When I had my nervous breakdown in 1996, when I was nineteen, talking about depression was a big taboo and acknowledging that things were hard took a great deal of courage. That was more than twenty years ago, and these days we talk about mental health a lot more. People encourage their friends to be honest about how they are feeling, and people who are struggling are urged to reach out.
But that’s not the whole story.
Asking for help in the depths of depression is hard in ways that someone who has never been depressed can’t possibly imagine. Depression can make the sufferer feel that they don’t deserve help. It is hard to talk to anyone when things are bad.
We live in a world that values the appearance of happiness to an extraordinary and, I believe, unhealthy extent. We are encouraged to keep quiet about the things that are hard in case we make other people feel uncomfortable. This has the effect of making everyone feel isolated in their suffering, which makes it even harder to reach out.
People can be very judgemental about other people’s struggles. I have been told, in so many words, that because I live in a lovely house, have the luxury of being a full time parent, have a loving husband and a strong marriage, and only one child, I have nothing to complain about and no right to be sad because “other people have real problems”. But feelings are not mutually exclusive, and neither are facts. I absolutely have a lot to be thankful for. And also, I have had a number of very difficult and painful experiences in the last three years and I live with grief and PTSD every day. My pain matters.
In June last year I was referred by my GP to a local counselling service. In March I had an initial, introductory appointment and in May I had the first of twelve sessions. I’ve had five appointments so far, averaging one every three weeks. It has been incredibly helpful. I have been able to talk to this counsellor and have made huge strides in my understanding of my experiences and of my response to grief.
On Saturday 5th October I received a letter from the health authority informing me that the service had been terminated. I assumed that my booked appointment yesterday, Wednesday 9th, would go ahead and I intended to ask the counsellor if I could make a private arrangement for further counselling. Instead, the termination of the service was immediate and no-one took responsibility for making sure service users understood this. I don’t want to take up more space talking about this, but the careless way in which this was handled is a stark reminder that even health care professionals still disregard the significance of mental health.
I’ve written parts of my story before. In my twenties I learned to live with depression in a world that was much less open about such things than it is now. In my early thirties, depression almost ended my relationship: an excellent counsellor and a great deal of prayer helped us to build a strong marriage. After two years of trying and a difficult pregnancy we finally welcomed our daughter, and when she was eleven months old I had my first miscarriage and almost died. Five more losses followed in rapid succession.
I have been fundamentally changed. I am not the person I was in 2015.
After we lost Gracie Wren, I kept my mouth shut about what I was going through. I really believed it was my duty to keep quiet and to protect everyone else from my sadness. I began to open up, very tentatively, in October 2016 as a direct result of Baby Loss Awareness Week. My further losses have made me more and more aware that millions of families are suffering in silence because they believe that is the right thing to do. I want to encourage everyone who needs to, to speak out. What is troubling you might not be baby loss. It might be another kind of grief, or it might be your mental or physical health or that of a loved one. Of course, if it needs to be private, keep it so. But if you are keeping it secret because you think people don’t want to know, do speak up.
Your pain is personal to you, but until you talk about it, you will never know who needs the lifeline you are holding in your hands. You will never know who you can help with your experience.
So please talk. Please be open. Please share. And above all, be kind to other people, and also to yourself.
Joy in the Mourning 