I have suffered from depression once in my life so my experience is limited to just that one occasion. However I did find out at first hand just how devastating and debilitating it can be.
At first it was just a nagging worry that pervaded my every waking thought and as the days went by crept into my dreams and sleep. The hours of sleep became shorter and shorter and lasted just long enough to relieve my exhaustion. Only very deep sleep let my tired brain rest a while until the thoughts came tumbling back.
My work suffered, my home life suffered and when it got to the state that my sleep suffered I was well and truly in a pit of depression. My doctor’s solution was for me to get real professional help in the form of the hospital psychiatrist. His solution, when I was dying to talk to someone, was not to listen to me at all but to prescribe a dose of some sort if pills.
These did nothing to help as all they did was take away what little control I had of myself to leave me in a foggy vacuum not caring what I did, where I went, who I spoke to or how I behaved. And I still couldn’t sleep for more than an hour or two at a time.
Amidst all this fog and unreal life somehow I managed to persuade my own doctor to give me a very powerful sleeping draught so that for just two nights I could get some real deep undisturbed sleep. Somewhere in the back of my befuddled brain I knew that if I could stop being so desperately tired I could regain control of myself. It was this constant brain tiredness that was fuelling the depression, which sapped my energy and thus my self-control. It was a vicious circle. The less sleep I got the more tired I got, the less sleep I could get the more depressed I got, the more tired I got the less I could sleep and the more I became depressed. One state fuelled the other and so it went on.
I remember very little of that first dreamless night except that I took the prescribed dose and went to bed in mid evening with instruction to my son not to wake me for any reason other than a house fire. I woke up long after he had got himself up and gone to school and I pottered about in a half-asleep state until his return. I vaguely remember making some tea for both of us and settled down after taking the second dose of the sleeping draught.
When I finally awoke some 18 hours later I was a new man. I had control of my thoughts. I could rationalise and for the first time in many a day I could think clearly. I had broken the circle and from then on pushed aside the depression for the solution was in my head all the time but I couldn’t get at it because I was too tired to think which made me more depressed, which interfered with my body’s requirements for proper sleep.
This may not be everybody’s answer to depression but surely it is worth a try rather than getting addicted to tranquillisers and the like.