As I began working with patients in a local community clinic, I noticed a pattern emerging. In 2001, I left London for Berkeley, California, where I spent three years training to be a psychotherapist. I wanted to try and help others in the way that I had been helped. I had also found something I wanted to do with my life. It was not easy but after two years of once-a-week sessions, I felt I had regained some equilibrium. I started the painful process of examining what had gone so wrong for me, rather than just trying to patch up the wound and soldier on. Many the day, though, I would return from lunch with a journalist or some radio or TV gig and collapse in bed with the covers pulled over my head.Įventually, I gave in to my friend's urging and went to see a therapist. This warded off the worst of it and I was able to work in fits and starts. For the first two years I eschewed therapy and stuck to medication (first Prozac, then Effexor). Little did they, or I, know that recovery would take years. To be fair to the world of Westminster, people were sympathetic, supportive and ready to give me time to recover. I started to tell people, which wasn't easy, but it did come as a sort of relief. ![]() I had to recognise the surprising but inescapable fact that I was depressed. I felt bereft, alone (though I wasn't) and hopeless. I wasn't too tired or ill to get up and about, I just had no inclination to do so. But could such a catastrophic depression really have sprung from nowhere?Īt first I thought I had a virus, but after a week or so I realised that physically I felt fine. It felt at the time as though I was fine one day, and the next completely crippled. ![]() I went from a high-octane, glamorous life as a New Labour high flyer to being scarcely able to muster the self-confidence to go to the corner shop for milk. It happened over the course of just a few days, in the spring of 1996. I first wondered about this in relation to my own breakdown. The statistics all scream about one form of depression, but I believe that there is another form, much less recognised, that affects millions more people, especially men. Yet I suspect that the true picture is even worse. One person in 20 in Britain is now clinically depressed - about three million in total - and one in five of us will suffer from depression at some point in our lives. Young people, as this newspaper reported recently, are more likely to die from depression than from Aids, cancer and heart disease combined. ![]() The World Health Organisation predicts that the illness will soon be the second-biggest public health risk after heart disease. Depression is routinely described as an "epidemic".
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