MENTAL HEALTH
Hollow corer at work
one was more difficult than the last. Time after time, Dr Mann asked me to consider medication to help me sleep, but I declined. Then, one day, I said the solution to the whole sorry affair was simple: I just needed to ‘man up’. Wrong answer, but it was a turning point. It wasn’t easy, but Dr Mann convinced me that trying to ‘man up’ wasn’t a helpful approach. Finally, I surrendered to her advice. Finally, I accepted that I was suffering from depression. Finally, I agreed to take the antidepressant mirtazapine. The next few weeks were some of the toughest of my life. The thought of setting foot outside the house filled me with fear. I would avoid anywhere where there were likely to be other people, which is pretty much everywhere.
A number of very close friends started coming round to see how I was. I appreciated these visits but found them enormously difficult experiences. My matchday medical officer and deputy safety officers visited several times and, to my surprise, one of them revealed that he
had been through depression himself and knew exactly what I was going through. One of my most loyal friends, a steward at the club for forty years, came round and told me he had suffered terribly during his depression.
Whilst these reassurances went some way towards persuading me that depression is a distressingly common disease, I’m sorry to say that at the time they were like water off a duck’s back. I couldn’t see a way out of what I was feeling; I had no interest in anything; if somebody had presented me with a million pounds and asked what I would like to do with it, I would have replied ‘nothing’. My life had no meaning and even less purpose. But, I had another huge surprise when one of my visitors, before I’d said a word, described my symptoms in precise detail and said he’d also been through a rough spell. I wasn’t alone, he stressed.
He was a serving police officer and real hard nut who was always the first to put his head above the parapet and deal with crowd disorder; he was the last person I would have
suspected of suffering from depression. His revelation had an impact on me and I found it so much easier than usual to talk to him. It sounds ridiculous now but at my lowest point I couldn’t get out of the house, so I was set a challenge: going to the Co-op twice a day to start engaging with people in public places. But I found myself cheating. If the car park was busy I would wait until it was quiet, and I would have the right money ready in my pocket for a quick exit at the till. There were times when my lips felt three times their real size, I had the shakes and panic attacks were common. Having dealt with large crowds at work for decades, I found these especially hard to deal with but there I would be, struggling to breathe, convinced I was having a heart attack and was going to die.
At one appointment a colleague of Dr Mann’s was in the room. Dr Kim asked if I would return to the clinic with a family member or friend. I couldn’t bring myself to ask Lisa as I knew I’d already put her through hell, so I asked my good friend Andy if he
Since my challenge with life, I have helped two people who were struggling in silence with depression and pointed them in the right direction - one of whom said that I saved his life
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PC December/January 2020
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