This writer of this post has chosen to remain anonymous
This was my experience …
It does not take much to tip someone over the edge. I had no great ambition; I just wanted to own a house and bring up a family. I was deprived of this by debt and convincing lies to the extent that I did not know truth from lie. I felt guilty of being useless and gullible and I paid a high price for it. I.e. not being there for my children. I realise now that you can so easily be in this position, if you are made to feel worthless and trapped.
Back in the late sixties and seventies, I suffered severe mental depression. Mental health in those days was looked on by the public as a stigma. My Mother felt this, and my sister’s attitude was pull yourself together. At the time I had two small children and a husband.
I suppose the only way of describing depression is a feeling of dread. Everything you need to do takes such an effort and most of the time you cannot think and have no motivation. I remember getting up, sitting and fearing the start of day, getting to the afternoon the mood lifting a little and by the evening just looking to go to bed and take a pill to put me to sleep. Just existing really.
My GP was extremely good and did his best to keep me going, prescribing tablets day and night, however, things came to a head and I was admitted to Mayday Hospital, Croydon. I was admitted to a ward used to assess patients, with ten or twelve beds. The cases were varied from “milk fever”, guilt over a legal termination, some obsessive and some who appeared completely out of their minds. This was all very frightening, to the point that you would feel unable to cope. They brought someone into the bed next to me and that night, even with sleeping tablets, I could not sleep for fear the patient in the bed next to me was going to stab me.
The psychiatrist came to the ward and had a separate room to which you were called into. There you were confronted, not only by him but about nine students, which was intimidating! He asked questions that I had no answers to, then more questions, however the students never spoke, with the outcoming being that you were either prescribed more pills or ECT treatment. I was prescribed both tablets and six treatments of ECT, another experience that was not pleasant. On the ward, you were given an injection into the hand, and you would then be called to go to the treatment room, a small room with a couch and three people present. You laid down on the couch, received another injection and after that you were barely conscious, following which you had to get up and another patient would take you back to the ward for you to sleep it off. The only thing that you got from this experience was that you had no memory, and that you felt like a zombie. The experts all thought this an improvement, because the treatment seemed to them to have lifted your mood, because you were not worrying. Without a memory, how could you!
I spent several stays in Mayday Hospital over the years. With no cure, feeling not able to cope with home and everyday life, I made one suicide attempt with an overdose, as I had convinced myself that my children would be better off without me. My stomach was pumped, and I was lucky I had sustained no brain damage, but when you are in that state of mind you do not think of the effect this action has on others. Before 1961, it was against the law to take your own life and if you survived you were sent to prison, there was no compassion shown by nurses and it was considered the cowards way out.
Eventually, I was admitted to Warlingham Park Hospital. This really was the things of nightmares, people there had brain damage, either through drugs or alcohol, mixed with those with genetic abnormalities. The ward was mixed, a day room in the middle, sleeping quarters either end, men one end and women the other, with the age group varying from teenagers to those in their fifties or sixties. This really was absolutely the scare of all scares, they wanted to section me, I had only been there twenty-four hours and I pleaded with my husband not to sign the papers.
Luckily, he listened.
In between the hospital stays, I had to attend centres for occupational therapy, where there were people who were like me, depressed and not being able to cope, but others were unpredictable, with fights breaking out for the littlest thing.
There was a period when group therapy was introduced, which was interesting,you were encouraged to speak about your problems. This made you more aware of the many things that people were dealing with and how they were feeling about it. I met and made a connection with an alcoholic. She was what was then known as a “trendy dresser”, a lady from a well to do family. We got on well and she said how ashamed she felt about her addiction, explaining the ways she fed it by going to different places to buy drink and different dustbins to get rid of empties.
My experiences, as unpleasant as they were, has taught me a few valuable lessons. I have gone on to achieve a few things I am proud of. It did not happen overnight, and it was not easy but, in the end, I made a reasonable amount of progress to find myself again.
Sympathy or bullying does not help. Finding a way of encouraging yourself to believe that you have self-worth. Somewhere along the way your thinking has got muddled and you cannot find a way out of the situation you find yourself in. Most of the time you do not take in what others are saying, you are in a world of your own. A very cruel and lonely world. Feeling wretched and inadequate. We all have worth, we all have a role to play, we should be encouraged to play it to the best of our ability.
Hope is another word for someone in depression.
One thing I know for sure “A little bit of help is worth much more than pity”