My name is Lauren and I have Clinical Depression. I have for years and years, ever since the hormones of my teenage years kicked in and suddenly the world got very hard to handle. Whilst still being a happy funny girl on top of everything, underneath I was battling with a nightmare, with an undercurrent of darkness that was ruining my enjoyment of everything, and making me want to give up on life.
I regularly thought about committing suicide, and developed the worrying mentality that I wasn’t “brave” enough to kill myself. I am OK now thanks to some lovely depression-beating drugs, but for a while there it was much more touch and go than anyone wanted to admit.
Because I understand depression and know how bad it can be, I was utterly appalled by the Janice Street-Porter article that turned up in this week’s Daily Mail. I know that she is a complete plank anyway, and the DM isn’t exactly the most trusted newspaper in the world, but even so I got more shocked and indignant than normal when I read it.
This article, wonderfully titled “Depression? It’s just the new trendy illness!”, is a rambling and unresearched diatribe explaining in JSPs wonderful dulcet tones about the “relatively new” illness that is depression, and the fact that people are suffering from it as part of trend-following peer-pressure rather than anything even remotely medical.
We had come so far with mental illness. Charities like Mind UK had managed to make more and more people understand that mental illness isn’t something to be shunned and hidden, but something that happens to millions of people throughout the UK, and is a condition that needs to be taken seriously.
With all of the steps forward in accurate and intelligent treatment of illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia and other such examples, you would think that things had actually changed. Well, thanks to philistines like Janice waxing lyrical to a pack of gossip hungry Daily Mail readers, it seems like that change hasn’t actually happened. After all, how is progress meant to be made with public figures holding us back – and even when those in the public eye who have been brave enough to admit to depression do so, they are being “named and shamed” as spoiled brats.
Thankfully Janice Street-Porter’s assertions that only the rich get depression, that it doesn’t exist, that there is no stigma attached to mental illness and that stress and depression are one and the same (you know, like cancer and a heart problem are one and the same) haven’t gone unnoticed. Mind has written a beautifully worded and intelligence response, and bloggers have been quick to attack the shallow depth of knowledge and complete lack of research.
As one of so many people who have suffered from depression, I seek an apology in The Mail (yeah, right, like that will happen…) – and I hope that all the people who read it have treated it like what it is – an abusive and uneducated tirade from a confused and naïve woman.
A few of the facts
- Depression in one form or other has been around since the middle ages – it is just the name that is relatively “new” – and the massive growth in numbers can be attributed to societal changes and the availability of treatment
- Whilst much depression is recovered from independently, many people are rendered unable to carry on with life, demonstrating the severity of the disease
- Depression can be treated using counselling/therapy options, or medically. Different types of depression require different approaches.
Further Reading
If you want to read a bit more about depression and understand it from a sufferer’s point of view, then my personal favourites are:
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Shoot the Damn Dog, by Sally Brampton