Living Around the Blues

When the people around you suffer.

by Anthea Rowan

Depression: A Perspective

I have accumulated - as bystander of more than three decades now - a semblance of understanding of Depression. As the outsider at any rate: the perspective, outside not in, isn't enough to warrant anything like the same point of view. I absolutely know that inside it is much colder and darker and more isolating than it is on the outside. Read More

Hope and Heroes

It's a long time since I wrote.

Depression steals words and light and inspiration.

Mum's has hung around for a year. A whole year. The longest in thirty years. Read More

Sadness isn't blue, it's Gray

Each morning I take a small, circuitous walk of my in-the-middle-of-nowhere-in-Africa garden (an anomaly: suburbia juxtaposed with sprawling, arid isolation). It's desiccating fast. Jaundiced grass thin and dry and spitefully sharp against bare feet; termite tunnels crumble where I tread, meringue fragile. The dogs follow me. Read More

Depression the Conversation Killer

I think the silence is the worst.

My mother has been ill for almost seven months.

Every now and again, just occasionally, a small bright shard of hope pierces the gloom and illuminates her day and lifts her conversation just a little so that she says ‘oh, I'm not too bad', when I ask, ‘how are you ma?'

Usually though she says, ‘I'm not too good'. Read More

Depression's a Bitch

I suppose I think - I hope (fingers tightly white-crossed) - that if I write about it, Depression won't bite.
Depression's a bitch. A big black stalking dog with swallowing jaws and a stealthy tread.
It's been a part of my life for longer than it hasn't.
A part of Mum's for longer than she cares to remember. Read More

Remembering to Pack the Salt

Tomorrow we head out of our African outpost on a roadtrip.

And so I am packing a picnic, to sustain and distract and keep us going during the first of three days hard driving. Read More

Depression: the New Black?

Dr Michael Shooter worried it might become a Designer Disorder.

Depression.

Sorry to bang on about this.

(It's why an editor at the Telegraph once dismissed my CV with a derisive, ‘is depression all this bloody woman ever writes about'. Read More

Out of Mind

I swim. The water is translucent. It wasn't a week ago; it was peagreen soup sludge and warm when I got home after a month away. I Mind the water when it's peagreen sludge and warm. I prefer it gin-clear, the depths illuminated by sunshine, the surface brittle as a mirror. Read More

It's back. Again. Depression the Great Returner

Last week's snow has melted. The rain that lashed down most of Saturday and all of Sunday has vanished. I draw back curtains to a dawn smoked pink with lifting mist. An English spring sky spray-painted egg-shell blue and sun that streams through the window forging the frame gilt. Read More

Casting Shadows

She is irked on the telephone. Irritated by a friend. She is frustrated by things which would not normally frustrate her. She has lost the impetus to do the things she ordinarily does without missing a beat. Then she has a bad night. And gives up on the following day: ‘I think I'll just have a lazy day: I'm so tired'. Read More

What Shakespeare knew about Sleep

My cyber silence has been wrought of two things. Busy-ness, which is good, and Insomnia, which is not. Read More

Happy-ness Is Busy-ness

My mother had a kitchen soap dish once; it read ‘Happiness is Busyness''.

Trite. But true. I wonder, now, who gave it to her? Read More

In Celebration of Insanity

Jeanette Winterson writes in praise of the crackup.

And I am reminded of a year-long project when it seemed imperative to celebrate the creativity born of madness. (Or the madness born of creativity?). Read More

Creating Gaps. Closing Doors.

I think that my mum's illness, its sly and stealthy onset so that at first we could believe what she told us - I'm just having a bad day - coincided with the collapse of her role as mother. Read More

Hiding Cracks

Imagine a table magnificently set for dinner with the finest bone china and cut glass, the most brilliant silver, each place laid with thoughtful precision, every knife and fork and spoon at exactly the right angle, imagine a vase of beautiful flowers neatly arranged as a centerpiece. Read More

Roots and Wings

My son was eighteen last week.

My eldest daughter begins at boarding school next week.

Small pieces of me are breaking away; splinters of myself.

My mother remembers the feeling well. The loud fluttering of young wings that faded to silence when we'd all gone. Gone to school. To college. Away to work.

Gone. Read More

Shhh ... Whisper it ... She's well.

My mother is well.

Right now she is feisty, happy, fulltothebrimbursting with joie de vivre and laughter and energy and positivity and smiles.

I'm always afraid to say it out loud: my mum's well.

Afraid I will tempt fate. Afraid that Depression will overhear me, misinterpret my delight as complacency. And clamber back in. Read More

Family Skeletons

Somebody I know, somebody I know well, somebody quite close to me, said, ‘You know: you shouldn't write about your mother's illness the way you do; you shouldn't do your dirty laundry in public'.

Dirty laundry? Dirty laundry! My Mum?

Oh please.

Everybody's got family skeletons. Family skeletons locked up in cupboards. Read More

What does Madness look like?

My mother is not a candidate for madness. Let me make that perfectly clear: she looks too normal. Read More

Loneliness

That's what it does to you sometimes.

Loneliness.

It messes with your head.

And that's what I am. Often. Lonely. An isolation borne of my geography. Read More

Waving Not Drowning

Now, now in high blue white African winter (a misnomer, surely? winter? in Africa?) the pool is brittle blue cold. The sun dances a waltz on the bottom, holding hands with the water. Shifting. Swaying. It'll slow and then stand still when I turn the pump off. Read More

The Dangers of heeding Good Diet advice

Mum was once persuaded by a nutritionist (who I thought was too fat, given her profession) that her diet was the root cause of her vulnerability to Depression. Read More

Blue-Gened Girl?

I am lucky: I grew up with a mother who suffered, still sometimes suffers, from Depression.

No really; I am. Lucky. Read More

No Woman No Cry

Depression affects more women than men. Fact. Twice as many more. Every year an estimated 12 million women fall prey to the illness and one in eight will succumb at least once in her life time. Perhaps twice that again: one in four. Read More

Chin Up!

A memory. Read More

All in the Name

Mum and I are in the car, I am driving. She is well. It means her tongue is not tied by Depression's paralyzing lethargy.

‘What do you think of the word, anyway', I ask, ‘of the word of depression?'

It's not big enough, Mum says simply. Read More

Snake Oil and Wrinkle Therapy

Botox Appears to Ease Depression announces a newspaper headline. The doctor who made the claim observes, "Maybe the frown is not just an end result of the depression; maybe you need to frown in order to be depressed."

Is that all it takes then? To lift a mood so catastrophically compromised it can result in hospital admission? Read More

Depression Does Not Discriminate

Depression descends by icy degrees. It tiptoes in.

When Mum first got sick it wasn't as if she was pitched head first into gloom overnight. So that one day she was there and the next she wasn't. (Depression steals the very essence of a person so that the one you knew - that familiar smiling, dependable, rock-solid soul - morphs into somebody you've never met before). Read More

One in four, one in six, one in ten ...?

By the year 2020, Depression will, according to the World Health Organization and on account of high suicide rates, be the world's second biggest killer after heart disease and ahead of road accidents and Aids. Read More