Blog 23 - Gary Speed, depression and how people can help.

I'm writing this having just heard the terrible news about Wales manager Gary Speed committing suicide in the early hours of this morning aged just 42.

If there is one word that dominates the news reports and discussions it is shock. Every friend, colleague, pundit and fan seems dumbfounded by the news.

Gary Speed is a man everyone liked. With his good looks attracting a lot of female attention, as a young Leeds star he could easily have become a "Spice Boy" like so many others and allowed the lifestyle and money of a Premiership Footballer become more important to him than actually playing the game. But he didn't. He gave 100% week in-week out and served every club he played for with honour and commitment, and he was a man that every neutral fan had respect for as a result.

He seemed to have it all, a lovely family, financially untroubled, a successful playing career, and now a promising spell as manager of his country, the highest honour one can be given in football. He had it all. So why would he want to end it?

I don't know, because I'm not Gary Speed, but as someone who has suffered with depression and been to some very low places, I can certainly see how the seemingly perfect life could have become more of a prison than a paradise for someone with depression.

With everything Gary Speed had going for him it's clear that in life he has made some very good decisions. As a manager that's his job, and as a player it was one of his strengths. So when you spend all day every day making good decisions in your professional life and in your personal life, what happens when you find that the right move still leaves you feeling hollow and empty every time?

This is what depression does. It strips the joy away from everyday life. It makes the positive seem bland and uninspiring (at best). So if the right moves make you feel like shit, what's the alternative? Deliberately make the wrong moves? Run away? Quit and start again from scratch so you can do it all again? When you are a father, a husband and someone shouldering the burden of a nations footballing hopes it isn't that simple. If you make the wrong decisions those around you suffer. You can't and won't run away from those you love, no matter how much you may want to be alone. And you can't quit as manager of a national football team because all you want is some peace and you'll be hounded by the press forever and a day. You're trapped. You're on a treadmill that you can't get off of. Logically the best thing you can do is just to carry on as normal but when every fibre of your body is screaming for rest and change, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Speed's very success could have been his biggest downfall.

Gary Speed, due to his fame and position, has today become a symbol of all that's hidden about depression, but his situation is replicated by normal, everyday people every single day of the year. The challenges are different, but the reasoning will usually be the same. People who feel desperately unhappy, but who feel powerless to change their situation. I feel like this regularly to varying degrees, but have never, even at my lowest point, acted on it. However given how prevelant depression is, it's amazing that statistically more people don't.

So how can we stop this happening to the next Gary Speed? The next person who is backed into a corner with only one way out? The answer, however unhelpful, is that you can't. Depression is an illness and whilst it varies greatly in seriousness and symptom, there is no cure. You may feel better for a while, you may consider yourself "cured" even, but once a person suffers from depression it will always be part of them. Something you always have to remain aware of. And people will always be pain and a lot will kill themselves. There's no magic formula.

The one area that can be addressed is that of changing attitudes towards people with depression. When I was first diagnosed with depression my first reaction was to keep it to myself. I was ashamed by what seemed like a terrible weakness for a bloke in his early twenties to be suffering from. I thought it was only something for people who had been through a massive trauma in their life, and that my feelings were fraudulent. Surely I was just being a wimp? My sunconscious was sulking about something and wanted to hide away from the real world for a while like a child. It took me a long time and a lot of lost sleep and mental strain to acknowledge the validity of my condition.

Imagine how much more difficult it is to accept for someone who has never experienced depression. If your only contact with depression is that someone at work buggers off on full pay for months at a time with it whilst you have to come in every day and pick up their slack, then your opinion of it is not going to be good. The invisible disease that anybody can claim to have.

I think as a society, we do accept that some people suffer from mental illness, but that we have all experienced one or two people who claim to have depression but seem to be fine. Depression is regarded with the same skepticism as ADHD. Some kids may genuinely need meds, but every naughty kid at school these days gets told he has some vague disease because it's easier for parents to blame illness rather than a lack of parenting. Hence, for every 10 people who claim to have depression, we assume 7 or 8 are just making excuses. As someone with depression, you feel this skepticism acutely, often because you still feel this way yourself to a large extent.

If I found coming to terms with depression hard, imagine what Gary Speed had to deal with. Football is an old-school male community, with embedded attitudes when it comes to health. The team is everything. The individual must put the team before himself. He must play through the pain barrier, fight to his last breath, leave everything personal in the dressing room and live for the moment with his teammates. A national football manager who quits because of depression? Unthinkable. A large proportion of the country, and more importantly the footballing community would see it as tantamount to treason. You don't quit a job like that. You're honoured to have been asked in the first place you ungrateful sod. And depression? Well just cheer up a bit, there's nothing wrong with you. I doubt very much that Gary Speed told many people in the game about his illness, which would have added to the pressure he was already feeling.

I can only hope that Gary Speed's tragedy can change this attitude. That people see a model professional and a successful man and now understand that one man's perfect life can be another man's prison cell, and that depression is a potentially lethal illness and not a weak persons laziness. And I hope that the next Gary Speed feels like they can ask for help, or a way out, and that more people will now understand rather than turn on them in ignorance.

I feel for his family and friends, but most of all I feel for him, and the incredible pain he must have been feeling.

