The aim of this book is to help you sort out this confusion and to be a signpost for your journey out of the prison of depression. Depression is not an illness. It is an experience out of which we can gain greater understanding of ourselves and other people.
My friend Pat Wakeling, a psychiatrist who, having found that the treatment his colleagues gave him for his depression did not work, had to find his own way out of the prison, wrote:
Depression is not – as I have eventually and painfully learned – something to sweep under the carpet: to deny, to forget. It is an experience that brings great misery and causes a great waste of time, but it can be, if one is fortunate, a source of personal wisdom and worth more than a hundred philosophies.13
This book is a distillation of my work not just on depression but on all the suffering which we can encounter. In it you will hear the voices of some of the people who have talked to me over the last twenty years, people living in the United States, Britain and Australia. To them I give my gratitude and love.
‘My family insisted I see a psychiatrist. So I went along expecting to have to tell him all about my life, but all he said was, “We don’t need to go into all that. You’re obviously depressed”, and he prescribed me some pills. That wasn’t what I wanted at all.’
Pat looked tired and much older than her forty-five years. She had read my book. Beyond Fear, and had written to me to say that she would like to talk to me because in that book I had described what she was going through – experiences of terrible fear and a sense of despairing and painful isolation.
So now she sat on my sofa and diffidently and simply told me her story.
She was a doctor’s daughter and had wanted to be a doctor too. But her father had said that medicine was not a profession for a woman. So she trained as a nurse and met Simon, a medical student, and fell in love. They planned to marry, but Simon was killed in a car accident.
Later she married one of her patients, a Korean veteran who had acquired the habit of drinking to maintain his courage, a habit which he did not relinquish after the war. For ten years Pat tried to maintain her marriage for the sake of her son, but eventually had to admit failure. She was offered the chance to train as a teacher and, even though this, like all the jobs she had done previously, in no way stretched her ability, she was glad to have a secure job which allowed her plenty of time for her son. Soon, though, there were other demands on her time. Her parents were now old and infirm, and her sisters had compelling reasons why they could not look after them. So Pat nursed her father and then her mother through long, painful, and finally fatal illnesses.
When Pat was a child she had enjoyed drawing and painting, but her parents and teachers discouraged her. Her parents had belittled her efforts, and her teachers told her she could not study both art and science. Though she had put aside this interest, she was delighted when her son showed artistic talent, even though he went to Paris to study. Pat had plans for herself.
Pat said, ‘All my life I’ve been looking after other people. But I’d always told myself that when Peter was grown up I was going to travel. I intended to go absolutely everywhere. I felt that I deserved that.’
So, at long last, Pat could begin to fulfil her ambition to travel. In the summer holidays she and a woman friend went to China. In Peking Pat fell dangerously ill and was rushed to hospital. An immediate operation was necessary. She survived, but her friend had to return home before Pat was well enough to travel. So Pat found herself weak, in pain and alone in a foreign hospital whose standards of care and cleanliness were far below what she had expected.
Pat told me how she had summoned up every iota of strength to travel home. Then she had to go into hospital again, and there she was told that she should plan to take early retirement, for now she would need to lead a quiet life with little physical effort and certainly no stress.
All this she endured in the same stoical way she had endured the troubles of her life. She left hospital and returned home feeling tired and uncertain about what she would do. Her son had returned from Paris to be with her, but as soon as she could Pat urged him to go back to his studies. She assured him that she would be quite all right.
However, when the taxi taking him away had disappeared down the road and she closed her front door behind her she was assailed by the most terrible fear. She felt that her very being was shattering. She clung to the coats hanging behind the door, trying to get from their softness a sense of being held, but knowing that they were only coats. She hoped that if this were death it would come quickly.
Eventually, the fear ebbed and she made her way carefully upstairs. She sat on the edge of her bed, hardly daring to breathe lest an untoward movement brought back the fear again. She saw it as a dark, foreboding ocean whose tide at any time would rise and engulf her.
Much later she lay down on the bed, and much, much later she slept. When she awoke it was to a new world, a world from which all colour had been drained and where the familiar objects of her bedroom had taken on a strange, sinister meaning. She lay in bed all morning, fearing to traverse the vast distance between bed and door and to face the impossible tasks of bathing and changing her clothes. She longed for someone to come and rescue her, but when she heard her neighbour knocking she buried her head under the pillow. Her kindly neighbour now seemed to her as someone she must fear.
Only the thought that her neighbour might well call the police got her from her bed and into a semblance of living. As the days passed she discovered in herself a facility for lying, declaring to all who might ask that she was well. She gave all kinds of reasons why she could not accept their invitations out but never the true one, that she was frightened to leave the security of her own home and venture into the company of people who, in the guise of friends, threatened injury. She felt exposed and vulnerable and needed to hide away, yet that isolation was near unendurable. She said, ‘I feel that I’m in jail and they’ve thrown away the key.’
Some friends were not deceived. They contacted her son, and he came again to see her. He told her to consult a psychiatrist. Her friends and sisters said the same. She felt that she could not refuse, and so heard her life of striving, hard work, devotion and self-sacrifice dismissed as unimportant and her profound experiences reduced to a label and a pill.
Pat’s experience of fear and painful isolation is very common. For many people it comes towards the end of a life of hard work, self-sacrifice and disappointments bravely born. For many others it comes in the middle years, when the rewards for hard work, unselfishness and devotion do not materialize, or, if they do, prove to be a disappointment. For many women the experience comes in their twenties and thirties when, after childbirth, they do not discover in themselves the bountiful fountains of mother love which society assures them resides in all good, natural women. For many teenagers the experience comes when they face the insecurities, the hurdles and the dangers of adult life and they doubt that they have the strength and ability to deal with these. For many children the experience comes when the world which they took to be solid and secure is shattered by the death, defection or disloyalty of someone on whom they