So many people wonder why we talk about dark, miserable and terrible things, and why I write about them. The reason is very simple. Those places need a light shone on them so they aren’t dark anymore and we can focus on the brightness rather than the abyss. The other end of happy is unhappy, and both are legitimate states of being, in the same way cheerful pop music is diametrically opposed by death metal. Experiencing, learning and talking about the darker things is not the same as obsessing over them and letting them affect the way we are. Its ok, safe and in some ways essential to walk into the flames as long as we keep our eyes on the daybreak.

Im not a big fan of summer. Something about June, July and August plagues me for a reason I know not. My memories of this time of year arent great, in fact I can remember several genuinely horrific and painful things that happened in the recent past that made me want to forget the season altogether. Im not going to go into details but rest assured they were life changing and nothing Id ever want to revisit in any lifetime I had again, regardless of the lessons I learned. In try to avoid August if I can.

Around 2 years ago i was walking down a country road, almost unable to walk and on the verge of being hospitalised. My girlfriend at the time was in total and utter despair and so worried that she was in tears. I could hardly lift my arms, speak more than a few words or find the strength to eat. I was shaking and trembling like I would never stop, like electricity was racing around my body. Nobody could do anything. Nothing had worked. I was falling apart. I knew I was going to die, and it was going to be a relief.

I hadnt slept at all in over 10 days. I couldn’t sleep no matter how hard I tried or how tired I was. Not one minute.

A week beforehand my doctor had diagnosed me with anxiety and depression. In those 10 days I had been on almost every antidepressant known to man, and nothing helped. I was throwing up, disorientated, wired like Id drunk a litre of coffee every hour and unable to carry on. At one point I was out in the middle of the road on a humid night at 3am on the phone to both the NHS and the Samaritans because I was convinced I was going completely mad. My ears were ringing, my skin was tingling and my heart was pounding out of my chest. For 3 days, continually.

Sleep never came even with some of the most powerful sleeping pills, and the fear of not sleeping took over like it had done years before when Id been wasting my life away on methamphetamine and cocaine. As the days went on I had got worse and worse and found myself travelling at 6am back to Hampshire to my doctor, who made the initial diagnosis and went through the whole catalogue of SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, such as Proxac and Seroxat) in response, none of which did anything but make me worse.

We eventually went to the country because I couldn’t handle being anywhere near the hustle and bustle of a town or city, but I worsened. After a few days and at what felt like my last dying breaths, they got me into the car and took me to a local GP in Norfolk who spent 2 hours talking through whether I should be committed or not. He openly said he was amazed how Id got that far and how I was still able to maintain a profound and deeply intelligent conversation. I don’t think It was anything like that, more the fact that I understood the mechanism by which tricyclic antidepressants worked and how they were made.

In the end he prescribed me the antidepressant my mum had used for nearly 20 years and the original staple benchmark for all drugs of that type, amitriptyline hydrochloride. What works for mother often works for baby, and that night when I finally fell asleep my girlfriend cried her eyes out in relief. I slept for 16 hours and woke up a day later.

It had crept up on me for several years and I had experienced similar times when my nerves were shot to pieces but never at that scale. Adrenaline is a short-acting hormone that is designed to stimulate your body for fight or flight in emergency situations. Your body is not designed to produce adrenaline for long periods of time or sustain that physiological state for any more than is absolutely necessary as it requires massive resources and enforces huge pressure on you. Were meant to cruise in fifth gear and not continually accelerate violently.

So when something goes wrong, serious damage results, both physically and emotionally. When you live with stress so chronic and perpetual that it causes a long-term physiological reaction, you eventually reach the end of the road and break down like a car in a traffic jam on a sunny day. And I broke down. I simply was too stressed, worried and burnt out that the constant excitation of my nervous system had ground me to a halt. My dad helpfully called me an emotional cripple.

I suffer incredibly acute and frequent anxiety. Bizarrely enough, so does every entrepreneur and self-made man/woman I know. Panic attacks, night terrors, nerves, jitters and irrational fear are every day things for me. It runs in my family, just as thyroid problems do. To start with, everyone thought my anxiety was my thyroid over-producing once again and making me totally mad. The symptoms are indeed similar, such as lack of sleep, weight loss, shaky hands and more. Its another strange illness where you don’t know you have it until someone points it out or medication brings you back to normal.

