Alison Cowan, 31, self-employed campaigner
There was this cloud over me all through my childhood. It was a dread of life, a lump inside me. I didn’t know what it was like to be carefree; there was always a sense of foreboding. My family thought I was moody and sulky and told me to snap out of it. I thought it was normal to feel this way - guess I just didn’t have the happy button.
By 15 I was on Valium and had a couple of breakdowns where I’d just cry and cry. People put it down to exam pressure and PMT. It wasn’t until university that I was diagnosed as having chronic depression but since my family had always told me to pull myself together that’s what I thought I had to do. I had a year of counselling and thought I was doing all right.
When I came down to London, I got a job in marketing and started working my way up the career ladder. But I wasn’t coping at all. The feelings got worse and worse, and it got harder and harder to cover them up.
By 1997 it was so bad that I attempted suicide by taking an overdose of anti depressants and alcohol. There’s nothing quite so bad as waking up the next day and thinking “I shouldn’t be waking up”. When my flatmate went to tell my boyfriend that I’d taken an overdose, he just said “I don’t want to know” and walked out of the pub. I never heard from him again. Friends also began to drift away.
I was pretty ill for a good couple of years and at one point ended up in a psychiatric hospital. I’d lost everything but what really saved me was having cognitive therapy. It enabled me to cope day to day, to manage the spiral and to train my brain to work in different ways.
Work has been difficult because I lost my last full-time job after the suicide attempt. They implied that if I’d put my illness on my CV I’d never have got the job. They said I was a disappointment to them. I was told to keep my depression a secret and tell the team I’d been managing I’d been off sick with a virus; later I learnt they thought I had HIV. Other comments have come back to me about how I was a bit “wacko” or “mental”. Marketing is the kind of industry where you’re not allowed to have any weakness at all.
Every 2-3 months I’ll still have a bad patch. I have no interest in food, can’t watch TV, can’t read a newspaper or book, can’t go out. It’s hard to talk to people even those who love and care for me. My sleep is disturbed by terrible nightmares. All my functions are switched off, none of my senses are working. It’s a cruel illness because you forget what it’s like for something to be pleasurable; you have to force yourself to do the simple things like eating and washing. At least now I know that I just have to sit and wait for it to pass. At least I now know it will pass.
FACT: In a survey of over 800 companies by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), only 1 in 10 had an official policy on mental health. (Department of Health, 1997)
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