|
EDGES MAGAZINE Issue |
October 1999 |
with Depression
Paul has first hand experience of struggling at University with mental despair. He has recently come to work with our organisation. We are helping him integrate back into the community.
The last two years have been by far the hardest of my young life. There are many people for whom circumstance dictates a heavier load than mine, but I can only say how I felt and to a lesser degree feel.
I started to develop symptoms of acute anxiety after a bout of Flu-like illness during Christmas 1997, just before the final stage of my A levels. The physical symptoms of anxiety are crushing to the social persona. The hands shake and sweat, muscles go into uncontrollable spasms, the heart pounds, the voice breaks up and there is a constant ringing in the ears, amongst other symptoms. The anxious person is robbed of any quiet moments in his life and from time to time, especially in the social arena, these symptoms increase until total panic ensues. Your belonging in a circle of friends is dismembered and they seem threatening. My reaction was to flee to the edges of relationships.
Even
though my state of health had deteriorated considerably, I managed to
get good A level results and moved on, as planned, to University. In
reality, I should have known that I was totally incapable of standing
independently, but I had become a coward, unable to make a decision or
even be truthful with myself. Before, I had the excuse of imminent
examinations, that was valid to my friends, family and myself, to build
an extensive wall between the outside world and myself. When I would
fight my way out it would be in the comforting knowledge that a rack of
pints, to steady my nerves, lay in wait at the pub. Now, on my own in a
strange city, that wall would come tumbling down. It was only a short
time before I was back home, a dysfunctional personality unable to live
in the world.
Over the next year, I had to stare myself in the face, in all my waking hours and my sleeping. I was lucky in that I had the loving support of my family, and the help of a doctor and a psychiatrist. Although their help was a great comfort to me, I realized this was an intensely personal and inner struggle.
My bruised and grossly insulted mind had become clouded. I found that my concentration and memory had deserted me. Often I struggled to remember what I had said in mid sentence, or what I was doing seconds before. Anxiety channels the mind's energy solely into destructive patterns of thought that strangles the vitality of consciousness. Your suffering and its wealth of possible causes become your sole focal point for attention. You actually become a habitual murderer of the beauty that life inherently possesses, an addict to all that is negative. My person had split into two, the tortured and the torturer. I frequented a self-made prison where I was the jailed and the jailer.
Slowly, and after many months of inner reflection aided by books of psychology, mysticism, philosophy and religion, I began to realize the insanity of my position. It is not clear to me when this first began to dawn but it was probably at my lowest ebb, with flashings of suicidal thought and self-loathing. It was at this point of inner realization that my interest in the spiritual became an unshakable affirmation of the spiritualness of my own being, and of everyone else’s. This submerged my wounded pride, a wicked combination, so that I could use my faith in God, with a new vigor, to learn to walk again in the world.
I met Father Jim three months ago when I felt impelled to participate in the Sacrament Of Reconciliation, to try to reconcile, through the sacrament, the co -existence of my shadow of inner suffering and myself. This was also a gateway for me back into the Church and regular celebration of Mass, that I had abandoned along with my other social activities.
Shortly afterwards, I started as a volunteer with THOMAS. My confidence is returning and all the beautiful people I meet here are teaching me, just by their simple presence, to love myself, a concept I had wrongly confused with vanity in the past. I now see that only by loving oneself can a person truly love others. The greatest teachers of this to me are the homeless people I meet, whether homeless in body, mind or spirit. Some days I do return perilously close to my lowest ebb, it is then that they pick me up. Many days are utterly beautiful and satisfying, it is then that the offered hand is mine.
