Caroline Church - I Blame The Hormones - A raw and honest account of one woman’s fight against depression

When I was fourteen I started my periods and, being at an all-girls school, the realisation hit me quite early that not everybody was suffering the way I was. The pain was something I hadn’t anticipated, and would often leave me hunched over and unable to straighten. In lessons I would flush hot with embarrassment as the teacher was often a man and he wouldn’t understand that it was the first day of my period. More often than not, I would have to go to the nurse’s office as the cramps were too much to bear and I needed to go home. On my way from the office to the sick room I would vomit violently, over and over, and as I clung onto the toilet to stop myself from fainting, tears would stream down my face and my eyes would burn. I would be crouching on the filthy toilet floor, desperately trying to catch my breath as the agony seared straight through my legs and into my pelvis, from where it would wrap around my back. Once the purging had done its job, I would go to the sick room and curl up in the foetal position before falling into a deep sleep, which seemed to be the only respite from the month-to-month misery that was to increase throughout my adolescence.

As time went by, my change in mood went from bad to worse, and I started to experience my first feelings of paranoia. I began to believe that I wasn’t wanted at home, so I decided to move out, far too prematurely, on completion of my school exams. I moved in with friends first, but convinced myself that they didn’t really like me, so I moved again, into a rented house where the people were relative strangers. This, of course, had a disastrous effect on my state of mind, and I went downhill rapidly as I became more and more isolated. I started to drink alcohol, which helped enormously with my racing thoughts, and I gradually began to self-medicate as depression and anxiety took over my life. I would pour myself a drink and swallow hard, waiting for the calmness to envelope me like a warm blanket as it crept through my veins. It greatly relieved the feelings of tension, and I thought that I had found the perfect solution to my problems. Unknowingly, this was the beginning of my self-harming, as I desperately sought out ways to find relief from the crippling and worsening anguish within.

At around seventeen years of age I started working as an auxiliary nurse in a home for the elderly, which involved extremely long hours and probably did little to help my worsening condition; I would often have to ring in sick as I struggled to cope. I had also started to have intermittent sobbing episodes, sporadic days when I would begin to cry and often still be crying several hours later, which of course left me utterly exhausted. I just couldn’t fathom why I seemed to have these issues, why I sometimes would be weeping for days with a deep sense of bereavement for no particular reason. I also had a ghostly feeling around me, which seemed to be getting worse, and I would sometimes feel a sudden eeriness that would leave me suspicious of everything around me. Even my bedroom and the house in which I lived would become spookily unfamiliar, and I would suddenly be terrified. I just couldn’t explain it, and because I felt so ashamed of my thoughts and feelings I didn’t tell anyone, which of course increased my sense of isolation.

As time went by, my racing thought process became so troublesome that I began to see a psychiatrist in the hope that he could help me make sense of what I was experiencing. I had gone from being a playful, happy child to a damaged young woman within a couple of years. I epitomised the phrase ‘troubled teen’. As a direct result of my cripplingly low self-esteem I was also becoming more and more promiscuous, which did little for my reputation and self-respect. I was desperately trying to fill the missing void at any cost, even if it meant compromising my integrity. I hadn’t had a disturbed childhood and, as far as I was aware, I didn’t have any emotional baggage or hidden trauma, so I was concerned by this side to my character. The sex had started to become another addiction, along with my dependence on alcohol.

Once I started to divulge my feelings and worries to the psychiatrist, he became very concerned and asked to see me weekly. I had started to harbour thoughts of violence and suicide, but I was also experiencing the ghostly feeling (known as depersonalisation) more and more often. I began to suffer from nightmares and would wake in the night with a great feeling of impending doom and terror, which would then start the sobbing again and prevent me from working. My paranoia increased too: I would wake suddenly and my heart would race in my chest; I felt sure that somebody was in the room with me. This, of course, was terrifying and would sometimes happen over consecutive nights, so for a whole week I would be frightened to go to bed because of what was awaiting me.

The psychiatrist and I decided together that I would try a mild antidepressant, in the hope that it would slow me down and help with my persistent feelings of paranoia. I would often feel the need to sleep during the day, and would sometimes still be there seventeen hours later. As soon as the relentless chatter in my racing mind stopped, I would then stay in bed for hours at a time, utterly exhausted and unable to function. The situation was abysmal and had started to impact severely on my whole life, though I still couldn’t tell anybody for fear of what they might think of me. I genuinely felt that my colleagues perceived me as strange, and I often felt left out, self-conscious and plagued with self-doubt. As the months went by and the depression worsened, I became increasingly perplexed by this sudden change in my character and the helplessness within.

I had been taking the antidepressants for some weeks when I had my first out-of-control experience, and it has haunted me to this day. There had been a conflict of some kind at home with my parents and I returned to my lodgings, where the crying began. The sadness engulfed me and, as I sat alone, I felt that the whole of mankind had died and left me on my own. I really felt the grief and loneliness that anyone would feel in that situation, along with the eeriness that had been around me before. All the room felt so odd and dreamlike, but without the protection that a dream could bring, and I cried pitifully and long into the night. I didn’t want to stay any more with all of this desolation and sorrow, and it seemed as though my heart was broken but without a cause. I picked up the bottle of pills, emptied the tablets out, crushed some of them up and placed them on my tongue. They tasted so bitter and I immediately gagged, so the rest I just swallowed with some wine that I had in the cupboard for sedation purposes. I didn’t want to die as such, I just wanted the feelings of misery to leave me, and as I gradually fell asleep, I allowed the tension to leave my body and the anxiety simply melted away.

Fortunately, the landlord found me just in time, and at the hospital I remember waking up as the nurse held me down while she fed a pipe down my throat. I struggled against her and retched violently as I tried desperately to pull the tube out of my own stomach. I could feel it dragging along my insides. My efforts, of course, made the nurse angry, and she shouted at me to stop while she tried again. I was annoyed, as being asleep had made me forget the feelings I had been experiencing; I was so disappointed to be awake again and to have to face it all. As I fought her off, I looked at the lights above my head and my body suddenly became floppy, without anything left to give. I fell into a deep sleep, which lasted three days, and when I finally woke up, I had never felt so embarrassed and ashamed as the reality of what I had done suddenly hit me.

The week following my suicide attempt was an absolute nightmare. On my release from hospital I returned to see my psychiatrist, and he decided that I needed more intensive treatment. I was initially quite pleased to be going into a psychiatric ward, as I felt that at last I would get the help I needed and I could at least get a diagnosis. The reality, however, was extremely different, and although the doctors and nurses were kind, I was surrounded by schizophrenics and people with bipolar. Some were extremely ill and were withdrawing from alcohol and drug addictions, which was painful to see and extremely frightening. One particular lady I secretly named the ‘pacer’, as she wandered endlessly backwards and forwards while chatting away to herself. She seemed to be having her very own conversation and was even answering herself in a different voice, whilst her husband looked on despairingly. She seemed so normal in some ways and yet so damaged at the same time, and I desperately wanted to reach out to her and help her through it, which of course was futile as I was clearly in need of help myself.