The problem with referenda

Caught philosopher Roger Scruton's timely "A Petition to End Petitions" on Radio 4 this morning (A Point of View), in which he outlined Edmund Burke's distinction between political "delegates" and "representatives". It started a train of thought that ran through Isaiah Berlin eventually to provide logical justification to a nagging sensation I have had for some weeks now that this referendum is fatally flawed.

With a distinction between delegates and representatives, Burke argued that it was the role of elected representatives not simply to act as a mouthpiece for their constituents, but to apply judgment to what can often be ill-informed and reactionary opinion: "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

With his distinction between positive and negative freedom, Isaiah Berlin sheds light on the origin of judgment:

Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the road. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other. Next you come to a crossroads. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from going left or straight on. There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks. So you seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this picture of your situation might change quite dramatically if we consider that the reason you went left and then right is that you're addicted to cigarettes and you're desperate to get to the tobacconists before it closes. Rather than driving, you feel you are being driven, as your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably to turn the wheel first to the left and then to the right. Moreover, you're perfectly aware that your turning right at the crossroads means you'll probably miss a train that was to take you to an appointment you care about very much. You long to be free of this irrational desire that is not only threatening your longevity but is also stopping you right now from doing what you think you ought to be doing.

This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of freedom. On the one hand, one can think of freedom as the absence of obstacles external to the agent. You are free if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can think of freedom as the presence of control on the part of the agent. To be free, you must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own destiny in your own interests. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be unfree: you are not in control of your own destiny, as you are failing to control a passion that you yourself would rather be rid of and which is preventing you from realising what you recognise to be your true interests. One might say that while on the first view liberty is simply about how many doors are open to the agent, on the second view it is more about going through the right doors for the right reasons.

Putting these two ideas together, one can sense more clearly not only the difficulty of becoming an enlightened political citizen in an age of mass media, but also the problem with popular referenda. In an age of mass communication and limited attention spans, media outlets abandon lengthy and cognitively expensive appeals to reason and instead seek to persuade us through emotional appeals. More specifically, fear, anger and resentment are the buttons inside us which they seek to press, stupefying our reason and short-circuiting our freedom. Thus affected, the arbiter of our better judgement is compromised at the precise moment that the representative that would arbitrate for us is taken out of the equation. In the absence of enlightened and liberated opinion, unmediated fear, anger and resentment are currently at the wheel of our democracy and stand a real chance of driving us over the edge.

Learning from Depression: the relief of tears

It is difficult for men to cry, more difficult if they are Victorians, and worse still if they are the son of an ex-Presbyterian minister whose idea of education involves praising and punishing dry book-learning into a child from the age of three.

I would urge anyone who suffers from depression to read the autobiography of Victorian philosopher, John Stuart Mill. I first encountered Mill's life story when I was doing Masters research on late nineteenth-century psychology back in the early 2000s. Mill's story is a fascinating one. The son of the utilitarian philosopher James Mill, John Stuart received an extraordinarily intense, hyper-rationalist education designed and administered by his overbearing father with the sole aim of producing a genius to continue the utilitarian tradition. From the age of three, Mill began learning Greek. By the age of eight, he was acquainted with classical authors such as Herodotus and Plato in the original, as well as a great deal of arithmetic and history in English. He then began latin, algebra and geometry. By ten his reading list included most of the Latin and Greek authors commonly read in schools and universities, and by fourteen he had undertaken studies in logic, political economy, as well as chemistry, zoology and higher mathematics from specialised schools and private tutors.

At seventeen, Mill joined his father in a post at the East India Company and began proselytising for the utilitarian cause. Then, aged twenty, Mill had a breakdown. As he describes it in the autobiography, in delightfully Victorian language, he fell into a 'dull state of nerves' in which he was 'unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement[...] One of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent'. In this frame of mind he posed himself the question, suppose his life's ambitions for utilitarian reform were achieved? Would he be any happier as a result?:

An irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

In vain, Mill attempted to carry on regardless:

At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's 'Dejection' — I was not then acquainted with them —exactly describe my case:

"A grief without a pang,
void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear."

