Facing up to depression

On finding myself faced with redundancy, my reactions underwent a rapid flux. At first I assumed I would easily find another job and that my years of varied experience and proven adaptability would be enough to see me into a new job with ease. As the first couple of contacts came to naught and nothing else seemed to be on the horizon I backed off from job hunting and busied myself with more pleasant activities.

Lisa became concerned to see this and decided to get me organised and back on the job hunt in a systematic way. She set me up with a spreadsheet to record the status of each potential position and a system of folders and colour coding to make the process more efficient. With this help, and masses of encouragement, coaching and pep-talking from Lisa, I started on the second phase of the hunt: enlisting with every recruitment consultancy going and chasing down every likely position dragged up by searching every online job listing I could find.

At first the sheer business of this approach kept my spirits up but gradually it dawned on me that I was not finding it so easy to even get interviews. Few jobs came up that played to what I saw as my real strengths and it seemed that what jobs were out there were for those at the sharp end of programming: something I'd been consciously avoiding (as somehow beneath me) for over ten years. Undaunted I chased the programming jobs, content to start there and work my way back into a more senior post once I was established with a new employer.

After a few months of banging my head against this particular brick wall, I began to crumple under the weight of a sense of dread and a growing conviction that I was unemployable. I made huge efforts to put on a good show of enthusiasm and positive attitude at the handful of interviews I landed but each rejection was like a hammer blow. When Lisa was out of the house I felt especially desperate and howled aloud in my mental anguish. The situation looked hopeless and there now seemed no prospect of release from the torture of trying to find work.

Alone, I would not have survived long. As my despair deepened I began to eye railway level crossings in a new light. In my current state of mind I couldn't imagine any alternative approach; these were the jobs that there were and I couldn't convince anyone to give me one: although they were jobs I could do, and do really well given the chance, I was never going to be the very best candidate for any of them and there were no prizes for coming second. My mental state entered free-fall.

Lisa saved my life. All through what had now been a nine-month ordeal, she'd been there for me; doing any thing she could to ease the burden and get me doing an effective job. Now she intervened in the most important way of all. Lisa has experience of depression from the inside: she's been dealing with her own for over a decade. She could see what was happening to me and was certain she knew what was wrong: I had become severely depressed. Eventually she confronted me this and insisted that I seek medical help. I was in no state to rebel: unable to help myself, I was content to be told what to do.

The moment of this confrontation is clear in my mind. To describe it as a turning point in no way captures the significance of that instant. As we stood in the hallway of our house in Harlow and Lisa handed me the phone to call for a doctor's appointment my whole world lurched onto a new orbit.

As soon as I'd made the call, Lisa sent me out to take a walk in the autumn evening. As I marched along, my thoughts spinning and churning, I tried to trace back the feelings to which I'd succumbed to find a starting point. It was a revelation to discover that, as I thought back in time, the feelings had been with me for far longer than I would have guessed. My breakdown had been instigated by my redundancy but that hadn't been the cause of my depression: it had merely piled up the pressure to the point where I could no longer cope. I had, I now realised, been coping with a certain level of depression for at least eight years. I knew that I'd had episodes of feeling so low that I couldn't function well for as long as I could remember but at some point the condition had become chronic. I'd been living my life with this extra burden for many years before Nortel gave me the chop and precipitated my mental collapse.

The doctor put me on the anti-depressant Paroxetine: one of a class of such drugs known as selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs. Lisa had been taking this medication for some years and had found it beneficial. I started taking the drug in the middle of October and by the end of the month was beginning to feel an improvement in my internal state. The drug disturbed my sleeping and gave me night sweats, pretty minor side effects compared to the benefit I was deriving from taking it. In any case, changing to taking the pill at night rather than the morning (at Lisa's suggestion) seemed to solve those problems.

With my mood lifted by the medication I was able to return to the fray but with no improvement in my success rate. Then a job ad crossed my path that was quite unlike others I'd been looking at. It came in on one of the automated E-mail systems that I'd joined and which sent me jobs matching my "profile" on a regular basis. I'm not sure how this job matched my profile since it wasn't in any way telecom related: it was an ad for a position as Senior Computer Technician to work in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Cambridge. I hadn't seen any jobs in the academic sector before this.

The job was a computer support role and the money on offer was a third of what I'd been on at Nortel but something about the job not only caught my eye but also lodged in my mind as possibly being a real "find". I'd never worked in a pure computer support position before (I'd always been seen as too "valuable" to "waste" in such a role) but I'd done a fair amount of it; officially earlier in my career, unofficially in later years, always with a great deal of pride and satisfaction. I conceived the idea that I wanted this job very much indeed and applied with eagerness.

The combination of finding this ad and a tip-off from Lisa's ex-boss at Cambridge that there were many computing-related vacancies at the University led me to open up a whole second front in my job search and www.jobs.ac.uk became my friend. Suddenly I found a slew of possible openings and what's more my interview invitation hit-rate boomed. Struggling as I was before I took action to address my depression I couldn't have had the vision to see that these jobs were something I could not only do, not only be good at, but also enjoy so much more than I'd enjoyed my last several years at Nortel or would ever have enjoyed trying to hack it as a programmer in the rapidly diminishing Telecoms arena.

