One thing I’ve learned with antidepressant medication is they always say, Look it takes a while for the levels to build up in your system to the point where they are efficacious. They work. But they gave me no particular information about how long that might be. They said, Well it could be another few months, it could take up to a year, and perhaps even longer for someone.

I couldn’t see how it was going to hurt, I mean because, rather than, I didn’t expect it to help me deal with the wider things that I’ve just kind of spoken about, I didn’t expect it to help me deal with my issues about me being bullied still or the way other people think about me. I wasn’t expecting any of that to happen from the pills but I did see how it could, well I did hope as well that it could kind of just bring back some more positive ways of looking at things if that makes sense because when you do think negatively and you see things negatively you can’t, you can’t see the wood for the trees, you can’t get yourself out of your own head and if you can’t get yourself out of your own head you can’t help yourself to even know where you need help from and that’s. So what it, to me it was hopefully going to give me that kind of boost of, not boost, boost is the wrong word, I suppose to just.

Shift your mood a bit?

Yes just to help you turn things so I could actually think straight, so if I could think straight then I could work out what it is I need and then do something about it hopefully.

It’s not just about the medication; it has to be about other things that you’re doing in your life as well, not just medication. Medication is very much a kind of crutch, it’s an additional kind of thing to other things I don’t think you can solely rely that medication is going to cure all the problems in my life, it’s not, it’s great isn’t it, it’s great as a tool really, in a toolbox with lots of things that can be used.

So do you think it’s kind of helped you to get to the place along the way where you’ve had different bouts of therapy and you’ve been within, it’s helped you in the headspace to be able to deal with some of those things?

Yes, yes, I think it gets you to a, when you have such significant depression that, that you’re not wanting to live, you know you’re suicidal, you’re not wanting to live anymore. I think the difficulty with, with trying to say well we’ll just start to talk about things you’re not even in that place you can do that at that point. Whereas the medication takes that edge off the, the thoughts of suicide and the wanting to harm yourself to the point where actually, okay you’re still low, you’re in a low mood, you’re still struggling, you know to get through the day but you’re able to then start to do things about it in other ways and I think that’s where the benefits come in. Where it’s just that kind of lifting you 20/30% up and the rest, the 70%, the rest is down to you, you know, you’ve got to do the right, people around you and see what services you have around you.

Don’t rely, think of it as a bit like taking an aspirin, you know, it’s something that if you’re lucky will give you some relief from the symptoms, will help you feel better but particularly if it’s someone who has, you can tell has maybe got deeper issues that are contributing to that then I’d say look at, you look at therapy as well look at CBT. The people who are not in a position to afford long courses of therapy then there’s some, you know, there’s things on the internet sort of online CBT an online website help to help. So often I find for a lot of people it’s about, you know, as it was for me it’s about education, you know, when it first hits you, you don’t know what’s, you know, what’s involved and so yes I definitely I think drugs are always, always worth trying and from my experiences they work very differently for different people and you can’t tell until you’ve started taking the drugs what they’re going to do for you, you can’t tell what the therapeutic effect is going to be, you can’t say what side effects you’re going to get if any.

I think if you look at it in its simplest form, serotonin probably gets depleted over a period of time when it’s not naturally refilling itself because you’re not having a really good time and so I, this is as far as I understand it so I, I could imagine that over a period of time when you’re not enjoying yourself or you’re kind of really, you’re serotonin does get depleted and so obviously antidepressants are going to help build that back up again, that’s as simple as I understand it, I don’t know if I am right or wrong with that because I’ve never really looked into it that’s just kind of what I know. and I know that serotonin is something that’s kind of necessary for you to be able to enjoy things or for you to be able to see the light around you if that makes sense. So I think in that way it helps.

I think it’s a mixture of, I think it’s a mixture of both isn’t it, it’s repeated patterns in your life that you can, that underlie and that underlie the situation and you don’t know how to cope with them or your brain doesn’t produce enough serotonin is one way of looking at it, I don’t really have an opinion on depression of how, why it’s there, is it something that’s always going to happen to you as a person because you’re built that way and your brain doesn’t produce enough serotonin so you need these helping hands or is because you put yourself in situations that, that make you depressed. I think it’s probably for me it’s always a mixture of both.

There was no point in me having any counselling because there was nothing wrong with my life… what was wrong was the chemicals in my brain that’s what was wrong.

So you subscribe to that theory about the cause of depression, do you think it’s a, sometimes a combination?

Sometimes I think it’s, everybody’s different some people it will be, you know their circumstances, you know it will be a reaction to something in their circumstances but other people… I think there are a group of people and I think I’m one of them who just have effectively… a chemical imbalance and because I’ve had this my whole life.

I’ve had friends who’ve tried one drug and it hasn’t worked for them and that’s put them off the whole experience. I mean for me the big things was, and yeah, there were, there were times when I thought this isn’t, you know the day my doctor prescribed mirtazapine first of all, I went back to him and just, was not expecting him to be able to suggest anything that would help I was, you know, kind of, in despair about the chances of anything working or even you know prescribing a different drug or doing it, or being able to do anything that would usefully make me feel better and then when he, he suggested something I hadn’t heard of and I thought that could be interesting and gave it a try and just, you know, within a couple of months felt incredibly good.

I suppose it’s quite easy to, to kind of fall in that belief that when you’re trying something and it hasn’t worked so nothing else will, they could all be pretty similar really.

It plays into the mentality of depression as well, the kind of hopelessness of it all.