Depression

And whilst initially (after starting antidepressant medication) I started feeling better. I then started feeling, I started feeling depressed again and I started feeling, essentially because I'd got my capacity of thought back, I started feeling introspective. In the, before then really I'd lost the capacity… 

I just think I was a zombie and I started feeling, I started sort of thinking again and started thinking that, “Well, actually yeah the world would be a better place without me. Then, I think my family would be better off without me. You know, because of the life insurance, think of life insurance and they'll be more secure then you know. If I did lose my job I'd be unemployed.”

But I see myself as having...through experience, experiencing it myself, having got better and able to cope with it, even though if you get depressed you always still, you still really kind of believe that this is it, and it's really bad, but at the back of your mind at least you know that it's going to get better at some point. And I have become more positive, and I don't know if that's just something to do with gaining experience in life and actually doing things, and so becoming slightly, you know more confident. I mean, nowadays when I talk to people and meet people, sometimes I say, “Oh, I don't feel, I'm not very confident,” and whatever. And they go, “Well, that's funny because I really thought that you were”. So I've become a lot better, I think at presenting a better face to the world, and not kind of…. so obviously, like just withdrawn and introverted. And you know, partly that's just growing up, I think and just kind of gaining in experience, and just being less, slightly less, you become less self-conscious after a while.

And just, I remember nights you know, I couldn't sleep and I'd be… my mind would be really buzzing and racing. Somebody would tell me they'd been depressed and they feel sort of dead and numb. I never felt that. My depression is always about your mind zooming into miserable places, never about…some people say to me when I'm depressed I just, I can't feel anything. That's not my experience, it's just about racing. I remember lying in my bed and it would be, I can kind of see it you know [laughs] the light on the landing, and it would be getting later and later and later and I couldn't sleep and I'd be crying and I'd be upset and then my parents would say, "Well what's wrong?" you know, they'd take me into their bedroom and sit with me.

I think one of the analogies he used first off was, if I was walking down the street and somebody came walking towards me that I knew, and I knew well, but that they looked away and walked past me, how would I feel. And I said, "Well, you know, oh my God, you know, what have I done?" Or trying to remember the last time I met them, I mean what had I said. You know, feeling guilty that it was obviously my fault. It would never have crossed my mind as he would suggest, as he suggested to think that the person might well have had things on their mind, may not actually have seen me, may have been distracted by something else.....And I, I saw for the first time, other people had other issues that were quite separate from me.....And it made me realise over a period of time that....if something happened that I felt unhappy about [pause], I only saw it from one angle.

I've been doing diaries about thinking, of my thoughts, and there was recently an incident at the office - just a normal day-to-day one for me, where there were two colleagues. I get on well with both of them, I was sitting doing my own job, and there was some altercation in another room between these two people, and I felt completely responsible for this. I had nothing to do with it, I didn't even know what they were arguing about, but I was responsible for it, and nothing could shake my view that I had brought this about. Something about me had caused them to have this argument, and, I know that's completely illogical. I wasn't in the room, I still don't, to this day know what they were arguing about, but it was my fault, because that was the most obvious thing that I could think of. If nothing else makes sense, then I have to be in the wrong, which doesn't make any sense at all, but it does when you're… when you are living through it, and there are lots of situations where I do take on responsibility for things that are not my responsibility and therefore not my fault.