Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression by Sally Brampton Read Free Book Online Page A

to hug me. I am still on the floor.
    Tossing her handbag aside, she sits on my bed. ‘Has something happened?’ she asks. Her voice is gentle with concern.
    I duck my head, suddenly conscious that I am wearing the same, stained leggings and sweater, that my hair is matted from sleeping, my face shiny with half-dried tears and that the circles under my eyes look like bruises, purple and violent.
    ‘Nothing.’ I shake my head, ‘Nothing has happened.’ And it’s true. Nothing at all has happened in my world that day. Just me. I have happened.
    ‘Just a bad day then,’ she says.
    I nod mutely. I have summoned her from her work, brought her all this way to tell her nothing. It is unforgivable. I am unforgivable.
    ‘I can’t do this, Sarah. I can’t do this any more.’ I mean, stay alive. I can’t stay alive if this is what living is. I start to cry. She lays her hand gently on my head, strokes my hair. She is used to me crying by now. She knows there is nothing she can do.
    I wrap my arms around myself, to stop the pain, to stop the tears. My whole body is racked with it; I am shaking with tears. The monster is at my throat.
    ‘If I was an animal,’ I sob, ‘they’d shoot me, to put me out of my misery.’
    ‘No, Sal,’ she says, ‘they wouldn’t. Really, they wouldn’t.’
    I look up at her face, at the terror and the love in it.
    It still makes me cry, to think of it now.
     
     
    She told me later that she always used to cry, when she left me. She used to drive home, tears pouring down her face, saying the same thing out loud, over and over again. ‘This is not life threatening. She is not going to die. My best friend is not going to die.’
    I imagine her driving through the dark streets, crying, chanting aloud to keep the bogeyman away.

Self-Absorption and Symptoms
     
    Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind .
    Henri-Frédéric Amiel
     
    Before I became ill, I had no idea that severe depression has definite symptoms just like any other illness. Nor do most people. And that’s where the stigma around mental illness becomes dangerous. Our unwillingness to discuss it openly creates a damaging ignorance. We know the obvious symptoms of physical illness and seek help accordingly but we rarely take our emotional temperatures or check the balance of our mental health.
    Usually, we only act when things become too difficult to bear. By then, we are sometimes sicker than we need have become, and often too lost to help ourselves. Many depressives say they find a second episode of the illness easier to deal with simply because they know the symptoms and get help earlier.
    As with most other illnesses, if the early warning signs are caught early enough and treated accordingly, it may be possible to avert the full-blown disorder. Or, at least, to head off some of its most devastating consequences. A reactive (as in a reaction to life events) or moderate depression is much easier to treat than major depression which, once it is present, can assume an independent, violent life of its own. Nobody quite knows why.
    The origins of depression are both vague and complex. The symptoms, however, are not and it is as well for us all to know them, so we can seek help sooner rather than later.
    So here they are, as defined by The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM—IV) which is used by most psychiatrists and mental health experts to diagnose depressive disorder.
    Mild to moderate depression includes the first two symptoms and at least one other. Severe depression is the first two symptoms and at least five others. For depression to be diagnosed, the symptoms would occur together and for at least two weeks without significant improvement.
     
Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., I feel sad or