Failing to achieve take-off

This story started, as many good ones do, a long time ago, in a far away place.  

I was in a car, travelling to an out of town shopping area, with one of my most treasured friends (a select band of about a hundred or so, if you must know) and I had just admitted to him that I suffered from depression. He'd gone quiet, as many folk do while they are ingesting this news and working out (a) what, if anything, to say and (b) whether, and how far, to run away. It turns out that he was considering (c) 'shall I tell this guy I have practiced Transcendental Meditation?'.

Now, good friends we may have been then (and the bond has only deepened over the years) but he was quite right to wonder whether he should admit that to me. T.M. is usually accompanied by a cloud of eastern mysticism, and jokes about the Beatles and I, as a well-known taker of the piss might have been relied upon to mock. But, fortunately for the pair of us, I held my tongue.  Long enough, anyway, to ask how he had found the experience.

He told me that there was a certain amount of mumbo-jumbo associated with it and that the 'Maharishi' foundation, despite its charitable status, was quite interested in parting folk from their money. BUT, and it was a big but, he had found it useful and it had helped him through turbulent times in his youth. I made polite interested noises, thought I might try it sometime, and filed it away in my mind for future reference, where it may well have stayed.

While I was, to all intents and purposes over the bout of depression I'd suffered, I was tired, and sleeping very poorly.  Another very good friend suggested that my diet might be at fault and recommended a naturopath.  Well, I was getting desperate, and desperate folk to unexpected things, so I found one in yellow pages (where he'd been moonlighting as a bookmark), and went to see him. He put me on a detox-diet, loaded me with a collection of bottled supplements and tonics, relieved me of a wad of cash and commanded me to cease smoking, and desist from taking alcohol and caffeine, and to come back and see him in a week.

For three days I experienced the kind of hell that I steadfastly believed could not possibly get any worse. Everything that went into me and most things that came out were a virulent shade of green and, as each day proved, I was wrong about the not getting any worse.  On the fourth day, though, I woke up full of energy and raring to go so, as one does, I went straight back to beer and burgers. 

A few days later I arrived for my follow-up appointment, which went something like this:

Him: So the detox went well, and you're sleeping better?

Me: Yep.

Him: But not as well as you think you should be sleeping?

Me: Yep.

Him: That's because you're actually quite an angry man.

Me: No I'm not!

Him: Yes you are. (repeat twice, with additional exclamation marks)

Me: I'M NOT FUCKING WELL ANGRY!

Him: Ahah! (triumphantly)

Me: (simmering down a little) OK, ok, so maybe I am. what should I do about it?

Him: I don't know, I'm a naturopath, not a counsellor.

And so it was that I remembered the conversation I'd had a few weeks ago, looked up T.M. in the yellow pages, and found myself handing over a grand to a frenchman called Gerald who proceeded to earn this enormous sum by teaching me to shut my eyes for twenty minutes a day while repeating a nonsense-word.  Bizarrely, it worked.  My sleep improved, and my concentration at work was laser sharp.  On the down side, Gerald continued to try to sell me Vedic 'cures', make me go vegetarian, and suggest that one day I would achieve 'yogic flying'.  After a while, the mysticism annoyed me, the whole meditation thing just petered out and. slowly, imperceptibly, I settled back into the ruts I'd worn over the years.

Until Mindfulness, but that's a different story.

I've been watching you sleep...

That's creepy, isn't it? "I've been watching you sleep..."

The idea that someone is watching them might (assuming the presumptive voyeur is a stranger rather than a loved one) keep most people awake - even if they don't have a generalized anxiety disorder.  And yet, last night, I slept under the watchful gaze of a night vision video camera.  Not, I might add, one which someone was glancing at 'incidentally' now and then, but rather one which was being used to study exactly how I was sleeping, and every move I made.

To understand why I put myself in this unlikely position you need to know two things; chronic tiredness can be both a symptom and a contributory cause of depression, and Mrs Grumbler says I snore like a pig (she'd know, we do keep pigs after all...). The long and short of it is that I ended up with both a wife and a psychiatrist advising me to get myself checked out for sleep problems. I've no desire whatsoever to sleep with my psychiatrist but I am quite partial to she-who-must-be-obeyed's presence in the sack, and so I took myself to the local G.P. and asked his advice. Say what you like about the National Health Service, within a week I had an appointment arranged for a few week's time at a local sleep disorder centre, and that's how I ended up where I was last night.

I turned up at a pre-arranged early evening time and then sat around in a waiting room for best part of 45 minutes without seeing any medical staff. Once they did turn up, however, they proved to be quite special.  I have no idea how many people the nurse who looked after me was taking care of, but she was the only staff member I saw (and I saw five other patients) and she gave me the impression that the ratio was 1:1.

My nurse (never did find out her name) took me to a private room (I had been expecting, and dreading, a shared ward) and explained that polysomnography does not involve sleeping with a parrot; it's actually just a posh way of saying 'sleep study'. This meant I'd be wired to a number of sensors which would track heart rate, breathing, noise and movement, along with the aforementioned camera, whilst I slept.  She invited me to 'slip into something more comfortable' and indicated she'd be back in half an hour.

