lay there, and imagined the tablets were working. For a moment panic simmered down to a level of heavy anxiety. But that feeling of momentary relaxation actually triggered more panic. And this was a flood. I felt everything pull away from me, like when Brody is sitting on the beach in Jaws and thinks he sees the shark. I was lying there on a sofa but I felt a literal pulling away. As if something was sliding me towards a further distance from reality.
Killer
SUICIDE IS NOW – in places including the UK and US – a leading cause of death, accounting for over one in a hundred fatalities. According to figures from the World Health Organization, it kills more people than stomach cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, colon cancer, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s. As people who kill themselves are, more often than not, depressives, depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It kills more people than most other forms of violence – warfare, terrorism, domestic abuse, assault, gun crime – put together.
Even more staggeringly, depression is a disease so bad that people are killing themselves because of it in a way they do not kill themselves with any other illness. Yet people still don’t think depression really is that bad. If they did, they wouldn’t say the things they say.
Things people say to depressives that they don’t say in other life-threatening situations
‘COME ON, I know you’ve got tuberculosis, but it could be worse. At least no one’s died.’
‘Why do you think you got cancer of the stomach?’
‘Yes, I know, colon cancer is hard, but you want to try living with someone who has got it. Sheesh. Nightmare.’
‘Oh, Alzheimer’s you say? Oh, tell me about it, I get that all the time.’
‘Ah, meningitis. Come on, mind over matter.’
‘Yes, yes, your leg is on fire, but talking about it all the time isn’t going to help things, is it?’
‘Okay. Yes. Yes. Maybe your parachute has failed. But chin up.’
Negative placebo
MEDICATION DIDN’T WORK for me. I think I was partly to blame.
In Bad Science Ben Goldacre points out that ‘You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.’ This is true, and it can surely work both ways. During that very worst time, when depression co-existed with full-on 24/7 panic disorder, I was scared of everything. I was, quite literally, scared of my shadow. If I looked at an object – shoes, a cushion, a cloud – for long enough then I would see some malevolence inside it, some negative force that, in an earlier and more superstitious century, I might have interpreted as the Devil. But the thing I was most scared of was drugs or anything (alcohol, lack of sleep, sudden news, even a massage) that would change my state of mind.
Later, during lesser bouts of anxiety, I would often find myself enjoying alcohol too much. That soft warm cushioning of existence that is so comforting you end up forgetting the hangover that will ensue. After important meetings I would find myself in bars alone, drinking through the afternoon and nearly missing the last train home. But in 1999 I was years away from being back to this relatively normal level of dysfunction.
It is a strange irony that it was during the period when I most needed my mind to feel better, that I didn’t want to actively interfere with my mind. Not because I didn’t want to be well again, but because I didn’t really believe feeling well again was possible, or far less possible than feeling worse. And worse was terrifying.
So I think part of the problem was that a reverse placebo effect was going on. I would take the diazepam and instantly panic, and the panic increased the moment I felt the drug have any effect at all. Even if it was a good effect.
Months later a similar thing would happen when I started taking St John’s Wort. It would even happen to a degree with ibuprofen. So clearly the diazepam wasn’t entirely to blame. And diazepam is far from being the strongest medication out there. Yet the feeling and level of disconnection I felt on diazepam is something others claim to feel on it too, and so I think that the drug itself (for me) was at least part of the problem.
Feeling the rain without an umbrella
MEDICATION IS AN incredibly attractive concept. Not just for the person with depression, or the person running a pharmaceutical firm, but for society as a whole. It underlines the idea we have hammered into us by the hundred thousand TV ads we have seen that everything can be fixed by consuming things. It fosters a just-shut-up-and-take-the-pill approach, and creates an ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide, where everyone can relax and feel ‘unreason’ – to borrow Michel Foucault’s favourite word – is being safely neutered in a society which demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.
But anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication still fill me with fear. It doesn’t help that the names – Fluoxetine, Venlafaxine, Propranolol, Zopiclone – sound like sci-fi villains.
The only drugs I ever took that seemed to make me feel a bit better were sleeping pills. I only had one packet of them because we’d bought them in Spain, where the pharmacists wear reassuring white coats and talk like doctors. Dormidina was the brand name, I think. They didn’t help me sleep but they helped me be awake without feeling total terror. Or distanced me from that terror. But I also knew that they would be very easy to become addicted to, and that the fear of not taking them could rapidly overtake the fear of taking them.
The sleeping tablets enabled me to function enough to go home. I can remember our last day in Spain. I was now sitting at the table, saying nothing as Andrea explained to the people we were working for and technically living with (it was their villa, but they were rarely there) – Andy and Dawn – that we were going home.
Andy and Dawn were good people. I liked them. They were a few years older than me and Andrea, but they were always easy to be around. They ran the largest party in Ibiza, Manumission, which had begun as a small night in Manchester’s gay village a few years before and morphed into a kind of Studio 54 in the Med. By 1999, it was the epicentre of club culture, a magnet for the likes of Kate Moss, Jade Jagger, Irvine Welsh, Jean Paul Gaultier, the Happy Mondays, Fatboy Slim and thousands of European clubbers. It had once seemed like heaven, but now the idea of all that music and all those party people seemed like a nightmare.
But Andy and Dawn didn’t want Andrea to leave.
‘Why don’t you stay here? Matt would be okay. He looks fine.’
‘He’s not fine,’ Andrea answered them. ‘He’s ill.’
I was – by Ibiza standards at least – not a drug person. I was an alcohol person. A Bukowski-worshipping eternal student who had spent my time on the island sitting down in the sun selling tickets at an outside box office while reading airport novels (during my day job selling tickets, I had befriended a magician named Carl who gave me John Grisham novels in exchange for Margaret Atwood and Nietzsche) and drinking booze. But still, I wished madly I’d never taken anything in my life stronger than a coffee. I certainly wished I hadn’t drunk so many bottles of Viña Sol and glasses of vodka and lemon during the last month, or had eaten a few proper breakfasts, or got a bit more sleep.
‘He doesn’t look ill.’ Dawn still had glitter on her face from wherever she had been the night before. The glitter troubled me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, weakly, wishing for a more visible illness.
Guilt smashed me like a hammer.
