If, as Albert Einstein famously said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then you should technically be able to rely on repetitive behaviour for reliable outcomes, right?
I’m a methodical person, I crave consistency and I’m not really keen on change, so if I’m happily getting by doing The Thing, then I’m just going to keep doing The Thing. It’s not the sexiest personality trait in the world, but it’s something I take a lot of comfort in. So when The Thing – in this case, my antidepressants – suddenly stopped working for me, it blew up my whole world.
I’ve been on and off them since I was a teenager and it’s become an almost formulaic process.
Along come the warning signs, off I go to the doctor, bumble along with the medication for a year or two and then eventually come off it. Repeat two to three years later. Like I said, I’m a big fan of consistency.
But this year, the wheels came off.
Gradually – almost imperceptibly – the red flags appeared on the distant horizon, and then suddenly I was among them. The constant tearful pressure behind my eyes, the deadweight legs, a brain made of static and a sink full of dishes. The first crushing breath in the morning and the last heavy exhale before the blissful nothingness of sleep. All typical signs that the depression had crept back into my skull.
This time, though, I was already on the medication, so my dependable, watertight method of coping with my mental illness had failed. I had always managed to slap the SSRIs on my brain before I was completely adrift, but now, suddenly and unexpectedly, I was in a sinking life raft.
Of course, for someone as well-versed in depression as I am you’d think I could draw the sensible conclusion that there are no certainties with mental illness, and that it was simply time to visit the GP again. But that’s the thing with depression; it lies to you and I was already too far out at sea to glimpse land.
I didn’t even really recognise it as depression at first, such was my confidence in my previously fool-proof methods of dealing with it.
Maybe these feelings were down to my job, I thought. Or my relationship. Or my house. Or my haircut. I was already on the pills, so it must have been something else.
But, once I’d thrown a grenade into all of these things in an impotent bid for a quick fix (side note: getting a fringe won’t help anything), I slowly saw the reality of the situation, and it was like being hit with depression squared. It was all the icky bits of the illness that I already knew so well, but this time accompanied with the certain and absolute knowledge that there was no escape. I’d run out of free passes – this time it was never going to get better.
I felt like a failure. People talk about ‘fighting depression’ and I believed that I hadn’t been fighting hard enough. I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone that I was struggling because I was already on the pills, so how could there possibly be a problem? I felt like I would be judged for all the things that bought me small glimmers of enjoyment – going out, smoking, eating share-sized bags of Maltesers – because they didn’t align with the mental health ideal so what did I expect?
Then I’d grieve for my past efforts. I’d done my time. I’d put the initial work in. Mumbled my way through dismissive GP assessments and dealt with the preliminary side effects of going back on the meds that left me feeling like a space cadet for the first few weeks and gave me chronic heartburn and sweaty hands for much longer than that. Then I’d get angry for feeling so sorry for myself, because I had no-one other than myself to blame. I’d not fought hard enough. I took my previously successful treatment for granted.
And round and round it went: a different kind of consistency.
I wasn’t suicidal – I’ve never been suicidal – but I think a lot of people with depression would cautiously venture that sometimes it might be nice to just not be alive for a while.
And that’s what I was mulling over while I was sat in my car outside ASDA – a visit that had taken me hours to psych myself up for and which, gazing at my bags full of completely haphazard items, I knew I’d failed at. Only after a concerned onlooker tapped on the window was I jolted from my swampy introspection and realised I’d been sitting there for hours. That’s when I knew it was time to go back to the doctor.
I’m back on an even keel now, thanks to a double dosage. And it took me the entire arbitrary 6-8 week adjustment period to make peace with that. To know in my bones that I’m not doubly depressed, I’m not twice as broken, I’m not 100% more mentally ill. That like everything in life, there are no guarantees – and for me, consistency isn’t about formulaic prescriptions, but rather giving myself the space to embrace change, whether that’s for better or worse.