I often wake in the night suddenly and am flooded with intense adrenaline for no reason at all that I recognise. Panic attacks and night terrors make you wide awake and feel like you are having a heart attack. They last for 20mins or so that feels like hours, and are completely irrational as they have no apparent cause which confuses you. Its even stranger when you realise that the panic you are suffering is a delayed reaction to something that happened earlier in the day, and that even though you are over it by now, your body still needs to shake it out later. If you look at me closely you’ll see my hands always shake. I get scared and nervy very easily. I cant sleep until I’m exhausted, especially if its the first night in a place I don’t know.

But you’ll never know I suffer so intensely unless you are close to me because I wont show you. In fact I go to great lengths to cover it up, until now, writing this. Outwardly the impression most people get from me is that Im superbly confident, quirky, a very positive, a character, bold to a fault and charming. People say the things I do and say inspire and entertain them in equal measure. My speeches are a classic example. What you don’t see are the times that go with these successes where I am crying, shaking, curled up in a ball or unable to speak because I’m hyperventilating.

If only they knew what it takes to do it, and what it takes out of me.

When I tell people I have clinical depression, their reaction is generally one of surprise (not quite shock, but near) and disbelief. I usually get 10 minutes of why I shouldn’t be on antidepressants and why I dont really need them. Apparently you just need to get on with it, in the same way someone with a broken leg just needs to run down the road to feel better. I humour them at that point in time because I know they are too ignorant to know any more than what they read in the paper.

Its impossible to describe, as so many people say. No words could do it justice, as its a permanent state of being that never ends, unlike a cold or flu. You know those things will go after a few days and your body will fix itself. Depression has no end. It is a feeling of total despair that infects everything you do. It overwhelms you so powerfully that you have no enthusiasm or energy for anything and cant ever see anything ever getting better. Everything is a struggle. There is no way out, and no help. You cant see the good in anything or anyone. There is no point to anything. You feel heavy, slow and lost. All day, every day.

Fighting makes no difference. In fact, fighting in itself causes stress and makes things worse, which excites your nerves when they need time to recover like physical nerves do. Anxiety is so closely linked to depression that the same drugs are prescribed for both. You are touch-sensitive and panic at the smallest thing. Eventually you get so wound up that you become afraid and anxious about the anxiety itself, in the same way as it is impossible to sleep when you are worried about not being able to sleep. Only exhaustion and your own body shutting you down brings relief. Nature intervenes to prevent further harm.

I remember feeling devastated and being in total disbelief when I was first diagnosed. It was more than a shock, it was a damning verdict that I was weak, couldn’t cope and that I was a victim. Depression was something that happened to other people, not strong people like me who could handle anything and fight on. I was embarrassed, deeply ashamed and didn’t want anyone to know. Part of me arrogantly thought the doctor was entirely wrong and that Id find out in a few weeks once it had rectified itself that it was all a big misunderstanding and melodrama. He had told me I was one of the disabled, one of the weak minority who couldn’t handle it or whose system wasn’t strong enough to withstand normal life.

I suddenly realised I was a freak. I was one of them.

Antidepressants take several weeks to kick in, which is deeply disheartening because you want an instant cure right then and there. You want a painkiller, something that will get you back up on your feet immediately so you can soldier on with life’s everyday tasks. It feels pointless when nothing is happening, and it all just seems to get worse. Everyone around you reassures you that it will be fine and that you will feel a difference, but nothings happening, at the same time that you’re in complete denial that theres anything medically wrong.

Depression is a very strange beast, and one that is so badly explained or communicated that it goes untreated in so many people. My favourite author Scott Peck says that life consists of many instances of legitimate suffering, such as when we cant get what we want when we want it, or when we grieve the loss of a loved one. His argument is that all mental illness is due to our attempts to avoid that legitimate suffering. For him, natural and healthy depression results from when the subconscious mind knowing something before the conscious mind does, and the incongruity between the two subsequently causes the emotional instability.

In most instances, healthy depression resolves itself fairly quickly. We get over things pretty soon, as painful as a lot of them are. Sometimes it takes hours, sometimes a few weeks, depending on the severity of the incident and the ability of the person to process their emotions and deal with they are feeling. Often an incident is a trigger for a greater problem, and just as often there is no incident or direct trigger. A lot of the time, it just happens. Its as common as flu, and 6-10 million people in this country suffer it at some point in their lifetime. You will know dozens, and most dont even know they have it.

