Ex-banker Richard Hawkey was diagnosed with depression in 2010. He says he ignored all the symptoms.
“I was running the rat race with pressure at work and doing the school run. I would have a cold every few weeks, which I put down to the air-con at work. I had a headache every day. I had all the trappings of a successful life,” he says. “When it hit me, I didn’t understand what was happening. Here I was coaching others but not coping with my own life.”
What many readers will relate to is the regular “urban” lifestyle he lived: working hard at his job, assisting colleagues in their personal traumas, trying to make family time on the weekends for his children, paying special attention to his wife and remembering his responsibility to his parents and extended family. He says the big burn-out happened when he finally had a chance to relax.
“The World Cup was on, it was a euphoric, infectious time and I remember leaving the stadium on a high. We were going on holiday straight away but instead of being excited or relaxed I was in the pits.
“The noise around me had stopped and yet here I was, I had lost my appetite, my libido and the thought of going down to the beach to build sandcastles with my son felt like a chore.
“When I got home I went to the GP, got meds and thought I’d ‘suck it up and get on with it’, but the next morning, I couldn’t get out of bed. I remember having terrible nausea.”
Hawkey says the next month only got worse. The anxiety also left him with “terrible shame” which he puts down to our Western way of thinking. He did, however, get himself to a psychiatrist and emphasises that only the fourth set of anti-depressants worked.
The idea is to persevere when it come to medication.
Above that, Hawkey says that much of his recovery can be credited to his wife.
He emphasises the importance of a sympathetic, non-judgemental support system.
It didn’t take long for him to figure out that his job left him unfulfilled and he soon quit and began reading, which led to him writing his own book. Today he says it is relatively simple to manage his stress. What has helped him along the way is something called cognitive behaviour therapy.
Clinical psychologist Dr Colinda Linde describes it as a method of dealing with stress and anxiety by knowing what it is you are afraid of and changing your estimation of the threat.
She says the panic sensation – a kind of out of the blue feeling that you’re dying, going crazy or have to get out of where you are – often stems from a fear.
“Stress contributes but is not the main factor. Panic often comes from a biological vulnerability or inherited anxiety; role modelling on a parent who perhaps had general anxiety; or an early trauma,” she says.
Basically panic is an anxiety disorder and it is learnt fear.
This makes it treatable as you can “unlearn” it, so to speak.
She offers the basic example of a panic attack at the wheel. When it happens to a person while driving, the reaction thereafter is usually that they will not want to drive on that road again. It is perpetuated until more and more roads add to the list. Your world shrinks and, as Richard experienced, you get to a stage where you cannot get up in the morning.”
Linde says blaming the situation is only human nature. Coping with it is about desensitising the physical sensation, by graded exposure – in this example to those roads.
“It’s about understanding that your feelings are real but the alarm is false.”
Psychiatrist Dr Frans Korb says society needs to wake up to the reality of depression and mental health disorders.
“It’s not just about getting a script from a doctor. It should also be about how you are functioning, socially, at work, in your marriage.”
Hawkey says only one-third of people seek treatment for depression, less than half of them with major depression are explicitly recognised as being depressed and only half of all depressed patients receive some therapy.