I have to say its not often now that I get…it’s not often now do I get an experience which indicates to me that I’m going to lapse back into it. I’d no history of depression before this came along. If I find myself getting very tired, I take that as a warning’Well I think you see, if your brain has had a battering, it needs time and rest to recover you know. If you’re awake you’re not resting it, and I think that’s what happened, I think you know this detachment, the brain was saying, ‘I’ve got too much overload I want to chill out’, as it were, “I want, I want ‘out’ of this”, you know.

You were saying before that you know the warning signs. What are the warning signs for you?

The warning signs for me are I don’t listen, I can’t listen to music or television. I can’t bear noise. I’m very intolerant of any noise. Any kind of noise at all, and I take to my bed. Or I isolate myself. I stop answering the phone, before that something must happen before that. Just generally feeling things aren’t right. Something is wrong somewhere. Intuition. Somethings wrong. Somethings not right.

I don’t feel at ease with myself. I don’t really want to be with myself. If I could get drunk. I haven’t turned to drink. I have drugs, I have used my medication to get myself off my head sometimes, sleeping tablets. I’ve taken four or five sometimes to just release myself.

And it’s the same thing as getting drunk. You kind of need to lose yourself because you can’t bear to be with yourself anymore. I’m not really sure what that’s about but.

The signs (of depression) are panic, yeah you just think “I’m panicking.” And that’s physical, you know your heart rate goes up, the old classics of waking up early in the morning, that happens, the fear of being on your own, that you recognise. And just the sheer onslaught of negative thoughts that you just can’t push out. And then you know, you know when it’s coming, you know this is a bit different from just feeling shit.

You know I have crap days, you can come home from work, and you think, “Oh shit, that was awful, I feel crap.”And you know, maybe you’ve got some kind of material problem in your life, we all have them you know that’s different, theres a very different’ Quality, a panicky quality, a dark kind of it’s a very different texture that kind of anxiety from. and depression from the kind of stuff that we deal with every day, or you know sometimes you have a couple of days of feeling, ‘God, I didn’t feel that great last week.

But you know it’s very different from what.. yeah that, when you see it coming I think, I remember saying to myself, “Oh no, not again.” Really you know, I know, I’ve got over this once, surely, I thought I was over it and it’s back. Now if it happened to me again, which I dare say it will, I’ll never think, “Oh God, I thought I was out of that”, because I think I’ve kind of accepted that it is something that’s there now. And people will say oh how sad that is, and I don’t think it is really, without saying yeah it’s something that’s there, but I know the signs, and I know what to do, and I know you get better.

You know in the best of moments, I can do more than somebody who hasn’t been brushed with the madness stick. You know, I have, sort of, my art that I do, I like writing music, I’ve made films, I make animations, I write software in my spare time. I can do lots of things and you know, when I go through the things that I do in my spare time, people look at me as if I’m mad. Yeah, probably am, but you know, this is madness in a positive sense in I can pull the energy that’s within me to doing something positive and doing something creative.
But I do feel that every good day has to be paid for by a bad day, and yeah, sooner or later it catches up with you. And that’s when you get depressed and you have to be aware of that and sometimes I have to make a conscious decision. Why get engrossed in a project and stop going to bed at bedtime? Making sure I don’t miss meals, you know, make sure that I don’t get up at three o’clock in the morning because I’ve got this crazy idea that won’t go away. You know, stay in bed, get up at a sensible time and yeah, I have to look after myself like that or. I believe when I’m on a high, I’ll lose it, and I will lose my grounding in reality.

Yeah I could then see this cyclical pattern, it was like being on a scenic railway you know. You’d drop down into the depths and then hit the heights. The heights were very good for thinking up schemes, and some of them were a bit over the top maybe, but I got to use it if that’s the right thing. It sounds as if I’m so clever, but at the time I didn’t feel it. But I was able to use it to my advantage and trim it to suit the situation, and I’d quite a lot of drive and I could get people to become enthusiastic about doing certain things and it worked very well for me. And then I thought, well that’s the easy part. It’s the depression is the bit that’s difficult, and I then began to notice sort of [pause] forerunners if that’s the right expression, little things that would tell me that the depressed state was about to start. So I was then able to increase some of the anti-depressants.

After yes. after recovering if you like.. but there were still periods when instead of being like this in the swings [motions with his hands a roller coaster ride] it’s more like that it’s manageable [motions with his hands a much flatter roller coaster], and it’s got to the point where the depression is a feeling of being just fed up, plus a fraction. But not the absolute withdrawal, that’s. that’s ghastly. That is awful. So that’s something I’ve experienced.

Well with some sort of experience of it, when you’ve had about six goes, depressed for two years, okay, depressed at least by then you know I did get better. Whilst I was depressed the thought of ever getting better was the last thing on earth, desperation of just living through a day was. it was that desperate you know at times. And that’s how I bumped along, with recurring bouts about two years depression, three years okay.

It’s just my life has been bouts of depression and fairly good, and then another bout of depression. And I was warned that my particular sort of depression would follow that kind of path. So you can’t be for, forearmed against it, if it’s down to you, you’ll get it. What you’ve got to be able to do is accept it, and accepting it seems to be able to make it manageable.