Mill's breakdown has been the subject of retrospective analyses from every major psychiatric school, with radically contrasting diagnoses. The scope for Freudian readings of Mill's relationship with his father are understandably particularly broad. For me, there can be no doubt. The dullness, the indifference, the anhedonia, the thickening cloud, and the cycle of hope and disappointment occasioned by the failure of sleep to reset your mood: Mill was suffering from depression.

Mill published in 1863, and we ought to marvel at the courage it took for him to share his crisis with his Victorian audience. The accounts of others who have waged and won their own battles with depression are so valuable when you are utterly alone, which is arguably what drew Mill to the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; for like Mill's autobiography, Coleridge's poem 'Dejection - An Ode', is a beautifully solemn, honest and potent reflection on depression, and again I would advise anyone so afflicted to read it. Indeed, it was precisely this kind of encounter with literature which catalysed Mill's eventual recovery:

I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's Mémoires, and came to the passage which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them—would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my ever-present sense of irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life could again give me some pleasure; that I could again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and that there was, once more, excitement, though of a moderate, kind, in exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public good. Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I again enjoyed life; and though I had several relapses, some of which lasted many months, I never again was as miserable as I had been.

It is difficult to cry. I have tried it many times, mostly on the suspicion that there have been times that I really should have but didn't. And it is difficult for men in particular to cry, at least in front of others. But then again, how do we begin to cry alone? As Mill's example reveals, it takes a trigger, and it takes imagination, or perhaps empathy is a better word. You have to creatively place yourself in a scene, fictional or remembered, and paint it out with sufficient detail as to bring the emotional tone of that scene to the fore. Not only this, but you must also let your guard down, which is difficult to do since crying and sadness are a form of pain. Just as you reflexively throw up your arms to protect your face when you suddenly notice a Frisbee flying at your head, so does your ego instinctively mount defences to protect you from psychological injury. But what if you do not see the Frisbee coming? Mill's account also reveals the importance surprise plays in catching us unaware - literally off guard. Undoubtedly this is the best strategy to trigger tears, which is why we really need an attentive and questioning other to listen as we talk about our problems. A good psychotherapist, or friend, is your trigger to reach in, your book of stories to mould your experience along the lines of others', and your own best reader, alerting you when you fold up or skip a page.

That morning as I lay on my sofa at 8 am, fully dressed in cycling waterproofs, ready to battle against the wind and the rain to the doctor's surgery, I couldn't stop thinking about poor old John Stuart Mill - numb, despondent, leafing through sentimental scenes from Romantic literature in a forlorn attempt to convulse his joyless soul back to life. Friends had recommended that I try to cry, and now I really felt that I should in order perhaps to challenge this numbness. I needed a trigger, so I went up to my attic room and found two large boxes of old family photographs, teenage notebooks, letters and keepsakes from the early years of my relationship with my ex-wife. The wind and rain continued to fall, the radiator hissed, and I sat there for an hour, trying to cry.

And I did. A little. Tears fell down my cheeks a few times that hour, and I felt my face girn and grimace, as if I was on the edge of a much desired fit of wailing and sobbing. But that is as far as I got, mostly, I suspect, because my barriers went up, and the imaginative bubble burst through the weight of self-consciousness. 

But miraculously it worked. I unfroze. The brain fog lifted, and my perspective shifted, as if some binary switch had been flicked. I looked out the window. Bruised clouds still scudded across the sky, rain still spattered against the glass and drummed on the roof. But the scene was transformed. Everything was suddenly so near, so real, and I was again part of it all.   