To preserve what little modesty and dignity I have left I eschewed my usual Monroe-esque night attire (sans Chanel #5 mais avec Brut #33) in favour of a pair of Star Wars 'lounge pants' tastefully emblazoned with R2D2, C3PO and Darth Vader. My nursing angel did wonders for my ego on her return by pronouncing them 'cool' before dashing it on the cruel rocks of reality by telling me that 'I might buy some for my Dad'. I submitted in wounded silence to the affixing of a multitude of sensors with the aid of several hundred metres of what might well have been industrial-strength carpet-tape. Promising to bring me a cup of tea at six am she left me to sleep.

To my surprise I did actually get a good few hours and was awoken with the happy news that my nocturnal activities had generated a lot of interesting data.  I'll have to wait until next week to find out what it all means, but I can categorically state that having a nurse rip electrodes from various appendages first thing in the morning wakes you up really rather quickly...

Why 'Dogsitting for Winston'?

Winston Churchill, according the the memoirs of his doctor, Lord Moran, suffered from depression which he referred to as his 'Black Dog'. There are those who doubt the veracity of Lord Moran's assertion; not only in respect of the raven-hued canine anthropomorphism but also whether Winston actually suffered from what we know today as clinical depression.

We know from readily available empirical evidence that the British Bulldog was certainly a moody bugger - a trait shared by the Grumbler.  If, in fact, he did have clinical depression then that's something else which, it will come as no surprise to those who know him, the Grumbler shares.

This collection of musings is about depression.  Mostly I'll write about things from my own personal experience but, where it suits, I might add thoughts that others have contributed. I have many motives for inflicting my views on the subject on my largely unknown audience but my primary one is to help, via my own peculiar perspective, to do away with the stigma surrounding matters of mental health.

We all know people with mental health issues.  Frequently though, we don't know that these people have them. Now, just as if one of our friends has diabetes, there's no reason why we need to know but the difference is that very few people would be ashamed to tell you that they have a problem producing insulin - while many folk will shy away from admitting they have a mental health issue. And that's odd since clinical depression is essentially a chemical imbalance in the brain.  You can think of it as 'diabetes in the head' if that helps.

Ive been happy to talk about mine to anyone (just ask Mrs Grumbler) but Ive always avoided writing about it, because I was afraid that people might judge me, or my career prospects might be limited - despite the thin and easily pierced layer of anonymity between the Grumbler and the real person behind the keyboard.

So why the change of heart? Well, I'm no spring chicken, so I'd be fooling myself if I thought I was still on the upward slope to promotion at work, depression or no. So what is there to be limited by my spilling of beans? Then there's the faint but growing whiff of hypocrisy I have noticed when people ask my why I talk about it, but don't write. And finally, I know that I am fairly adept at conveying a feeling in words and so, just maybe, someone else might read a paragraph and think "oh, so it's not just me..." and take a crumb of comfort.

So, back to that word, depression.  For me, it conjours up a mental image of Disney's portrayal of Eeyore, almost comically sad and filling the watcher's heart with compassion. Or maybe Douglas Adams' Marvin, the Paranoid Android - annoyingly pessimistic and almost screaming to be shaken out of his gloom.

In reality, certainly in my case, that's not even close.

Many of you will have had a dream in which you're falling, helpless and terrified, from a great height, and most of you will have woken up with a start. Think about that first half second when you wake. Disorientation; an almost electric shock; nerves stretched like piano wire; raw, animal fear that you can taste, like tin... and then the world floods back in like a tsunami of relief as your mind takes charge and sorts things out. Your heart stops pounding, the bedclothes embrace you in soft warmth, and you realise that you were dreaming and all is well.

Try to imagine, if you can, that one day your mind simply can't sort things out. The world doesn't flood back in, and there is no relief. Instead, the terror; the tension; the not quite knowing where, or who, or even what you are; that exhausting rush of fight-or-flight adrenaline all just keep on coming. Stretch that half-second feeling you remember into an hour; a morning; or a whole day from waking to sleep. Its not an easy thing to imagine. In my case, its not an easy thing to remember because I have been there. I can tell you that it's not sadness I was feeling and if shaken I would most likely have simply shattered, Humpty-Dumpty style into a million pieces never to be put back together - not by all the king's horses and all the king's men.

I tell you this not for sympathy, but for the sake of understanding. That's how the worst days (and they are mercifully few and far between) are for me.  For the next person it will, probably, be different.

Back in the days when I owned only short trousers and lived happily on a shilling a week pocket-money from my sainted grandmother these afflictions, if they were talked about at all by the grown-ups, were called (in hushed tones) a nervous breakdown. I don't know whether its political correctness or the mere evolution of language but 'nervous breakdown' fits the bill so much better and I feel that to call what we have 'depression' does a bit of a disservice to those who suffer from it.

You can tell I don't like to call what I have 'depression'. But I'm none too sold on calling it a 'nervous breakdown' either - not because I have anything against the term but because this is my depression and Ill put it in its place and call I what I want.  I like the idea of giving it a personality of its own. So, instead, just as the feelings arrive, stay a while and then go back to wherever they came from I'll say, when the mood has taken me, that I've been dogsitting for Winston.