My 20-year depression and the three things that healed it

In November 2022 I emailed Dignitas, the assisted dying organisation in Switzerland, to obtain a brochure. It was for me.

I was looking for a way to opt out of life.

As I began researching, I realised it wasn’t a quick (nor cheap) way to die. Even just to be considered for assisted suicide, you had to become a member of Dignitas, pay a one-off joining fee, a monthly subscription, and huge admin fees.

Then there was the cost of the consultation with the doctor — the one who gives the sign off that your life is so intolerable, it would be kinder to kill you off — and a chunky payment for the funeral director to cremate your body and ship the urn back home. I was looking at around £15,000 in total.

I then realised that while assisted suicide is legal for mental health disorders, it’s super rare that people get the go-ahead, and it causes great controversy when they do, like the case of 29-year-old Aurelia Brouwers. Only 83 of the 6,585 deaths from euthanasia in the Netherlands in 2017 were cases of people with psychiatric suffering.

I marked Dignitas up as ‘feels like a lot of effort, but maybe one day we’ll revisit’, and began Googling the lethal doses of my prescription medicines Diazepam (for anxiety) and Zolpidem (sleeping tablets).

I wasn’t going to kill myself yet anyway — not while my mum and nan were around. I couldn’t intentionally put them through the pain of losing me, I would just have to suffer on for now.

To try and get the broken pieces of my brain back into some sort of order, I decided I better go back to therapy. I’d tried at least 10 therapists over the years — a couple were okay, and helpful with some life events (like helping me get over an abusive relationship I found myself in) but most were terrible.

I had one who told me I needed a “diet club not a therapist” when we were talking about my binge eating disorder (something I most likely developed by going to diet clubs age 16). Another spent a whole session trying to give me weight loss tips (“Have you tried taking the stairs instead of the lift?” she offered). While one therapist couldn’t even remember what I was saying and kept asking the same questions every time I saw her. “Of all the people I expect to be able to listen to me,” I thought, “it’s the woman to whom I’m paying £1.20 a minute.”

With my hopes as low as my mood, I booked in and went along to try yet another therapist. Sat on the leather couch in her garden outhouse I told her how I had been depressed for as long as I could remember — since the age of 16 — and how I just didn’t find life to be an enjoyable pursuit. And when things went wrong in my life? Well, I didn’t cope well.

We spoke about all the traumatic things that had happened that might have caused me to feel that way: my father abandoning me as a baby; my grandad (who did love me very much) dying when I was just 13 years old; that year-long abusive relationship; being sexually assaulted by someone in a position of power in the music industry whom people still celebrate to this day; toxic jobs where the whole team were bullied and put under immense stress; a general unlucky-ness in love; and some heartbreaking friendship break-ups… it’s no wonder I wasn’t skipping around town.

My only happiness throughout the past two decades came in the form of distractions — that giddy period when you first meet a new romantic interest, the cool trips I used to go on when I was a music journalist, getting to interview all my favourite bands, travelling the world, and fun times spent with friends and family…

But the depression was always there when the distractions weren’t distracting. Just waiting for me, arms wide open.

Life felt hard. Not even remotely enjoyable. Just a chore. And I was plagued by negative thinking — a couple of the friendship break-ups I went through were with ‘friends’ who said I was too negative (luckily I also had some wonderful friends who offered nothing but love and support in my darkest moments, to whom I will be eternally grateful).

They say the average person has 12–60,000 thoughts a day… when you are depressed, the majority of those thoughts are bleak. Can you imagine the toll that takes?

It’s like a dark thought tsunami, that repeatedly drags you under, and every day you are fighting to keep your head above water. That’s why drowning almost begins to look like the easier option. And it felt like the friends who were having a go at me for being negative couldn’t understand that.

But back to my new therapist… after around 45 minutes of us chatting, her assessment of me was complete. “I think you are depressed because you have unhelpful thinking styles,” she said. “I can definitely work with you on this.”

I was shocked. Why had the 10 therapists before her not mentioned this? I’d done CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which is a more convoluted way of teaching people to change their unhelpful thoughts), with one of the therapists, but that was to deal with the abusive relationship, not my depression.

I had always thought of depression as an illness that simply caused negative thoughts to incessantly play out. Not the other way around. “Could my negative thoughts really be causing my depression?” I thought as I drove home.

Of course, depression is a complex condition, for which there are many causes and triggers. According to the NHS, these include:

• Traumatic life events e.g. losing a loved one, divorce or getting made redundant
• Your personality — people with low self-esteem are more likely to get depressed
• Family history — genes inherited from parents can make you more susceptible to depression, as can growing up around depressed people
• Female hormones — PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder) can cause depression, as can giving birth
• Loneliness — people who feel alone and have little human contact are at risk of becoming depressed
• Alcohol and drugs — pretty self-explanatory
• Longstanding and life-threatening illness, as well as head injuries, can also trigger depression

While I’m no expert on the matter — just someone who’s been depressed for a really long time and done a lot of research on it over the years — I am aware this isn’t an exhaustive list.

