His was a name with which I had a vague familiarity; that said, I did have to google him on signing into facebook to find some 30 or so of my friends had posted statuses referring to his unfortunate death… and for those who still have no idea who he was, here is a link to more information.
This is not another blog of “what a great loss to football”; there are ample tributes around the web from people to whom his passing meant a great deal more than it did to me. I want to discuss the way this has highlighted the subject of depression and mental health in general.
Living with someone with severe depression, I know how difficult a condition it is to manage on a day-to-day basis. People who have never encountered it simply cannot understand and I often find myself engaged in arguments following the line of “If he just got on with his life he would soon cheer up!” – If it were that simple, would there really be the need for such a huge amount of different medications? Surely if there were a way to make all sufferers of depression better without turning them into drug-zombies it would be used quite prolifically? Not only that, but in our case there is no life for him to get on with, so where do you begin?
I am sure it is another of those postcode-lottery issues, but mental health provision on the NHS is in our experience seriously lacking – and certainly something which needs more attention. I know that during a particularly dark phase here, the hub-person told our doctor he was feeling like ending it all and was told he could be referred to the mental health team, but that there was a waiting list of 18 months… what is the point in a system that has people waiting that long? For the most part, talking to a doctor about such things means you have already suffered quite some time; no-one just wakes one morning feeling a little down and goes straight to the doctor, do they? And in our case, the decision was “Don’t bother”; hub’s attitude at that point being by the time he was seen he’d either be over it or would have made the decision to end things.
A few years ago now a friend of my first-born discovered the body of her father after he had committed suicide. I remember at the time the hub-person spoke about how selfish an action it was; in spite of also being close to the same state of desperation himself. I remember feeling anger at that time, unable to understand how he could see how selfish the other dad had been but not how his actions were much the same. Of course, years down the line I understand that selfishness and self-involvement are as much a part of the condition, but it takes a long time to come to this realisation and few people are able to stick by the sufferer long enough to reach a point of fully understanding all the symptoms and indicators.
This is a topic I really could harp on about forever, but since this really is not the place for such seriousness I will close on this note:
I do not want my readers here to think I am setting myself up as some sort of saint, being fully accepting of hub’s condition and treating him with kindness and patience. I am a bitch. I am aware of that. Whilst I understand that his actions are a result of his symptoms, I still hold resentment for his ability to spend his life in bed; summoning food at will, demanding assistance with dressing and washing, having no responsibility for housework, childcare or finances; when he tells me to hide the key for his medications, part of me thinks “Why should I?” – although, of course, I do!
But anyway; just for a few days at least, the world is thinking about how people like the hub cope with life; about how hard it is to get through each day when you don’t know that you want to face tomorrow. People who are aware of their own condition are able to say “actually, I could be that person – maybe I need help?”
And if off the back of such tragedy, just one person is able to find their way out of the darkness or help another to manage their condition, then surely this means such a high-profile death of one so popular has not been in vain.
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