A Beginner's Guide to Beating the Blues

Editorial

Do you find it difficult to sleep? Do you find it difficult to eat? Do you find it difficult to answer mindless questionnaires like this one? Well then. Sugar plum. Let’s see if we can’t reach under your bed clothes and help yank you back into the big, bad world.

Statistics describing the extent of depressive illness are astonishing. Data suggests that one in every five Australians will suffer from this ill. Available reports suggest that more than 12 million prescriptions a year are written for anti-depressive medication across the nation. The World Health Organisation has declared depression a major health concern of the future. All of these facts are, in short, depressing.

On the plus-side, there’s such a burgeoning awareness of depression, particularly in Australia, that help can be found with minimal effort. Let me amend that – with reduced effort. Just a decade ago, many GPs would recommend that patients “snap out of it”. Now, a scheme called the GP Mental Health Treatment Plan provides better, faster, stronger Medicare subsidised assistance. This scheme is designed to help you ease, not snap, out of it.

There is, of course, no snapping out of the blues. It’s a slow, often exhausting climb out of that abyss. But, believe me when I tell you from the top of the hole, it’s an ascent that you will achieve. First things first, though. Go to the doctor. No. Don’t screw up your nose. Go to the doctor. Make an appointment. Turn up. Tell the doctor how you feel. In the case that you are too depressed to bother coming up with descriptors, here are some my depressed self prepared earlier: despondent, worthless, tired, inconsolable, irritable, unambitious, shiftless, smelly and unloved.

Then, tell the doctor you need a Mental Health Treatment Plan. Tell them that you want to speak to someone in detail about your listless condition. Yes. I know. You don’t actually want to talk to anyone. But, my self-loathing comrade, I’m afraid you must. It’s that internal monologue of yours that’s feeding your illness every minute. Some external dialogue is the remedy.

These days, your GP can send you to a psychologist for a chat and have Medicare foot the best part of the bill. My shrink, for example, ends up costing me twenty bucks a session. This may seem like a lot. However, when we compare this to the ongoing costs of Nick Cave downloads, books of poetry by Emily Dickinson and the very real possibility that we’ll be too depressed to ever work for money again, it’s a snip.

There are, of course, many who swear by medications such as the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) family that includes Prozac and Zoloft. You may wish to entertain the idea of drugs; particularly if you’re eyeing off the knife-block and humming Leonard Cohen. But, I’d say, approach every decision in the management of your illness at a speed you can maintain. Which, as we both know, is just marginally faster than a dial-up turtle. Talk to a GP, talk to a psychologist and then, perhaps, talk to a psychiatrist about the possibility of medication. Why rush it? You’ve spent your entire life digging this pit of terrifying gloom. Take a few weeks to decide on the best sort of ladder.

I need you to remember a few things on the trip back up. You are absolutely entitled to feel like this; life can after all, be fairly trying. You are permitted to make changes to your life; even if you feel the great, crushing weight of responsibility to others, these others are usually very eager to see you take the turns that you need to get better. You are a physical thing and so is your illness. Your depression may feel as though it’s a powerful thing beyond the authority of the everyday. However, the things that you consume, the work that you do and the life that you have lived all do their bit to rob you of contentment.

You are not being self-indulgent or weak. You are not beyond help. You are not alone. I wish you all the vigour and speed and wisdom in the world. The world. It’s actually pretty decent once you get back there.

Helen Razer, Citysearch