Like a drowning sailor clutching at a tiny piece of wreckage, I clung to this delicate morsel of pleasure and let it, as far as it could, nourish my soul. I desperately hoped that this moment might be an end to my isolation, my unfreezing. But I hardly dared move, since everything seemed so precariously balanced. Slowly I made my way to a large cushion next to the radiator where I had again begun meditating, and tried to lock in these gains. After some minutes repetition of my mantra, I folded the beat under the sensation of connectedness, tending this vital feeling as one might a fragile form of life.

I awoke from the meditation still feeling connected, but now with a strong desire to go to work. I had been alone, experimenting with my psychology all morning, and now needed some kind of normality. I also felt, uncharacteristically for these weeks, that stimulation would be good for me, and afford more opportunities to focus on this sensation of connectedness.

I left the house and cycled to work. Half-way there joy suddenly flourished in my heart, and my eyes again filled with tears. Not many, but shed with abject gratitude and relief.

At work no one was around but a PhD student who was working on her thesis. I entered the room where she was sitting with her back to me and greeted her with more warmth and energy than I had anyone in weeks. Something was wrong, her cursory response was flat, eyes still trained on the screen. I moved around the room and invited her to make eye contact. Nothing.

Empathy involves reaching out and connecting with another. It involves inserting yourself emotionally into their perspective and feeling what they are going through. When you are depressed, you are isolated, you cannot reach out, or at least, you cannot connect. You can of course correctly recognise the states of mind that others hold, and impute possible causes for these states; depression is not like some autistic spectrum disorders. But, as I have said before, all these behaviours are scripted, as if in a language you can speak but cannot understand, and so you follow the moves impeccably, without a deeper and more significant involvement in the plot.

I grabbed a seat and sat down, not because I knew it was the right thing to do; but because I had become involved in this little drama, I felt her discomfort as my own and now I wanted to do what I could to take it away. And I knew that this would involve listening.

And that is another lesson. When you are depressed, you sometimes find it difficult to listen. For the same reasons that I have just mentioned, the inner lives of others are shut off from you, and your attention is more than likely eaten up with your own unease, anxiety, shame and sadness. You may, as a result, throw out a great deal of energy, either to silence your unease, or to act as a buffer against any implosive collapse. Or you may fail to acknowledge the emotional dimension altogether, and instead focus on the practical aspect as a problem that requires a solution.

I encouraged her to speak about the problems she had been experiencing with an upgrade, and I listened with all of my soul, reaching out and connecting with her, feeling her worries and empathising with my eyes, face, body and voice. I was almost 100 percent in that moment. Almost, because a tiny part of me was watching my own self with abject gratitude and relief that I had momentarily rejoined the world of others.

Then, when I returned to my desk and began working, the spell broke. Heralded by a sense of dislocation, as if the points on the track of my life had suddenly been switched, I departed from the path I had taken since that morning, and entered the fog once more.

Three photographs from my recent travels hang on my study wall: one from the Himalayas, one from the Sahara, and one from the Greek islands. All of these photos I took myself, and often in the days since my recovery I have looked on them with pleasure and fascination, while at the same time introspecting to understand better the origin of this response. For me, the reason I take pleasure and feel fascination for these photos is that I can easily picture myself there. After all, I was there once, and I know how it feels to be there. I know the thrill and pride of climbing snowbound peaks, the playful exuberance of riding in a camel train at dusk, and the deep sense of affinity and love that I personally feel for the heavenly light of the Aegean.

With so much in life, we take it for granted, and only really come to appreciate it when it is taken from us. Every time I wake up from a period of depression, the world seems to throb with pleasure, which makes me draw conclusions about the adaptive value of the condition. Like my photographs, pleasure is always there, but only if we linger long enough to drink it in. My experience of going numb, and unfreezing temporarily, once more pointed to the need to pay attention to the world, to be predisposed and ready to take pleasure wherever you find it, and you can find it almost anywhere. 

