How philosophy helped me out of depression’s mire

As a teenager, I wrestled badly with depression. As is the case for many of us, I stumbled my way through an unhappy childhood filled with tension and sudden, dramatic shifts in direction.

With an alcoholic parent and another family member with severe mental illness, a knock on the door could always be bad news, or the gardaí.

As a child, I didn’t bring friends home for fear of what I might find there. You don’t want your friends to see your father drunk and shouting. So the family folds in on itself.

My parents separated when I was seven, and my father was sporadically around for a few years after that, but things at home were less catastrophic.

My mother told me later that when he had finally left the house, I said (aged seven) that I liked things better that way. She said I told her I wasn’t as scared, and the shouting had gone. She cried, although not in front of me.

By the time I hit my teens, I lacked basic skills that other kids had. I couldn’t socialise, was suspicious and unfriendly and completely lacked self-confidence.

I spent summers alone in my room, reading. My mother spent a lot of time caring for my grandmother. It didn’t occur to anyone that I could be depressed. I was, after all, just a child.

My mother tried everything she could think of to get me to spend more time with others my age, or take up a hobby that got me out of the house, and I’d try and I’d hate it.

Unhappy in school
I thought that school was the source of my unhappiness, and to a large extent, it was. Every moment spent there grated like the scratchy school jumper rubbing against the back of my neck.

There was no room for questions or for independent thought. I felt that we were treated like imbeciles, given no room to breathe, and painted a picture of the world that didn’t at all reflect what I would find when I left school.

The real world is so much brighter, less limited and more hopeful than it felt in a place where, at 16, you would be shouted at for wearing the wrong colour socks or told “Because that’s the way it is” when you asked a question.

It would be a few more years before any doctor would put a name to the awful feelings that filtered my reality, and another 10 years after that by the time I had done enough hard work to be able to manage them successfully.

Philosophy would help me to make sense of the world, and the people in it. Ultimately, it would give me the skills (along with seeking the appropriate help) to find a way out of depression’s mire. But it does still loom up there, like Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, threatening to descend sometimes.

When my mother died, almost nine months ago, I grieved. I am still grieving. It is difficult to describe the difference between depression and rational despair. When my mother died, the loss had me hunched around a sense of absence in my gut.

The pain was physical. The sense of how empty my life would feel without her and the injustice of her death at 58 robbed me of sleep or any form of comfort, physical or emotional.

I was sure that these agonising feelings would make that bell jar descend, blurring the world and leaving me trapped inside, breathing that stagnant, recycled air that makes the brain slow and despairing.

Utterly bereft
But it didn't happen. I was not apathetic about my life. I felt utterly bereft for months, and I still grieve, but I never stopped being invested in life.

In my teens, when I couldn’t sleep with what would later be described as insomnia from depression, my mother would read to me to stop my mind racing.

Usually, I would ask her to read poetry – Yeats and Heaney, with their crisp, comforting cadence.

Once, over a few nights, she held my hand and read me The Bell Jar. Last night, when I couldn’t sleep for thinking of her, I sat up and read it again. After a few hours, sleep came.