RIP Gary Speed.

Blog 9: I'm mental. No really..... I'm proper mental.

Every day at work I speak to person after person claiming various things. Some things are true, and an awful lot arn't, but one of the most heard claims is that someone is suffering from Stress, Depression and Anxiety.

These are probably the least believed statements by me and many of my peers, partly because they are so prevalent that by law of averages a large percentage must be bullshit, and partly because claiming stress, depression and anxiety is relatively easy to do and it's a ticket to convenient benefits.

We arn't there to make a judgement on whether these people are genuine or not and in fact it makes no odds to us whether they're faking it. But the underlying fact remains: as soon as someone says Depression, most of us think of it as a quasi- illness. I'm no better than anyone else in this respect. I disbelieve the stories, I assume a lot of them are lying through their teeth. (On a side bar, I don't believe 90% of ADHD claims either but don't even get me started on that bullshit...)

The thing is I should be more sympathetic than most. If anyone should give people the benefit of the doubt in this situation it's me. Because I'm a proper mental. I suffer from stress, anxiety and depression and have for the past decade, and for years beforehand without confronting it.

I don't speak about it, other than to a select few people. This is mainly because most people (like me) assume that if someone says they have depression it either means they're preparing the ground to go on a long stretch of sick leave at work, or they're looking for a big dose of sympathetic attention, neither of which I want people to think about me. So I keep it quiet.

But now I'm here blurting it out for all 4 people who may just bother to read my blog and one or two of them may not know this about me already and may even tell other people too. Why?

The reasons I want to make it a bit more public are twofold. Firstly, occasionally you find out that someone else you know suffers with depression and has been really battling against it at a difficult time but has never spoken to you about it because they, like me, keep it to themselves. This is frustrating because when I've been suffering it's really helpful sometimes to talk to someone else. Not a big girly blubfest, but just to mention it to someone and feel free to talk about it can be very therapeutic. Fortunately I have some good friends in this respect, and I've been lucky enough to be there for other people. But there are times when good friends have been struggling and I could have helped but we were both playing the non-admittance game, and to be quite honest it's shit. Secondly, I'm too old to be embarrassed by this kind of stuff anymore. I am what I am, and I am who I am. And whether I like it or not this is part of me so I'm not going to bother keeping it quiet. If anyone has a problem with it tough shit. If you know me and you think any less of me, I don't care.

I first got diagnosed 10 years ago. Scared the shite out of me at first because I had no idea what was going on. I'd just moved into a new flat, a few weeks later had met Kerry and a few weeks later she'd moved in with me. Happy days, or should have been. But work was just beginning to turn shite at the time and with all the changes going on I think everything came to a head. I had a week where I simply couldn't function. I was exhausted and run down. I presumed I had a fluey thing and went to bed, expecting that after a day or two, I'd feel better, get up and back to normal. But that didn't happen. And so I went to the doctor who said it sounded like a virus and signed me off for another week. And than another. And then on the fourth week he ran through some questions. "Do you ever..." this, and "How do you feel when..." that. Then he asked me where I worked and when I said "Norwich Union" he just laughed and chucked a truckload of pills at me and wrote me a sicknote for work which said "Depression" and I had to suck it up and deal with it, because I was going to have to hand it in at work and become one of those people that I'd always been suspicious and skeptical of. I went back to work, relieved that I wasn't dying of some mystery disease, but baffled by the fact that this was what I had because I'd never thought of myself as being someone who would get depression. I didn't think I fit "the profile". But I went back in, rightly or wrongly, and those initial four weeks are still the only time I've ever had off sick from work with depression.

It really didn't sit well with me, not just immediately, or for the next few months. I developed horrendous panic attacks which would show up for no reason and which would render me a sweating, breathless lunatic. I remember having lunch with Kerry one day and suddenly saying "sorry, have to go" before dashing out the door because I thought I was going to pass out if I stayed where I was for a second longer. Proper fucking nutcase stuff.

For months I kept going over it in my mind: how did I get here? I thought I was mentally strong, now I'm a fucking basketcase. What triggers are there that set me off? Surely there's something I can do to get rid of this? Some way to put this bloody genie back in the bottle. But there wasn't. And after a long time I realised this and came to terms with the fact that it wasn't going away.

It's with me for life now. My Black Dog (If it's good enough for Churchill, another mentalist, who coined the phrase, then it's good enough for me). And I'm fine with that. I can manage it. I have down periods, and then I have ok periods. I still sometimes have panic attacks which I keep quiet about because nobody wants to see a big sweating freaky mess so I'll keep them to myself. But otherwise it's just a normal part of life. A pill a day keeps the total wobblies away.

But I can cope. I've been lucky to have Kerry who's been amazing, putting up with my madness, my freakouts, and my sometimes overwhelming snappiness and melancholy. Love that woman. I've also had various friends, some who are non-mentals, some who are up-front mentals and some who are closet mentals who've helped me and who continue to do so.

Anyway, I've decided that whilst I'm definitely not making a song and dance about it, I'm moving from the closet out into the open. I'm a strong proud mental man and I don't care who knows it. And hopefully if anybody else is where I was 10 years ago and needs to talk about it, they'll feel they can with me.