Beyond this, my experiment taught me a simple truth, which many of us know, but perhaps fail sufficiently to bear in mind. Crying can help alleviate depression. I cannot speculate as to how, since our ego seems to hide this part of the trick from us. But I suspect it has something to do with closing some kind of circuit, or rather letting loose a fruitless cycle of thoughts by throwing them into action. Research on depression points to the key role which rumination without action plays in developing and perpetuating negative and self-defeating patterns of thought. Some of us are unlucky enough to have had difficult childhoods, or unexpected traumas in later life, for which we need to find answers. And I know that I am such an individual: driven to understand adversity by curiosity, the love of wisdom, by perfectionism, by a conviction that the answer is valuable, by an enormous capacity for self-reflection, by the need for feedback, and, yes, by sheer bloody-mindedness that I will not be beaten by fate or ignorance. All of these qualities can serve me well as an academic, writer and teacher, but when these same abilities are continually trained on complex and traumatic life events, whether consciously or not, and when they perpetually fail to yield a satisfying solution, they can foster a sense of learned helplessness, as depression has sometimes been framed.

Our way out of rumination without action is to act to better our lot. I do not know if there is any evidence to suggest that crying is a form of action that allows us to break this cycle. But it certainly helped me, that morning at least, to gain some temporary relief.


To be continued...

Learning from Depression: understand your symptoms

We reach for metaphors to describe the workings and dysfunctions of the mind. For Plato, the mind was a chariot: driver and horses. Reason steers a course while the animal passions, both noble and ignoble, pull us toward our aspirations and desires. Freud likened our mind to an iceberg, concealing below the surface of our awareness all our memories and instincts, as well as our repressed fears and desires. And for Cognitive Behavioural Therapists, the mind is a computer, programmed and reprogrammable, processing emotions and experience to our benefit, and sometimes to our disadvantage.

Depression too has been the target of some famous and infamous metaphors, from demonic possession to Churchill's symbolic 'black dog'. Recognising abstract and potentially threatening emotions, rendering them concrete and discrete through reference to a metaphorical source, is a fundamental means of gaining some control over them, and hence some meagre relief. For me, the conceptualisation I have of my own depression only took form when I was swallowed up by darkness at my own desk.

For me, depression is like being dead in the midst of life. It is like waking one morning to find that you are lying in your own grave with nothing but the stifling pressure of darkness and distance separating you from the rest of the world. Your body may act and react to the events around you, but you remain cut off, and nothing you can do or say will ever reach another, nor add a letter to the story of the world.

Dozens of classic poems, plays and novels reference this same deep metaphor: DEPRESSION is ISOLATION. In J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield's psychological dissolution is heralded by a sense that he is slipping away, even in the midst of a populated cityscape:

I kept walking and walking up Fifth Avenue, without any tie on or anything. Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening. Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again.

In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, in addition to placing her troubled protagonist under a metaphorical bell jar, Plath also uses immersion in water as an alternative source mapping attributes of isolation.

We have to believe that all experience is valuable, that setbacks are feedback, and that even an experience as nightmarish as slipping into a depressive coma, is, in the final reckoning, an opportunity to learn. When I finally stabilised that evening, and cycled slowly home with the sun still in my eyes, I strongly suspected that my core symptoms - the dissociation, the brain fog and the fatigue - were one in the same as the absolute isolation which had claimed me at my desk. The difference was only one of degree. If I felt dissociated from the world, it was because I was already experiencing it from behind a dark veil; my brain fog was only a thin layer of the same pressure I felt wrapping round my forehead and crown as I went under; and the terrible listlessness and lack of energy that had plagued me for weeks were in fact my body's way of folding me in on myself and preventing further interaction with the world.

I did not know it at the time, but in reaching for this metaphor of isolation, I had taken my first tiny step toward recovery; for only now did I realise that depression without sadness is in fact no paradox at all. This bout of depression was like no other that I had experienced because in place of sadness I had become numb. It made sense. In the past year I had bought a house, travelled to the far East on university business, designed highly innovative educational programmes, climbed mountains and run across Mediterranean islands, and every time someone asked me Aren't you happy to own our own home? Are you looking forward to your trip? I would look into my heart and realise that very often I wasn't. Instead, there was sometimes a sense of unreality and very slight discomfort, as if these pleasures and opportunities should be happening to someone else. And a great deal of indifference. I thought I was simply growing up. But now it seemed more like I was colluding in pulling myself down.

