I should have seen it coming. I had been through so many life changes in such a short time that I should have known that it would have some effect on me. I had left a highly stressful job to become a househusband. We had moved house and moved to a new part of the country. I had started trying to put together a writing career and was just getting used to the idea of my work being rejected on a regular basis. Angela, my wife, had started a new job. My two eldest children had started a new school and I was left at home in a new house, in a new town with my eighteen-month old son for company.

The first thing I noticed was how hard I was finding sleeping at night. Now I'm a bit of an insomniac at the best of times but this was ridiculous. It was taking me hours to get to sleep and I was waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to nod off again. I became a regular viewer of the sort of sub-standard television that they provide for night watchmen. I became tired and irritable.

The next thing that, in retrospect, I can say was a symptom of my depression was a growing paranoia. If people were too busy to speak to me, then they obviously were fed up with me. I became, in my perception, the centre of the whole universe. Everything revolved around me. People were no longer independent entities but bit players in the drama that was my life. They had no role of their own, no private worries or concerns. Everything revolved around me. Looking back, this must have been a dreadful; burden for friends and family to put up with. At that point, however, I was keeping things to myself.

The worst element of my depression was this overwhelming feeling of sadness. Nothing could cheer me up. There was a heavy weight hanging around my neck that I just couldn't put off me. I would escape into my office and just lie there as wave after wave of negative emotion swept over me. The children bore the brunt of my anger and frustration at this point. I would shout at them for no apparent reason and storm off to my place of solitude. I spent a long time crying for myself.

I decided that I needed to see the Doctor. I wrote down my feelings at that time:-

Being sad
So what does it feel like to be sad?

I can wake up happy, ready to face the day. Then something happens. The wrong sort of post arrives, one of the children winds me up or something I'm doing does not go to plan.

That's when it starts.
It rolls in and creeps all over me. My stomach churns. I can't think in a logical manner. My world becomes very 'me-centred'. I begin to block myself off from others and blame them for all manner of problems that trouble me.

I feel heavy, leaden - unable to move.
My thoughts become heavy too.

I repeat to myself: 'no one understands me'. How can I explain myself? What can I do to impress upon people the urgency that I feel? The agitation? The anger? The hopelessness?

Although not suicidal, I understand the victim's desire for others to take them seriously. No one believes you when you're down. You want to snap out of it but you can't. You try and change things for yourself but you can't. You want to do things to make it feel better but nothing seems to work.

You know that, by your attitude, you're making it worse for others. You know you're hurting those who are closest to you but you can't help yourself and, in your 'me-centred' world, you just don't care. And so it rumbles on. You just hope that it ends soon and you can get back to normality but you don't expect it to.

I gave a copy to my doctor and after a short discussion, he diagnosed that I was suffering from depression. He said that he wanted to attack the depression in one of three ways and wanted my input into the choice of treatment. I could either try a few counseling sessions or start a course of medication or a combination of the two. The medication that he was suggesting was Prozac. He explained that it was non-addictive, which was one of my concerns, and that it seemed to work for the majority of people. He explained that, for whatever reason, my brain was being starved of Serotonin and that the Prozac would return the level to normality.

I agreed to the medication but I also said that I would like an opening session with a counselor. This proved to be unhelpful. During the hour-long session I felt that this was not what I wanted. I went into great detail (after all we were talking about my favourite subject - me!) but I didn't feel the process was having a great deal of benefit for me. I decided, at the end of the session, not to do anymore at that point in time.

It took a while for the Prozac to kick in. After a few weeks, the days of feeling sad became fewer and fewer. I began to get a more balanced view of the world. It suddenly became less me-focused again. Many people refer to Prozac as a 'happy' pill. I think that I would rather refer to it as a 'normality' pill. Granted, I became rather tired when taking the pill and I did suffer from the occasional hot flush, but overall I was more than pleased with the effect that the medication had on me.

I still have bad days. I still have periods of time where I feel sad. Yet they are probably no more frequent than they are for the vast majority of the population. A year on and I am still taking Prozac. I will be coming off them soon. I have no regrets about taking them. They have helped me survive.

About the author:  Andy Walsh is a househusband and writer living in Cumbria in the UK. He writes novels, short stories, articles and poems.
(c) Andy Walsh 2001

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