The Cause of My Depression

Thank you for waiting for this.  I realise I had promised it for Sunday last (my fortieth birthday) but circumstances have caused me to postpone this post until now.  I can pin the cause of my depression down to a moment in time because I have reactionary depression.  That is my depression has been caused by an event that I have reacted to.  There is non-reactionary depression also where the minds chemistry is not balanced correctly (I believe that is the case) and people are just depressed and are not sure why.  So in that circumstance I actually feel lucky to have reactionary depression.  I can't think what it would be like to think that feeling like this is a natural thing.

My depression began on Monday the 21st of April 2003.  This was Easter Monday and I was at home playing Mario Party or something similar with my wife and my two kids, Shanise and Courtney.  The phone rang and I let it go as we were in the middle of a round and I decided to use the caller ID function to call them back after the session.  We were living in Emerald Queensland at the time, a long way away from my family in Tasmania.  I walked out to the kitchen and dialled the *10# number that allows you to retrieve the last number that called you.  It was my mother and I dialled it back.

I heard the receiver lift on the other end and as I was in a jovial mood at the time I made a joke that I knew would make my mother laugh and be shocked.  I said "What the f*&% do you want?".  Unfortunately the next voice I heard was not my mother but someone else.  They asked who this was.

That really knocked the wind out of me and I became worried.  My mother lived alone and would never let some random person pick up the phone.  I explained who I was and my mother came on the phone.  She was distraught and had obviously been in tears.  She asked me to sit down, but I couldn't.  I asked what it was and then she said to me;

"Michael has been killed in a mining accident."

Michael was my only sibling.  My big brother.  Growing up it had always just been my parents and him and I had always thought the world of him.  A lot of who I am is due to Michael and it really felt like I had been hit with a physical blow.

I doubled over.  I could not breathe.  I must have made some kind of wild/feral noise as Nikki came running in to find me.  I was inconsolable.  My mother told me that she had left some rather curt messages on my Father's answering machine (they were separated and he had married again) and I knew I could not let him find out in that way.  To hold myself together I just repeatedly dialled his number until I got him and gave him the news.

Michael is one of those people that everyone loved.  he was mischievous, fun, caring and charismatic.  People could not help but like him and he always was surrounded by a massive amount of friends.  He was always chased by the ladies as well as he was considered quite the catch wherever he went.  I always measured myself against him and I always fell well short in every department.  When he died I quietly repeated a mantra to myself for many months.

"It should have been me."

It is funny in a way as I have since heard a lot about my brother.  I had been away for some time and though we spoke infrequently we were never a family that spoke in depth or personally really about anything.  We would keep our emotional selves in check and talk about other things.  But talking to people that knew Michael it seems he was very much envious of me.  He was envious of my stable relationships and of my intelligence and I am sure if it had of been the other way around it may have been him that thought exactly the same things.

It is eleven years almost since Michael passed away.  He died instantly according to the coroners report and the Doctor that called his death advised that it could have gone the other way and made him a quadriplegic with no ability to communicate with the outside world, which he would have hated more.  You may think that it is ludicrous for myself to be still in depression like this, and I agree with you.  But I can't seem to let it go.  Doctors are happy to get you on medication and I have seen counsellors but none of them say "This is the way to stop feeling bad about this".  They tell me that the medication needs to level me out and then slowly come off it and I will be find.

The medication simply stops me being angry.  I struggle to find happiness in my life and when I do find a place to be happy I normally am disapproved of by one faction or another until the thing I find offers me no enjoyment any more.  I want to break the cycle of depression but I feel I am caught.  Each time I think of Michael it fills me with a deep loneliness and I can conjure up that initial pain of first hearing it as though it were seconds ago.

Michael's death was the trigger but there are other, weirder factors that have me in this depression to do with my family.  I hope to talk about those in my next post.  I think I have put myself through enough for one sitting!  I hope that this post will explain a bit about depression to some people and also reach others that have some similar circumstances and see that it is OK to feel this way and I hope that through my writing that can follow my journey of what I am doing to try and get out of this hole I find myself in.

Thankyou for reading.