That night I slept for twelve hours and woke to a morning off work, my first since this whole episode began. I fully intended that morning to visit the doctor's surgery, to camp in their reception if need be till someone saw me and prescribed me the medication which I only hoped could deliver me some relief. But in the end, I did not go. Not because of pride, but because of an experiment.

If setbacks are feedback, then they warrant the formation of a new hypothesis, as well as an experiment to gauge the validity of your hunch. Sentient creatures have been making progress by following this simple paradigm since consciousness developed, and humans have been systematically exploiting its awesome ameliorative power to better their lot through the scientific method since the Enlightenment. It is also an incredibly positive and empowering way to look at adversity. Setbacks are an opportunity to learn, and you are in control.

Of course, you are only able to make this reframe as a depressed individual if you can get past your negative thinking, short-circuit your anxiety long enough to think clearly and create a hypothesis, and believe sufficiently in your own potential to make a difference to act. And this is the depressive bind. But, and here is what I cannot emphasise enough: you break this bind if you are mindful. It doesn't last long, the negativity, anxiety and listlessness return as soon as your focus shifts, but by practising mindfulness techniques like meditation, you can stand outside yourself long enough to see more clearly how things are and how they ought to be. And the more you do it, the better you become at controlling your own mind. 

I was now four weeks into my depression, and had been meditating briefly every morning for a couple of weeks. That morning had been no exception, and now I was ready to experiment.


To be continued...

Depression without sadness

A few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk at the end of the working day, sorting CVs for a job opening. I had just returned from the classroom - cover for an absent tutor - but it had otherwise been a very normal day. A few minutes into this routine task, I noticed that something was wrong. No matter how hard I focused on the paper copies, I could not find any of the required information, nor at times could I even remember what it was that I should be looking for. As I flicked backwards and forwards through the pages, it was as if I was not in my own head looking out, but looking in and seeing only my own inevitable failure to carry out this routine task. I persisted, redoubling my efforts to attend to what was in front of my eyes, refusing to acknowledge the growing realisation that something was very wrong. But my awareness of the outside world only grew thinner and thinner, as more and more I turned inward.

It was then that the blackness came. A literal blackness swallowed up my vision. There was a sense too of numbness across my forehead and crown as if my head was being smothered and bound in bandages. I leaned forward and stooped over the desk, making myself hunched and smaller. If a colleague had entered my office at that moment, they may well have mistook my posture as a need to protect myself. But in reality, I was being folded up and inward, drawn down into a void.

I have suffered from bouts of depression for years. Hitherto they have always been characterised by a sense of worthlessness. They have almost without exception lasted no longer than a week and there has always been a trigger - a broken heart, a regret, or a series of setbacks that had brought me to question my identity and sense of efficacy. But now it seems my symptoms have evolved. In fact, this nightmare episode at my desk was preceded by at least a month of other symptoms, so unprecedented, that I had a great deal of difficulty recognising that I was sliding into a major depressive episode.

Four weeks previously I noticed that I was having difficulty concentrating and was uncharacteristically forgetful. Frequently I would move around the house on chores and forget what it was that I was supposed to be doing. I had difficulty taking in information while reading, and then one evening in the pub while in the middle of an anecdote, I could not recall the name of the colleague with whom I have shared an office for a year, and who was sitting opposite me at the time. At the same time I became aware that my head was extremely foggy. The kind of sensation that plagues you when you wake up stale and drowsy after a dissatisfying daytime nap, only ever-present, from the moment I got up, till the instant I closed my eyes. By this time I was also physically very tired, and sleeping ten, sometimes twelve hours a night to compensate. But no matter how much I slept, I could not feel refreshed. All this caused me to worry of course, and I feared I might have a serious neurological problem. And who wouldn't? Not only were these symptoms physical and cognitive, there was absolutely no emotional dimension. No sadness. No sense of worthlessness. No trigger. Nothing that would mark this out as the depression with which I had long been familiar.