I personally have found several medications that exacerbated my depression, something the medical profession don’t exactly promote.

The first was Roaccutane — an extremely strong anti-acne medication with a terrible reputation for making people depressed and suicidal. According to the Guardian, 10 people taking it in the UK ended up killing themselves in 2019 alone. It undoubtedly made my own depression worse.

When the Kardashians sent weight loss drug Ozempic (aka Semaglutide) viral, I decided to give the tablet version a go. When they landed on my door mat, I hurriedly took my first dose, not noticing the ‘semaglutide for weight loss should be avoided in patients with a history of suicidal attempts’ in the booklet. Guess what… that also made my depression worse.

And the last, and one I don’t think many people would suspect: antibiotics. With the last course I unwittingly guzzled down with a glass of squash, I noticed a heavy decline in my mood, which is most likely due to antibiotics destroying your good gut bacteria.

Lots of research has shown that gut microbiota play a role in depression. Scientists found our gut bacteria produce neurotransmitters, with the gut providing 95% of the body’s serotonin.

Although I do believe there is some truth to this, I’ve experimented with high-strength probiotics over the years (Garden of Life’s Mood+ is a great one) and found them to be helpful for anxiety, but not so much depression. That said, I never take them regularly, and I also eat the diet of Kevin McCallister in Home Alone.

What’s made things even more confusing when trying to ‘cure’ my depression, is that we were taught growing up that the disorder is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

Johann Hari did an excellent job of disproving this. In his book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression — and the Unexpected Solutions, Hari makes a compelling case for antidepressants being nothing more than a placebo. And I myself found them to be little more than a numbing agent — a brief stint on Sertraline did make me feel less depressed, but only because I didn’t feel anything at all. And I found the side effects to be intolerable.

Same with Mirtazapine — I was prescribed it for insomnia after healing my depression, but even just half a tablet (7.5mg) knocked me out for 12 hours, gave me vivid nightmares and left me feeling fuzzy the next day; my arms felt so heavy I could barely pick up a pen to write. My GP had instructed me to take 15mg every single day… I’d be a mess.

I also find it deeply unsettling that antidepressants can cause an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, especially among young people.

Hari’s book is a great read — I would thoroughly recommend — but to spoil the ending somewhat: he says depression is caused by loneliness and lack of community. He visited places all over the world with the lowest instances of depression, and found them to have excellent communities where people lifted each other up when they were down and life got tough.

I didn’t think that was the case for me, because I’d always had great friends and family, but at my peak of feeling terrible I joined an adult gymnastics class, and it did wonders for my mental health.

The people were lovely, and for two hours every Friday we would just laugh and laugh. They expected me to show up every week, and if I even thought about not going, I’d feel bad because I knew they were expecting me. My little gymnastics family became the highlight of my week.

Since then I’ve also joined a reformer pilates gym and made friends with a couple of the other members and the instructors, as well as a weekly women’s kickbox class.

Having not just one strong community, but multiple, to get you out of your house and out of your head, will absolutely help your depression.

Casting a suspicious side-eye upon prescription pills, and finding myself a community helped massively, but it was unhelpful thinking styles that had allowed my depression to run rampant for so long.

After a few sessions learning about each one — this handy PDF explains each in detail if you’d like to learn more — and lots of homework writing down each individual thought, identifying which thinking style(s) it matched up to and then some time spent re-framing the thought… asking, “Is this really true? What are the arguments for and against it?” things felt easier to manage.

If you put the work in, acknowledging your unhelpful thinking styles will help your depression. But there’s a big ‘but’. It is hard work undoing 20 years of shitty thinking. It’s not a quick fix like throwing an antidepressant down your throat, or undergoing a lobotomy (last I checked they don’t do those on the NHS anyway).

You will need to put the work in. You’ll have to draw out charts in your notebook and fill them in. But eventually, identifying those unhelpful thoughts will become second nature, and you can easily dash them aside and go about your day. It will be worth it, to feel normal, to feel sane, and like you can actually cope.

And I feel like I need to add: finally healing from years of depression doesn’t suddenly mean life becomes all cupcakes and rainbows.

Life still feels hard, but less hard. I worry about the future a lot, but I’m definitely less stuck on the past. And while a traumatic life event might cause my depression to return one day, for now I’m okay and I definitely don’t want to die.

I do want to go to Switzerland still… but just for a holiday.

Ty for reading 🩵