Depression becomes clinical and/or pathological when it lasts for more than it naturally should, for whatever reason.

Doctors have a list of symptoms of which you musty have at least 5 for anxiety and depression to be diagnosed, each being closely related to the other. Some of them are very strange and make a diagnosis easy, such as malaise, waking early in the morning (e.g. 4am), suicidal thoughts and/or behaviour, loss of appetite and others. In that case, its relatively easy to discover it and just getting on with it will clearly not help. The less open you are with your feelings, the harder it is to spot, but the more violent the crash when it comes. Its these extreme cases that make depression so deceptive. And it is very, very deceptive. Depression is a very subtle illness and not what you imagine.

Feeling depressed is something we all experience, and very normal. But clinical depression isnt the same as being depressed in the common sense of the phrase. As obvious as that sounds, most people still don’t manage to get it. It is typically a progressive illness that develops over a period of time, but can also come on suddenly. Sufferers don’t walk around with heads bowed, lie in bed crying all day and have razor blades half-embedded in their wrists. Remember that most people don’t realise they have it so they struggle on. Its not what you think or imagine, and isnt like the stereotype.

Depression is the entire lowering of your mental state, and you cant detect it as it mostly happens without you knowing. Everything appears normal until it gets too bad that you cant carry on as you are, just like any other illness. Because youre in the middle of it, you cant see it. Other people can, but you cant. It happens slowly so you cant work out where it came from. Only when the symptoms are relieved do the clouds clear and you see exactly how your view of the world has darkened. Just with alcoholism and drug addiction, you cant see it unless its so bad you cant function normally.

Its for that reason that I describe the illness I suffer as like wearing grey-tinted glasses.

Once my doctor had diagnosed me and Id been started on medication, my mum and I went for coffee. Out of the blue she told me she thought it was all to do with my nan, and never having grieved her death. It was ridiculous but it was true. I was talking with her normally when I noticed that tears were flowing down my face faster than I could mop them up, but I couldn’t feel anything.

I couldn’t sleep for 10 days as they were the 10 days leading up to a friends wedding we were due to go to. It was the first time I would have been in a church since my nan’s funeral when I was 10. Even 15 years later, the grief was there and had become pathological. Id never grieved as I had to support my mum and it just bubbled up to the surface, almost randomly, years later without warning. I was surprised until I learnt that some people in their 80s sometimes suffer from things they experienced in childhood. It was very, very weird indeed.

And there is one of the many paradoxes of depression, that you are totally emotionally numb. People often report that they feel frozen or without emotion. Its a warning sign, so get them help, fast. The first thing that immediately comes out when you thaw is anger.

The mind and body are integrally linked together, and we don’t understand how they interact very well at all. When you have a cold or flu, your head is groggy and you cant think properly, and when you come back from the gym you are more mentally alert. Depression causes dysphoria (the opposite of euphoria), and robs you of joy, hope and calm. Naturally that affects you physically as well, hence exercise often the number one thing that doctors recommend for self-treatment. You become so used to feeling the way you do that you no longer remember what it was like to feel content, and the vicious circle becomes harder and harder to break.

Clinical depression is recognised medical illness. That fact almost always goes forgotten by most people. The key to resolving fear and healing comes through education and understanding the disease. Understanding brings peace and helps you help yourself. The trouble is that when you suffer depression, the illness steals the faith and motivation you need to do that, like the insidious thief it is.

Biologically speaking, depression is characterised by lower than average levels of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, such as serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine. These chemicals are also the same ones involved with illegal drug abuse, hence why some scientists believe drug addiction is actually self-medication. We don’t understand the mechanism by which the mind and heart alter brain chemicals, but we know they do. Its a simple equation, but overlooked.

Suffering clinical depression means you don’t have enough neurotransmitters racing around. You are not weak, a freak or some kind of victim. That lack of chemicals is a symptom, not a cause.

The press is full of daily criticism for antidepressants, saying too many people are on them, children are being prescribed them too liberally and that they are the solution for everything. They claim doctors give them out on demand, they are dangerous to mental health and/or they dont work at all. There seems to be this overriding belief that they are unnecessary and dangerous. People claim they are prescribed as a cure, when they are no such thing. If you think these drugs cure depression and that doctors think that too, you are stupid, ignorant and ill informed.