I made a doctor's appointment, but the earliest they could see me was late in the following week. I accepted this, since, despite my symptoms, I could still function. That weekend while out for a walk in a local park, I began to feel dissociation. If you have never experienced this, it is difficult to explain but it was as if a connection between my mind and my body had been severed. When my body moved off, I often had the sensation that I was leaving my mind somewhere behind, which made me feel slightly dizzy and disorientated. My limbs too felt as if they had been clumsily stitched on to my torso and seemed somehow to ring with an unpleasant nervous sensation, as if butterflies were flying around inside them. The more I attended to these sensations to scrutinise and control them, the worse they seemed to get, until at times I felt that I was going to have a seizure, collapse and lose control completely right there in the park. I walked slowly home, choosing to feel numb rather than the anxiety of attending to these desperate symptoms. The prospect of losing control of my body completely and doing who knows what right there in the street seemed very real. Only by sleeping could I find some respite.

The next day I awoke with this realisation: if I were to continue to monitor my symptoms in detail, to fear for their origin in terms of a serious neurological condition, I would, in all likelihood, get caught in a vicious spiral of anxiety and dissociation until I lost touch with reality completely. However frightening these symptoms were, more unacceptable to me was the thought that fear itself could take me over. Such are the insights you gain when you are stripped of all that is adventitious by the vicissitudes of extreme adversity. And how quickly we tend to forget this hard won knowledge; for I had been here before. Once in my twenties when an eating disorder halted progress on my PhD, and once again a decade later when my marriage failed. Both times I was brought low by the sense of loss, only to realise that the only truth that endures is the reality of your own self, and the environment of which you are now a part. All other actors, goals, beliefs, assets and achievements are transient, and to cleave to them is like trying to grasp water as it flows through your hand. 

This was a Monday morning three weeks after I first noticed something was wrong. My usual routine would have seen me filling the half hour before leaving the house, drinking coffee, eating breakfast, listening to the news, reading the news and responding to work emails and private messages, all at the same time. Instead I lay on my sofa, gazed out of the window and tried simply to be mindful of the only truth that endures, the reality of my own self pressing into the sofa, filling a space inside the four walls as sounds from the surrounding streets, telephone wires bouncing in the breeze, and birds winging and swooping across the sky marked the progress of the present through time.

I had short-circuited my anxiety for now, and at my desk, I was calmer. My symptoms were still in evidence, but I no longer made them my focus. Instead, I simply accepted that I was operating at a deficit, and focused on getting that morning's tasks done as best I could. Also, mid-morning, I decided that I would message a list of my symptoms to a friend who suffers from major depressive episodes. I had spent some time researching my symptoms on line and knew that there was at least a chance that they were a modified expression of my existing depression, however incredible this felt to me. 

She responded almost immediately. Almost all the symptoms I listed she confirmed as characteristic of major depressive episodes as she experiences them. It is odd to hear this, but I felt, if not joyful, then certainly relieved to hear this. The brain fog, dissociation, fatigue and momentary disorientation continued throughout the week, but for the most part, I was stable and coping. 

