Read Online Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression by Sally Brampton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sally Brampton
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did not occur to me that I was depressed. I was just sad, about the ending of my marriage, about loving somebody who I should not love.
Four months after we separated, Jonathan became involved in another relationship. I was pleased for him. I wanted him to be happy. I knew, from my lack of jealousy or pain, that our marriage was truly over. Even so, I carried the guilt of its ending like a thundercloud. I was the one who had moved out. Was it all my fault? Had I not tried hard enough?
‘You did try,’ Jonathan said. ‘You kept trying to talk about it but I wouldn’t. I just hoped it would go away. I knew it was over, that we had been unhappy for a long time. I couldn’t face doing anything about it; I couldn’t even face facing it. So, thank you for being strong enough to do it.’
‘That’s OK.’
He grinned at me. ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’
We are still good friends, even now. We see each other often and not just because we share a child. I call Jonathan in times of trouble, or celebration. And he calls me. This confuses some people. They think we are weird to be so happily separated. They wonder why we bothered. We don’t. We both know we have the sort of relationship that survives separation, but not intimacy.
Nor did our friendship stop the pain of a marriage ending. It did not diminish the agony of ripping apart a ten-year marriage, a house, and a life. Perhaps, even, our friendship made it worse.
‘Why are we doing this?’ I said, one day, as we were packing up the family home.
Jonathan looked sad. ‘Because there is no other way. We both know that.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and went back to packing up boxes of china and glass.
We dismantled our marriage slowly; it took us over a year to sell the house. During that time, I moved twice, into different flats, and moved in and out of the family house twice too. It was unsettling, but I was already unsettled.
I kept on taking the antidepressants. They did nothing, but my life was a mess. No drug has the power to tidy away that degree of mess.
I was physically unwell too, with an underactive thyroid, or hypothyroidism as it is known, diagnosed a year previously. ‘It’s only mildly underactive,’ my GP said. ‘Borderline. Nothing to worry about.’
And so I didn’t.
Mental health professionals, however, take malfunctioning thyroid glands very seriously, for good reason. The thyroid, which governs everything from metabolism to mood function, used to be known as the gland of emotion. It is hugely implicated in depression. According to one report, twenty-five per cent of women in psychiatric units have an underactive thyroid. Often, it is only borderline, which is why its implications regarding severe depression are often missed by general practitioners who tend to regard a mildly under-functioning thyroid as bothersome but not serious. There is, too, an enormous variation in function.
As my own psychiatrist told me later, ‘Normal is a piece of string. What’s normal for one person is off the chart for another. And NHS blood tests for thyroxin are notoriously insensitive.’
I knew none of this at the time and, taking my lead from my GP, did not take its implications seriously even though I had felt extremely unwell before I was diagnosed. I was tired all the time and not normal fatigue but bone-weary exhaustion. I slept as if I had been knocked unconscious and struggled to wake in the morning, dragging my leaden limbs through the day. I was always cold; my fingers white and numb even during the summer, when I kept a heater going at full blast in my study. If I got too cold, I found it almost impossible to get warm again and resorted to lying in a bath with the hot water running. My arms and legs ached constantly, so painfully that, at times, I took painkillers every four hours. And my weight, which had been the same all my life, kept going up despite eating very little. Stranger still, my eyebrows started to fall out
Four months after we separated, Jonathan became involved in another relationship. I was pleased for him. I wanted him to be happy. I knew, from my lack of jealousy or pain, that our marriage was truly over. Even so, I carried the guilt of its ending like a thundercloud. I was the one who had moved out. Was it all my fault? Had I not tried hard enough?
‘You did try,’ Jonathan said. ‘You kept trying to talk about it but I wouldn’t. I just hoped it would go away. I knew it was over, that we had been unhappy for a long time. I couldn’t face doing anything about it; I couldn’t even face facing it. So, thank you for being strong enough to do it.’
‘That’s OK.’
He grinned at me. ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’
We are still good friends, even now. We see each other often and not just because we share a child. I call Jonathan in times of trouble, or celebration. And he calls me. This confuses some people. They think we are weird to be so happily separated. They wonder why we bothered. We don’t. We both know we have the sort of relationship that survives separation, but not intimacy.
Nor did our friendship stop the pain of a marriage ending. It did not diminish the agony of ripping apart a ten-year marriage, a house, and a life. Perhaps, even, our friendship made it worse.
‘Why are we doing this?’ I said, one day, as we were packing up the family home.
Jonathan looked sad. ‘Because there is no other way. We both know that.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and went back to packing up boxes of china and glass.
We dismantled our marriage slowly; it took us over a year to sell the house. During that time, I moved twice, into different flats, and moved in and out of the family house twice too. It was unsettling, but I was already unsettled.
I kept on taking the antidepressants. They did nothing, but my life was a mess. No drug has the power to tidy away that degree of mess.
I was physically unwell too, with an underactive thyroid, or hypothyroidism as it is known, diagnosed a year previously. ‘It’s only mildly underactive,’ my GP said. ‘Borderline. Nothing to worry about.’
And so I didn’t.
Mental health professionals, however, take malfunctioning thyroid glands very seriously, for good reason. The thyroid, which governs everything from metabolism to mood function, used to be known as the gland of emotion. It is hugely implicated in depression. According to one report, twenty-five per cent of women in psychiatric units have an underactive thyroid. Often, it is only borderline, which is why its implications regarding severe depression are often missed by general practitioners who tend to regard a mildly under-functioning thyroid as bothersome but not serious. There is, too, an enormous variation in function.
As my own psychiatrist told me later, ‘Normal is a piece of string. What’s normal for one person is off the chart for another. And NHS blood tests for thyroxin are notoriously insensitive.’
I knew none of this at the time and, taking my lead from my GP, did not take its implications seriously even though I had felt extremely unwell before I was diagnosed. I was tired all the time and not normal fatigue but bone-weary exhaustion. I slept as if I had been knocked unconscious and struggled to wake in the morning, dragging my leaden limbs through the day. I was always cold; my fingers white and numb even during the summer, when I kept a heater going at full blast in my study. If I got too cold, I found it almost impossible to get warm again and resorted to lying in a bath with the hot water running. My arms and legs ached constantly, so painfully that, at times, I took painkillers every four hours. And my weight, which had been the same all my life, kept going up despite eating very little. Stranger still, my eyebrows started to fall out
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