All of it is bullshit. All of it. If youve never suffered depression, you need to shut the fuck up because you clearly know nothing about it and your ignorance is propagating the problem. Dont give your opinion, and dont assume you somehow know more than the medical community does. Its not a matter for argument or opinion, it is scientific fact.

Antidepressants are a recognised medical treatment for a recognised medical illness. They relieve the symptoms of depression by deliberately raising the levels of chemicals in the brain so they are back to a normal level. That increase causes changes in mood on a solely physiological basis. It is impossible to over-produce those chemicals, and antidepressants have no effect on those with normal levels of them. In short, they make life bearable whilst you get to the bottom of the problem, the root emotional cause of why youve become unwell. Depression recurs, so using antidepressants trains the brain to remember to produce the right amount of chemicals again. The longer you use them the first time it happens, the less likely it is to raise its ugly head again later.

And all come with side-effects. Another paradox of depression is that the tools you use to treat it often cause the symptoms of the illness itself. In fact, thats true of many treatments. Nothing is more ironic than reading a insert pamphlet explaining that your antidepressants can cause anxiety and depression as a side-effect. I reacted badly to almost all of them. Constant nausea was the worst feeling, but you learn quite quickly how important neurotransmitters control so much of what you do every day. Its a game of trial and error to find the right one. Again, only when those neurotransmitters fail to work, or work abnormally, do you notice them.

Yet so many people feel qualified to give counsel on the effectiveness and/or validity of antidepressants. They have little or no medical knowledge but somehow feel confident enough to tell you don’t need them, its dangerous to rely on them and how you should just carry on as normal and let it sort itself out. They couldn’t be more wrong or utterly insensitive. The press has the audacity to call them happy pills like they were a cheap diet supplement for your own emotional indulgence. These drugs have saved my life, and the lives of countless people I know. Its not for any of these people to judge or offer opinions on something they know nothing about.

Antidepressants are like paracetemol or aspirin. They relieve symptoms but do not cure the cause. When you understand that, you understand the context of how and why they are used. They take off your grey tinted glasses so you can see the colours of the world again and help you remember how things were before you put them on. Healing is a natural next step.

The UK is dreadful for its culture of suffering in silence and stiff upper lips. We cant seem to get the unwashed masses to understand that feeling crap once in a while is different to a major clinical condition that needs long-term specific treatment as its pathological (which means that is classified as a disease). We wouldn’t dare suggest that someone with tonsillitis should just talk their way through it, or those with broken limbs exercise them off, or even those with cancer just hop, skip and dance it off. Wed expect them to get help and be prescribed the relevant treatment, which would be surgery, drugs, a plaster cast or combination of therapy.

Depression is the same. It needs a combination of treatments to resolve. If you still think people should just get on with it, or cope like everyone else, then Im sorry to break it to you that you are officially a moron. Shape up and do some reading. Dont regurgitate what you read in the Daily Mail. That attitude is killing people and keeping them in slavery to unnecessary suffering, and does nothing for anyone but allow the fragile, naive feeling of some kind of perverse superiority and righteous indignation.

Personally, I don’t feel depressed or down, and am more alive than Ive ever been. I feel things now, as opposed to being frozen over for the last 20 year of my life. I don’t feel suicidal or want to self-harm, nor do I mope around, be miserable or crave attention and sympathy. Equally I’m not hysterically ecstatic or out of touch with reality. I’m not sedated, don’t write angst-ridden poetry, routinely write suicide letters or dress in black. I don’t want pity, hugs or you to understand how I feel or what this illness does to me. Life is the same more me as it is for everyone, I just have a set of complications that other people don’t.

There are good days, and there are bad days. The good days are ones where I am in a spirited frame of mind, positive about the present and future and am ready to give of myself in any way that I can. The bad days are really, really bad and very dark. I can be walking around admiring the beauties of nature, sampling it in all the 5 senses and recognising it’s wonder, but feel suicidal. I cant tell you why and I don’t understand it myself. Some days when I’m excited and happy my sole overriding urge is to destroy everything around me. I want to kill everyone in the near vicinity and smash the buildings down. Id never do it (obviously), but its the way I feel. Its irrational and unpredictable, and requires a special kind of self-control that I haven’t completely mastered yet.