Mornings that week always began the same way, by greeting the brain fog with a sense of disappointment that there had been no overnight change, by getting ready for work, then settling down on the sofa for half an hour of mindfulness before I left the house. I also began to notice a new and particularly debilitating symptom. Perhaps one of the cruellest symptoms of depression, as I experience it, is the dissociation, not from your own self, but from others. If you have never experienced this then you need to imagine an utter inability to connect. You find yourself in the company of others, watching them laugh or listening to them tell a story, you are aware of their facial expressions, their mood, you are aware that you should be responding in some way, and you do. You smile, you laugh, you add another comment. But all this is mechanical. As if scripted in a language that you can speak but not understand. There is no depth, no meaning no involvement with any of these behaviours with the result that your are utterly alone together. Most times you can just about bear this by ignoring it and inserting as much artificial energy between you and the world of others as you can muster. But sometimes your energy collapses, or you simply run out of motivation. Or again, the conversation disintegrates into a series of contingent stills, which, like a film advanced frame by frame, may reveal a hideous grimace in the midst of an unguarded fit of laughter. It is at these times that company becomes a form of torture. You lose your place in the script completely, and are left exposed with no way of concealing the shame of your own anxiety, despair and loneliness.

Elsewhere in this blog I have written of the joy I experience when connecting with another mind, and of the role creative language use plays in revitalising our jaded perspective of the world. For me the simplest yet greatest of pleasures is finding just the right language and mode of delivery to drop curiosities, insights and startling moments of beauty into the ears of others. This is doubtless why I became a teacher. But all throughout that week, my time in the classroom was a real source of anxiety. I had to take great care to build up enough energy before entering to last me through the 90 mins. And even though I delivered all my lesson aims, and the students enjoyed their lessons, for me it was a disappointing and exhausting performance.

Somehow the week passed, and I made it late on Friday evening to the doctor's. In the UK, a standard appointment lasts 10 minutes - precious little time for you to explain the complexities of your mental health problem, let alone for the GP to listen, explore and diagnose your complaint. But by this point in the week, I was already 90 percent sure I was suffering from depression. The doctor's confirmation again came as a relief, as was his recommendation that I deal with it through therapy alone. Now that I knew what it was, I felt sure that I could beat this depression, or more precisely, that I only had to hunker down long enough and my mood would suddenly lift, as it had so many times before. Before leaving his office, and already when he had warned me twice that we would have to bring the consultation to a close, I asked him: how was it possible to have depression without sadness? He could not answer.

The weekend passed in close company, which helped to calm me. I spoke about my mood often and felt no pressure to follow the empty ritual of normal relations. Sunday evening, however, was much worse, since I became aware of another disturbing deficit which undid many of my gains.

I have played the guitar on and off for decades, and in the early part of this year, I had taken it up again with renewed conviction. More specifically, I had spent most evenings in January learning classic blues solos, playing them over and over again until the phrasing was fast and smooth. At the same time, I was meeting every week or so with a group of friends who also sing and play guitar to develop a set list of songs. On Sunday evening, my friends arrived for a rehearsal, and I noticed that I was feeling very anxious. We began to play, but my concentration was so poor I could not remember the chords or the changes. And even when I had them written in front of me, I could barely process them quick enough to keep up with the song. Also, like the social ritual of conversation, the structure of the music seemed arbitrary. Whereas I would normally lose myself in the flow of the music, now I was locked out, spasmodically adding staccato and forced notes to a sequence of steps that refused to cohere together into a whole. But most worryingly, my fingers, which just a few weeks previous had moved so fast and with such control over the fretboard, were now clumsy, cold and weak. Again, my body felt as if it no longer belonged to me, as if some vital internal connection had been severed.

I went to bed that evening slightly embarrassed and utterly dejected, and woke up with extremely thick brain fog, which lasted all day. Looking back on my motor problems of the previous evening, I once again could not shake the sensation that there was something neurologically wrong with me. This gloom-laden thought came back to me again and again. After all, how is it possible to have depression without sadness?

In the afternoon, I was called upon to teach a class unexpectedly, which evidently used up all my resources, because it was when I returned to my desk to sort come CVs for a job opening that I was suddenly swallowed up by darkness.

Hunched over my desk, I fought against it the only way I could, by focusing on the reality of my own self, and the environment of which I was then a part - the only truth that endures. Going under, I forced myself to attend to my body, my breath, the sensation of my elbows resting on the table, the strands of hair beneath my fingertips, and soon enough I saw again the light from the window opposite.


To be continued.