I got interviews for two different posts at Cambridge and another at my alma mater Loughborough within the space of a couple of weeks. First up was Oriental Studies. I went to the interview not knowing what to expect. I'd never been interviewed by three people before. In complete contrast to my efforts to convince the telecoms software bosses that I was The Man, I went in with a different approach: I laid on the line that I thought I'd really love this job, that I was keen to take this on as a new career direction and tried to deal with the (quite tricky) questions as openly and honestly as possible. I had no line to push, no role to play, I asked them to trust that I was sincere and would do a good job for them if appointed. Reader, I got the job.

So, Paroxetine had helped me become sufficiently functional to recognise a fantastic, if off-beat, opportunity when it presented itself and to do myself justice at the interview and secure the post. I was understandably euphoric and I have to relate that the two years I've now been working at Oriental Studies have been the most rewarding and satisfying of my working life. But what about the depression? Was that dead and gone, beaten off with this wonder medication? Repeated attempts to wean myself off the drug proved otherwise. Without the crutch of the SSRI I very rapidly collapsed back into deep depression. Clearly this was no acute depressive illness that would be over once I was again working in a secure job. It looked like I'd be taking the pills indefinitely: not necessarily a terrible thing in my view if they allowed me to function as a human being.

Having been rescued from suicide by accepting Lisa's assessment that I needed medication for depression it was easier to act on her prompting that I should seek counselling help with anger management. Again Lisa's proposal was a winner and in a short sequence of counselling sessions with the University's Staff Counselling Service I was able to explore the roots of my anger and frustration and the sources of the fear that drove them to expression. I exhausted my entitlement to free counselling under the University scheme and couldn't afford to continue privately but after a few months on a waiting list was able to continue with a few further sessions of NHS counselling: something that didn't exist in Harlow but was available to me now that we live in Cambridge.

We live in Cambridge? Well, yes we do. But that hasn't been a stroll in the Town Park (or on Parker's Piece) either. After less than a year in post as a Senior Technician, my boss managed to secure a promotion for me: to Computer Officer. No longer was I a member of Assistant Staff (read: a servant), now I held a University Office and was regarded as a colleague by my academic clients. It was clear that living in Harlow now made no sense: I was making my way within the University at Cambridge and Lisa was working in London. Lisa made the concession that, rather than us both commuting from Harlow, she'd shoulder the whole commuting burden if we could move to Cambridge.

We concocted a tripartite plan: we'd rent a house in Cambridge and move out of Harlow, we'd sell the house in Harlow and pay off the outstanding mortgage, we'd use the proceeds to buy a flat in Nice belonging to Lisa's Uncles with the aim of retiring to Nice in due course and renting in Cambridge in the meantime. Stage one was relatively easy and we found a lovely property to rent in the Romsey Town area of the City. Stage two ran into trouble as the heat went out of the housing market in the UK and we had trouble selling our house in Harlow for a price anywhere near what we'd hoped. Stage three was put on hold when the value of the US dollar compared to the Euro took a tumble and the offer to buy the flat in Nice was withdrawn.

History seemed to be repeating itself: I'd seemed to be an unemployable person, now I seemed to have an unsellable house. I retreated into my work and failed to make the efforts necessary to make the sale of the house in Harlow go through. History repeated itself in another way too: Lisa stepped into the breach and hassled and harried our disgracefully useless solicitors into finally extracting their collective digit and deigning to do the job we were paying them for. In this I was about as much use as a chocolate teapot: my despair echoed that I felt when job hunting. Then I'd been depressed, now (thanks to the wonders of Paroxetine) I wasn't any longer. Or was I?

Clearly, Paroxetine had been of immense help to me and had brought me back from the brink to a reasonably functional state. Equally clearly, I wasn't yet free of the burden of depression. The worst effects of it were held at bay by the medication but I was still exhibiting lots of depressive behaviour and, while I could cope with the gentle regime of a secure job working with people I liked a lot and who had a lot of respect for me, I had no depth of resources to deal with stressful and personally painful circumstances. We managed to get the house sold but, within a couple of days, learned that the house we were renting was to be sold and we'd have to start house-hunting right away. As if this weren't enough, my father's cancer re-emerged in a new part of his body at was looking to be inoperable. I began to succumb once more to the clutches of depression.

A third time Lisa intervened. Worn out by having to force through the sale of our house in Harlow with no help from me while dealing with the aftermath of her own messy and excessively painful departure from her job in London, Lisa insisted that I needed to get onto a better regime for managing my mental condition. Paroxetine was doing what it could but it wasn't enough to address the whole panoply of what I increasingly recognised was a long-established and multi-faceted illness. Lisa's view was that I needed a change of medication and a new, specialist evaluation of my case. By now I'd learned not to delay in following Lisa's advice and managed to get my prescription changed, a psychiatric referral arranged and a place on the counselling waiting list obtained.

The new medication was a drug called Venlafaxine. Again, Lisa had been taking this for a while: a result of a re-evaluation of her own condition that had concluded that Paroxetine wasn't wasn't working for her if she had been taking it for so many years. It certainly seems to work differently to Paroxetine (although I understand that one of its functions is to act as an SSRI) and I felt better adjusted and more capable than I had for a long time.

To my surprise, it became possible to stop taking the Venlafaxine after a few months. I had assumed that I'd be on medication for life but it seems that, after all, my depression was of the kind that can lift. Part of reaching that realisation was learning to distinguish between the effects of depression, money worries, over-tiredness and the elusive mixture of immaturity, insecurity and frustration deriving from my deeper troubles. The counselling, now in the form of Group Therapy, continues to address those deeper troubles but, for the time being at least, it seems the book is closed on depression.