Free Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression by Sally Brampton

and my skin was so dry I was almost bathing in moisturiser. I felt constantly low and depressed but I was working too hard and had a small child who needed me. I was ripped in half by guilt. Of course I was depressed and tired.
    ‘It’s your age,’ a locum GP said. ‘You’re probably menopausal.’
    He was a young man, with ears that stuck out and were so red and shiny it looked as if he scrubbed them daily.
    ‘I am in my forties,’ I said with as much outraged dignity as I could muster in the face of his blank, young indifference.
    He did not look up from his notes. ‘Exactly.’ His eyes flickered across the pages. ‘And you have a small child and you work.’ He looked over at me as if to say, what did you expect?
    Eventually, my own GP put me on a small dose of thyroxin, 50 mgs a day. ‘To see if it has any effect,’ she suggested. My body temperature shot up. The weight fell off. My energy returned. But still, I couldn’t throw off the mood, the low feeling that seemed always to envelop me like a cold, grey blanket.
    When, eventually, I was taken into hospital with severe depression, they trebled the dose of thyroxin, to 150 mgs a day. The maximum dose is 200 mgs a day. The amount I had been taking was far too low, even though the blood tests my GP had done indicated that the levels of available thyroxin were back to normal.
     
     
    My ruinous love affair continued. We fell more and more in love, ran towards each other and away again. We were as intimate with each other, and as estranged from each other, as it is possible to be. We did not see each other for weeks on end and then came together in cataclysmic passion.
    Tom grew more and more miserable, until he was almost speechless with pain; handling his difficulties by shutting down emotionally or disappearing for days. I knew he could not bear to leave his children or break up the family even though, as he said, the relationship that should have pinned it all together was already broken. Only the surface remained intact. I did not want him to leave his children but I knew, too, that I could not bear him to leave me. He had to and so we agreed to part, again, only to come back together when the pain and longing grew too much for either of us to bear. And so it went on.
    The crying grew worse. I was scarcely sleeping. I started to cry in unexpected places, at inconvenient times. One day, I cried at work. I was mortified. I never cry at work. I decided that I was exhausted, and took a week off. It was the end of June. I spent the days walking around London, wearing dark glasses, with tears streaming down my face. I walked for hours, every day. Looking back, I see that I was trying to walk my way out of depression.
    I could not see colour, I could see only in black and white. I thought it was strange, but not unduly so.
    Later, I found a quote from the American humorist Art Buchwald describing his depression: ‘Everything was black. The trees were black, the road was black. You can’t believe how the colours change until you have it. It’s scary.’
    And I thought, so I’m not the only one.
    At the time, I paid no attention to my monochrome world. Everything was strange. My life was strange. There were no fixed points left.
    After that week of near total collapse, I went back to work. I sat through meetings, flew to Milan and Paris, tried to keep my staff inspired and lively. An editor is nothing if they cannot give inspiration, leadership, a sense of belonging. A magazine is nothing without people; without the people who make it, it does not exist. My job was to keep those people happy and anyway I had grown inordinately fond of them. I said nothing about my own misery. I hoped, passionately, that it did not show.
     
     
    I felt so desperate that I asked a friend who knew about such things to recommend a therapist. Back then, I was not a person who did therapy, wanted therapy, talked therapy. I used to rather despise the notion, believing it to be the