shoot the damn dog

I recently went to the big city (well, Leeds is pretty big compared to where I live) and came home with a stack of new books, as you (or at least I) do. And as someone who has slid into clinical depression a couple of times which fortunately was treated by medication without the need for hospitalisation, I am very interested in the subject and have amassed a small library of books on the subject.

I missed this one when it was first published and the fact that it won The Good Housekeeping magazine award 2008 for non-fiction.

Sally Brampton appears on the outside to be a smart, sassy, intelligent, strong, ballsy women who work in journalism. She edited Elle magazine and also launched Red. She has published several novels and she writes regularly for the Sunday Times and Easy Living Magazine. She doesn't seem to sort to descend into a hellish pit of depression and alcoholism which included several admissions to hospital, years of therapy and drugs treatment which did nothing to 'cure' her but everything to make things even worse. But she did and this book is an account of what happened and more besides.

It is not a comfortable read but then again it's also in many ways heartening. Depression brings out the worst in its sufferers--and others. Although it is a common illness (probably caused by a variety of chemical imbalanced in the brain) it is treated with hostility and scorn--you only have to read some of the reviews of the book on Amazon to see what I mean. Why? Sally Brampton does not hide from describing the monster she became, the suicide attempts, the difficulties of her seemingly privileged childhood and possibly genetic traits in her family. But it would seem that people are too quick to insult her without having read the book carefully or intelligently enough.

Sally writes clearly and intelligently and, as you would expect from a journalist, she fills the book with facts as well as personal memories. (I particularly empathised with the sections on having an underactive thyroid (tick), a family connection with Asperger Syndrome (tick--see also Tim Lott's The Scent of Dried Roses), and the side effects of taking Venlafaxine (unlike Sally I tolerate it reasonably well but it's not an easy drug to come off and although I try, I always give up.) I also believe in Omega 3 oil. Even if it's not as affective as people claim, at least it's unlikely to do any harm, unlike some of the drugs out there.

I once got into a bit of a kerfuffle with a friend who maintained that whilst she is sympathetic to people she knows who suffer periodic bouts of depression, she believes in steering well clear of them until they recover because she finds them bad company and would prefer to leave them until they get back to their normal selves. I find that appalling. After all if a person suffers depression, then depression is part of who they are, and my friend is merely being selective which is not what I call true friendship. Anyhow, I was cheered to read Sally's views that others should not stay away--because is a kind of rejection and therefore hurtful. People with depression are not so depressed that they don't know what complete pains in the neck they can be, and that how ungrateful they must appear to those who do everything to try and jolly them along. You wouldn't expect a friend with flu to stop feeling tired and weak, or a person with a broken leg to go out line-dancing, so why should they expect depressives to stop feeling so bloody miserable all the time? That's the nature of the illness. That's what being depressed means. I can assure you that however tedious it is to onlookers, it's a hundred times worse for the sufferer.

Sally Brampton deserves a medal (and not just because she's another Sally.)

Sally has a blog dedicated to that damn dog.