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‘I wanted to die’

Jean Hannah Edelstein was only a child when depression struck. Now she believes she owes her life to ‘happy pills’

It is the autumn of 1995: I am 14 years old. Each morning I am meant to get out of bed at 5.45 to catch the school bus, which leaves 50 minutes later. But this hasn’t happened in weeks. Instead, I have a new routine. My alarm goes off like a piercing scream; I unplug it and smash my face into my pillow. I am dizzy with fear and can only move in a slow and laboured manner, as if the air in my room has been thickened with gelatin. I listen for the sound of my father’s footsteps. He bangs on the door.

“Time to get up,” he says, cautiously.

“F**k off,” I reply, feeling alarmed that I’m saying this to my father.

He sighs and goes to get my mum. Her approach is softer.

“Darling,” she says, standing next to my bed, stroking my hair, ” you really have to get going now. I’ll make you some tea.”

“Fuck you,” I say, pushing her away, burrowing deeper under my duvet. I can hear her crying in the hall. I start the first of my own daily floods of tears.

I wail for 90 minutes; the bus rolls past. My father pushes and persuades me into his car. Upon arrival, the crying starts again. Dad parks the car and tries to cajole me into going to my lessons.

He is gentle, persuasive. Yes, I think, I can do this, I can go to school. But then I put my hand on the door handle and am overwhelmed with the conviction that if I step out of the car I will die. After an hour or so of the back and forth, Dad gives up and takes me home. Or I gather all of my strength and shuffle into my English lesson, telling my friends my face is swollen because of hay fever.

It all started with the occasional fleeting thought when I was 13 - something would go a little bit awry, and I’d find myself thinking “I should kill myself”. My favourite trousers aren’t clean? I should kill myself. I have a difficult geometry proof on my maths homework? I should kill myself. Gradually, over the course of the summer in which I had my 14th birthday, killing myself was the only thing I could think about. By the time I returned to school in the autumn I had changed from a happy, bright girl into a despondent disaster.

Whatever normal 14-year-old girl things I was trying to do - taking the dog for a walk, arguing with my siblings, fancying the boy who sat next to me in school orchestra - my thoughts were hijacked by an overwhelming sense of self-loathing and desire to die. I’d visualise slicing my wrists to ribbons or hurling myself off the roof. I spent a lot of time fantasising about shooting myself in the face.

I was appalled: always independent and assertive, I had always prided myself on my ability to take control of my life. But now I had no control over my thoughts. In occasional moments of lucidity, I knew that suicide was not a good idea. I decided that the best way to deal with it was to avoid ever getting out of bed. Bed was safe, because sleeping didn’t permit me to think. And it was soft, so I couldn’t really use it for self-harm, although I did experiment a couple of times with covering my mouth and nose with a flannel-covered pillow in a pathetic attempt at self-suffocation.

I was seriously depressed.

And clinically, at least, I’ve been seriously depressed ever since. But few people know that, because soon after I was diagnosed, I started taking SSRI anti-depressants. Because of them, I rarely have symptoms - and have sufficient control over them that only a small circle of my friends and family notice them when they’re exacerbated. I don’t like to think about what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been medicated as a child. I might not still be alive. I am certain that my quality of life would be severely compromised.

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When my symptoms began I didn’t know what depression was. I just knew that something was really wrong, and I was determined to hide it from my parents: I was convinced that it would only be a matter of time before they figured out that I was crazy and shipped me off to an institution (Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar had been included on my school’s summer reading list). My mother was an educational psychologist, however, and she took a progressive approach once she realised that I was not just going through a phase. First I had some talk therapy. Trying to unpick what was wrong in my life that was making me miserable was impossible because nothing, besides the fact that I was depressed, was wrong: my family was stable and loving, I was a star pupil, I had lots of friends.

Staring at the clock in silence during the course of my allotted hour, I considered whether I should make up some kind of dreadful story in order to make the way that I felt seem justified. But I didn’t. I was just really sad, I said. “Get over it,” the therapist said. Feeling that I was incapable of doing so made me feel worse. But when I didn’t get over it, my GP referred me to a psychiatrist. This, I was certain, was a sure route to my Bell Jar nightmare, so I kicked and screamed and threw my shoes as my parents dragged me out of the house. But when the psychiatrist pronounced me clinically depressed and prescribed antidepressants I cried with relief, knowing that the thing that was wrong with me could be treated.

Taking Prozac didn’t provide me with instant happiness or transform me into an artificial, cheerful version of my former self. I was still sad. But the medication did pull me out of despondency into a normal range of emotion, such that I could engage in the task of learning to cope with a chronic illness.

It amazes me how often people who learn that I’m on Prozac suggest that I should stop taking it. “You don’t seem depressed,” they say, and I suppose I don’t: I’m quite outgoing and successful and well-groomed. Other times, people make ridiculous assumptions about the kind of person I am, like the dental hygienist who read my medical notes (where I had dutifully marked down the medications that I was on, as directed) and remarked that my plaque build-up was obviously because I had depression and didn’t take good care of myself.

Over the last dozen years, I’ve taken several breaks to see if it is possible for me to cope without antidepressants. It isn’t. I always become depressed again, although I now have the self-knowledge to arrest the process by going back on to medication before it becomes so severe that things disintegrate. Why should I screw around with my emotional equilibrium just because of the current culture of shame and distrust about antidepressants, despite the fact that they mitigate my symptoms? I don’t believe that mine is a mindless dependency: I clearly have a physiological problem with my brain that causes me to go from being cheerful and funny and friendly to miserable and suicidal when I am not medicated. Several doctors have confirmed this. Theories abound: maybe it’s because I had febrile seizures when I was a toddler. Perhaps it’s linked to the time I fainted and bashed my head on the kitchen floor and ended up in intensive care with a severe concussion when I was 10. (A recent study found that American footballers who’ve had several concussions have a greatly increased chance of suffering from depression.) Maybe it’s genetic. The cause is a moot point but, now, I just focus on keeping well.

The MP David Laws has recently argued that the quadruple increase over the past decade in prescriptions of anti-depressants to children is evidence of an over-reliance on pharmaceuticals to treat childhood unhappiness. I disagree. Rather, I’d suggest that it might be evidence that society has moved, at long last, towards a more enlightened view in which childhood depression is recognised as a treatable illness, rather than something to be ashamed of. Parents are actually seeking help for their children instead of banishing them to their bedrooms and then wondering why they self-destruct. That’s fantastic.

I don’t advocate prescribing anti-depressants to children without the roots of their depression being investigated. There are many environmental and social factors that may lead to the increased incidence of childhood depression, as demonstrated in the recent Unicef report that ranked British kids at the bottom of the table when it comes to happiness. But instead of positive, progressive debate about how to improve the emotional wellbeing of children, we are embroiled in a moral panic about medication, undoubtedly because no matter how much people like me try to demonstrate that it’s real, it’s treatable, and it’s not something to be ashamed of, depression is an invisible, stigmatised illness. It is easier, and lazy, to blame pharmaceutical companies for marketing “happy pills” than to acknowledge, treat and finally prevent depression.

Rates of other chronic childhood illnesses, such as asthma and diabetes, have also had exponential increases in the last few decades. But no one suggests that parents shouldn’t allow their children to receive appropriate pharmaceutical treatment for these conditions. Just because an illness isn’t tangible doesn’t mean that the appropriate medication is an option that parents and children should always avoid.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Prozac Top News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.