Mental Health Maths for #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek

You could add this to your list of slightly doom and gloom posts for Mental Health Awareness week this year. Then, however, maybe you can take it off again.

I am someone who has struggled with their mental health, on and off, for just over seven years. Between the age of 23 and 31 I was very depressed six times. I won’t go into details; we all know roughly what that looks like and sometimes looking back on it brings more sadness than it’s worth.

Since my depression became recurring, all I’ve ever wanted is to one day say something along the lines of: “remember when I used to get depressed? Feels like a lifetime ago.”

Now, at the age of 32 and a half (the half is important), and almost two years free of depression (happy anniversary to me in advance for the 1st July), I tentatively wonder if I can begin to say that. While someone who has felt deep depression will never ever forget that uniquely indescribable feeling (how do you describe the utter absence of almost everything?), the pain certainly feels less visceral. Harder to conjure up in quite the same breath-taking, paralysing way. I am less likely to be stopped in my tracks by it. Perhaps when that feeling fades to a low ebb that only pulsates into consciousness from time to time, then I’ll be able to finally use my much longed-for phrase.

Except, I write this today, on the cusp of Mental Health Awareness Week, as someone who feels they’re struggling with their mental health a little at the moment. As someone who is beginning to realise that their hopeful, yet seemingly naive, belief that the threat of depression is somehow extinguishable was just plain… wrong. That, try as I might, there is no amount of depression-proof anything that will keep it from trying. And so long as it keeps trying, the extent of the control I have over my mental health is called into question. Not all that long ago, that ‘truth’ would have broken me.

That is one story I could tell myself. Being honest, it’s been the most common one I’ve used. There is the idea of ‘learned helplessness’; that, given the repeated nature of a certain outcome that we are unable, or feel unable, to change, we will give up trying to challenge this outcome because we believe our efforts to be futile. Even if they may not be. I believe I have fallen prey to this concept on a number of occasions; it is easier to claim that you are not capable than to fight. When depression has repeated itself six times and the struggle has felt like a losing battle each time, let me tell you, you feel helpless. I wonder if sometimes I bother to try less with each new occurrence.

Yet, slowly I feel myself becoming like the people whose accounts and blogs and instagram posts I used to trawl, mining them for every scrap of a version of my experience of depression that I could find in their words. They would tell of the lessons they learnt and the strength they gained, the self-belief and self-awareness, sometimes even the power they had found through depression. Because now, finally, they knew how to take control of their mental health. The triggers, warning signs, the very first vibrations of feelings that set the alarm bells ringing — they recognised these now and could use their new found arsenal of depression-slaying tools to kick the shit out of it before it became Big Depression. The kind that is fat and heavy and will sumo wrestle you to the ground.

For depression episode after self-loathing depression episode, for recovery after shame-filled recovery, I was not these people and I was jealous. My writing was about feeling lost and none-the-wiser. My words held a profound shame in the curl and flick of every letter, cushioned and cocooned and protected. I wrote because I felt useless at fighting depression (and I don’t take well to not being good at things), I was scared, and I wanted people to know this so I felt safer. Why couldn’t I be like these inspiring mental health warriors? Why had I not learned anything other than how comfortable and easy depression can feel? Why had I failed?

Then, one day, I stopped writing about it.

I didn’t stop writing because depression was nowhere to be seen or it wasn’t on my mind. I have never felt more obsessed by the illness since then. Yet, while the lifting of the heavy pain I had carried for six or so years — a different pain to depression but pain in its own right — negated my need to spill it out in front of everyone, that is only half the story. I stopped writing also because of the very concept that I am, ironically, writing about now: control.

It was, in many ways, the realising of an equation of sorts. Over the past two years, I have started to become tuned in enough to my mental health to notice when it feels a little ropey. It’s a subtle feeling, so much so that I often still miss it. Usually it’s just a foggy head or a sense of overwhelm that muddles my brain. Normally it will clear, but last summer it sat like a cold chill in my head that made me want to cut myself off from others and do nothing but ride my bike alone. And when I did ride my bike I cried, in my lycra, down country lanes and along busy high streets. Part of the sorrow was because the penny had dropped: depression will never behave itself indefinitely.

But I had noticed it earlier than ever, this fetus of a depression child (“something to be proud of!” my friends and my therapist said) so I could start the fight earlier, too. The fight is no easier and I believe you have to do battle with Baby Depression just as you would sumo-wrestling Big Depression; its roots are strong even in its infancy. However, that summer, I felt that I had maybe worked out the other side of the equation and that, this time, perhaps things could stay small if I tried hard enough. I wasn’t helpless, even if I felt it, I told myself.

*

Writing about something that is both predictable and controllable is boring. The emotion is removed from it; it becomes a question of logic, of mathematics, even. If x + y happens, implement z (asap, for the love of God). Like all maths challenges, it can be fucking hard and silly mistakes will be made that mean ’n’ crops up and tears your whole equation to shit and you lie in bed all of Saturday, telling yourself you’re a fucking failure and what’s the point of trying anyway because it’s always the same, not that you even know what ‘it’ is.

That voice right there, that is me. I think she will always be there, my little self-critical depression-chasing bully. There are, however, two sides to every equation. I know that diametrically opposed to that voice is the part of me that believes in myself. The voice that says “you know how to fight this” and then flicks a big old V sign (probably while flexing a bicep, knowing me). That part of me is new and a little shaky but she’s there, too, and I’m feeding her her protein and she’s only getting stronger.

*

Monday marks the start of Mental Health Awareness Week 2020. While my own mental health may be feeling a little frayed and raggedy (because…well, life), I know it’s just a little bit of peripheral damage, some wear-and-tear. I’ve got needle and thread and I can do a mean patch job these days. And so it is without a shred of sadness or fear that I can tell you that the lows will always be there but, the harder I keep at it, the more I’ll be able find that control that will one day be so predictable its too boring to even bother writing about.

In the meantime, perhaps equations aren’t so bad after all.