After 13 different antidepressants, psychiatric hospital and ECT I had given up.
Then a friend showed me an article in The Times.
My story about how I eventually found a door out of the prison of depression.
The first thing that hit me when I came round was the pain in my head. It was like someone had struck me with a hammer. Then came the confusion, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. As my eyes began to focus, I remember seeing other patients wheeled out after me, one by one. They were all hot and red, and some were twitching. A nurse gave me a biscuit and I just vomited on the spot. This was my first session of Electro Convulsive Therapy, and it wasn’t to be my last.
My psychiatrist had prescribed it as a last resort. I’d taken 13 different anti-depressants over 8 years, in all sorts of combinations, and had every type of therapy you could think of. None of them had even made a dent in my depression. I remember my mum being horrified when the doctor told her about the procedure — 140 volts passed through your brain to induce an epileptic fit — but all I could think of was getting in there as quickly as possible. I was 26, and felt like I couldn’t live another day with my suicidal thoughts. I had no choice but to sign the consent form and sit in the waiting room until my name was called.
It had all started when I was just 18. I knew that something was wrong. I felt an overwhelming sense of dread, like something really horrific was going to happen. It was almost like I was a clairvoyant, feeling something terrible in the air, but not knowing what it was. It went on and on until my concentration began to lapse and my studies began to suffer. I was so distracted by my thoughts that I couldn’t even watch the telly. Eventually I stopped eating and just went to bed for a week. Things got worse and my mum had to carry me to put me in the bath.
A doctor was called, and he immediately diagnosed depression. He prescribed anti-depressants and told me it would take two to three weeks before I started feeling better. I can’t survive two to three weeks, I thought — each day felt like a year. Eight years passed in that hell, including months on the ward of a psychiatric hospital. Nothing worked.
I just couldn’t believe that I’d ever get better. There was just no relief from my thoughts, nothing could distract me and I couldn’t find enjoyment in anything. All I wanted to do was curl up and die. It didn’t take me long to start thinking about suicide, and to this day I know it’s only because of my mum that I’m still alive. She cared so much that I just couldn’t put her through it.
Eventually my psychiatrist suggested ECT. I had three sets of 12 sessions over the next two years. Memory loss is the biggest side-effect, so there are a lot of things I can’t recall about this time. What I do know is that it didn’t work. And this left me with only one more option — a stereotactic subcaudate tractotomy, or the modern-day version of a lobotomy.
It was then that a friend saw an article in the Times about Dr. Clive Sherlock, a psychiatrist who was pioneering a new form of therapy treatment. He said it had had tremendous results with all forms of mental illness, from the mildest cases to the most severe.

(Click this link to read the article.)
I phoned immediately and agreed to travel and see the therapist the very next day.
The first thing I noticed was how friendly and understanding he was. So many psychiatrists and doctors I’d talked to were arrogant and unhelpful. He was one of those genuinely caring people. I felt at ease straightaway. He explained the treatment was called Adaptation Practice and that it probably wasn’t like anything I’d come across before. It certainly wasn’t. It was based on the understanding that the pain of depression is not really a mental disorder at all but an emotional one and in order to understand and tame it we must hunt the emotion down to its lair. This is not in the head, but deep in the abdomen. It is a system of emotional mastery.
There was no attempt to trawl through my past, and no attempt to consider what I was thinking, or how to change my thoughts. It was a totally refreshing approach.
He explained that the problem wasn’t the type of thoughts I was having, but that I even gave them the time of day. By following the ‘Practice’, I would be able to stay with the present and ‘live the emotions’, so that I wouldn’t stay lost in my thoughts. It sounded a bit ‘New Age’ at first, but he said it wasn’t like that at all. It was very straightforward and very basic — almost common sense. Over 10 sessions he taught me practical techniques to help me to stay with what was around me — the things I could touch, taste, see and smell, and the emotional feelings that were bubbling inside.
It’s not easy to do, but I got a real shock when I managed it for the first time. It felt like I’d just woken up. It was almost like I was a child again. I realised that I’d been in my head, thinking about thinking, for over 10 years. I saw that most of the time I wasn’t even aware that I was thinking. I’d be doing things but drifting off into thought almost straight away. I was never in the present.
It took a good few weeks before I began to grasp the ‘Practice’, and some months before I really got the hang of it. But that made sense. You get what you put into things — there’s no miracle cure that can sort you out in one go. The better I got at the Practice, the better I felt. In 6 months I began to have a glimpse of health and happiness that had eluded me for over a decade. Two years on and I’ve cycled across Thailand and am now out working and backpacking around Canada. I’ve got a new boyfriend who I’m very much in love with, and I now know what it feels like to laugh and smile without trying. You can never say that you’re out of the woods for ever, but I feel confident that as long as I keep up the Practice, my life will stay my own.
