren’t getting any information about every day mental health problems, they maybe base opinions on the cases they do hear about. These tend to be more extreme. Perhaps when things get so bad and someone makes an attempt on their own life and has to be admitted to hospital. Now in these cases people usually are a bit more sympathetic but quite often circumstances like this can often be the first time we hear about someone’s struggle. We don’t get to hear about all the in-between stuff, and so we form a general opinion based on a serious example and we think that what happens if we have a mental illness. I was guilty of this too. When I first went to the doctors in 2016 I held back on telling him about the bottom as I thought he’d maybe ‘take me’ from my family and send me to the Ross Thompson where I’d be kept till I was safe. Unlike with my friend’s wife, I don’t really feel ashamed that I thought that, I just didn’t have the information.
So without being too high horsey, this needs to change. I think people in my position, who have turned the corner, need to find a way to explain to the people around them what it’s like. It’s never too late to do that. I’m not saying everyone needs to write a blog or go public, I’m just saying everyone needs to find a way that they are comfortable with to increase the knowledge of those around them. We need to start talking about the real information. Non sufferers maybe need to accept that sometimes we can’t understand something we’ve never had. So I guess what I’m saying is we all need to start respecting mental health as a legitimate illness, and as such that message needs to be passed on to Abels generation. Growing up I don’t think we were taught that. And that’s not a shot at the generations above. We progress with time in every aspect of life. When I was young at school we thought Gransha and the Ross Thompson were places that ‘held’ lunatics who were too dangerous to be allowed to mix with the normal healthy people. We should be aiming for our children to view these places as just another hospital department.
Anyway, I hope the comeback gives incites as much interest as the last time, though I don’t think the subject matter from now on will be quite just as dramatic! Hallelujah say my nearest and dearest! It does feel strangely good to be writing again, to jump back on the horse as it were.
Until next time
Adam
Adams blog 