When I was thirteen I had known that I was acting in ways that were different from my peers for a few years. A lot of my peers got into trouble with their parents (what pre-pubescent and pubescent child doesn’t?) or other authority figures but I never did beyond the normal breaking-curfew-by-a-few-minutes type stuff. When I reached about 10 or 11 I changed. I cannot recall why. I cannot recall their being a catalyst moment that changed me from ‘good boy’ to ‘bad boy’ but change I did. I worked very hard to hide a lot the bad things from my parents and succeeded most of the time. It was pretty easy for a pre-teen boy to run fairly wild in the countryside in those days. There was no CCTV, no ASBO’s, no political correctness.

The ‘bad things’ I did grew over the years and it became more and more difficult to hide them. They would come and go in circles, or, more pertinently looking back, in cycles. Three or four times a year. These are probably things for another post. I’m not sure how ready I am to talk openly about some of this stuff just yet. The point of these cycles and me talking about them in this post is that they would inevitably terminate in a crash where things would get darker and darker until one was existing in a pit of utter despondency. Churchill used to call his depression his ‘black dog’ and describe it as a constant ‘companion’.

For manic depressives of all kinds, depression and stability seem to be the most common stages. Mania may only ever happen on a truly epic scale three or four times in a persons entire life although we may veer wildly between lesser examples of both these stages very often – several times a year. That’s bad. And exhausting. Don’t assume that ‘lesser’ means less severe. I mean lesser as in not epic. Mania of ‘not quite epic’ standard is still not great.

Anyway, back to the Black Dog. Although I can see what Churchill meant, I never thought of depression as an entity separate from myself. It encompassed all. Landscapes looked bleaker, situations were always desperate, I was frequently unable to get past my own feelings of utter and total inadequacy to complete whatever it was I should be doing. I would literally ‘breakdown’ – not in the ‘nervous breakdown’ sense of the word but in the ‘unable to function’ sense of the word and I would drift noiselessly through my days. Eventually, when I was about thirteen, my parents noticed and I was sent to our local GP. He floundered for awhile and then referred me to a Psychiatric Nurse who would visit all the villages in my area in turn. It was she who recommended my initial diagnosis to my GP – severe depression (what might now be called unipolar in the US).

Manic depression is difficult to diagnose for the simple reason that mania frequently results in feelings of heightened well-being in a person. And if you’re feeling well then why would you go see a doctor?

Depression on the other hand is relatively easy to diagnose. Although, in those days, it was quite rare in the rural settings I am from to get even that. Being ‘down in the dumps’ was a more common expression. I shudder to think of the number of post-delivery women who must’ve been turned away suffering from post-partum depression after being told they were just a bit ‘down in the dumps’. I was ‘lucky’ that my depression was deep and obvious enough to get a referral and a proper diagnosis – even if it was the wrong one. By thirteen I was taking an anti-depressant (was it Prozac? Can’t recall if that was even out then) but – being thirteen and prone to bouts of mania to boot – wasn’t good about taking it regularly. That caused its own issues of course.