Other days are just mediocre, where I feel my despair creeping up on me like a slow-spreading virus. The world gets slowly darker and things feel more and more hopeless. I start thinking about the bad and the cynical scenarios instead of the positive ones. I cant laugh as easily and I don’t have the emotional energy I need for social situations. I stop eating properly and my sleep is interrupted. I cant just relax, be happy with what I have and tick over normally, as the momentum of going forwards is the only thing that can distract me from the emptiness of standing still. I have to fight twice as hard as anyone else doing what Im doing.

On the strange days, I cant concentrate or think properly as I feel too vulnerable. Things and people don’t have a shine, they are just, there. I cant trust anyone not to hurt me and don’t have the strength to put on my brave face. I carry on regardless only as Ive become used to accepting the weakness the condition creates in me and know how to fight through it and hope that the way I feel has changed by the next morning. Only when I look back in hindsight do I realise what happened as I cant recognise it when I’m there in the moment.

Youll never know any of this. All you will see is my cheerful banter and flippant eccentricity. Im an obsessive bottler, in that I prefer to ignore things until they pass. But as Scott Peck so rightly pointed out, thats a bad template for doing things (a long-term strategy of the heart using short-term emotional tools to cope) and inevitably those things you bottle dont go anywhere and eventually accumulate to such a degree that you slowly become more and more unwell. And that is also my argument when it comes to cannabis causing mental illness. For me its not the drug, its that the drug numbs you and does the bottling for you. Push enough down, and you eventually break apart.

Whats helped me most is learning about the illness and understanding why, how and when it happens. Claire Weekes books on nerves literally saved my life. Ive read them time and time again and sometimes, like a lucky charm, just having them there is enough to calm me down and help me sleep. But I still don’t quite get it. If she were alive now Id give 50% of what I earn in this lifetime and it still wouldn’t repay her. Education is like switching a light on so the darkness disappears, and the darkness in the case of depression is the ignorance and stubborn opinion-hawking of those who aren’t qualified to express a legitimate view on the subject.

Im actually grateful for it, believe it or not. Getting up for every day is twice as hard as it is for anyone else. Having to push twice as hard means you become twice as strong. Touch sensitivity means you are so much more responsive than the average, and feeling your weaknesses more intensely means its easier to locate and address them. Discontent is a massive driving force behind so many things. The battle for me is not with the world, its with myself. I need to be careful about how I spend time with; as my composition doesn’t allow mood-hoovers or those whose misery acutely infects others. When the black clouds start to hover, I have to consciously fight to stay afloat, instead of treading water and gently paddling. That fight in me is violent and draining, and enough to knock me out for a day or two at a time.

But Im not scared of it now, and there will always be people who continue to talk about it in hushed tones or under their breath like its a taboo subject they daren’t mention for fear of judgement. But there are also people in the world who believe that having sex with a virgin will cure you of HIV. There is hope, and its such a wonderfully beautiful irony of life that we see hope only in the darkest of places and circumstances. Everyday life is so regular and mediocre that hope literally has no place. To have hope means you have faith, and faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. As a wise man said, most people live lives of quiet desperation. Hope shines in darkness, but its more important in the day to day humdrum than anywhere else.

Ive achieved everything in my life whilst suffering from depression. Ive fought through, worked hard and never let it stop me, despite it taking its toll.  The greatest lesson Ive learned is about getting up after you’ve fallen down. The concept of failure means nothing to me anymore, as its all just feedback. Living with depression means you have to learn to get up. The illness takes away your energy to stand and the reason for standing in the first place. The place you find is that very elusive so-called last inch of you that nothing can touch, harm or wipe out. Im the master of me, not the slave of neural biology.

Dont doubt for a second that depression means weakness, as Im more dangerous than ever simply because my nerves are armed up. The memories of the painful times only serve to remind me that I can survive, and the scars I have remind me that Ive been through worse. Im more cynical and suspicious, which means my agenda is hidden deeper than people know and its difficult to manipulate me when Im already considering the worst about someone. But suffering exists to generate wisdom, humble the complacent and help us to have compassion with others. The sting in the tail is also the magic wand that allows me a doorway to being more human.

I wrote all of this last weekend, when the black clouds had not only descended, theyd brought an entire hurricane with them for good measure. Time heals, and this life is just a ride so they tell me. If this is the worst the illness can do, it had better buck its ideas up as I just tore a hole right through it and I’m going to help others to do the same.