Depression
Welcome to my first post in what I hope to be a series of posts about my life and navigating my way through depression, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and beyond.
I am not a professional on the subjects of depression and PTSD. The information in these posts is from my own experiences and research to try and better myself. For more thorough and accurate information please see a health care professional and conduct your own research.
Some of the events in my life mentioned in these posts will be covered more in depth in other posts. Depression and PTSD is not a simple or easy subject to cover so I will try to cover as much as possible, spanning most of my life, recounting events that happened, how I felt or dealt with them at the time and beyond.
The purpose behind these posts is to tell a story of my life and how I eventually suffered depression and PTSD; then how I managed to keep moving forward to ensure I had a better quality of life, not just for myself but for my family and friends.
Although I take inspiration from influential people I research or follow online I am not a born again person preaching religion, nor am I that person that says: “I’ve found the light therefore you must follow me”. I like to be there for people and help people as much as I can without detriment to myself or my family.
I try to take information from many sources that best suits my life and circumstances at the time. What works now, or a few years ago might not work in the future but I try to learn with an open mind to build a better life for myself and my family.
There is a really jazzy Dolly Parton song called, Better Get To Livin’. Yes I am a country music fan but I take a lot of comfort from listening to lots of different music.
The longer I was dealing with depression and PTSD the more interested I became in it. I started to lose the fear of talking about it. It has been a slow journey for me being comfortable talking openly about my experiences; it even took quite some time before I could talk to my family and friends about it but I was eventually talking openly with work colleagues and even to Boarding Operations classes I was teaching with navy. One thing I noticed while teaching was when I mentioned anything about my experiences the students became very interested; and seeing their interest gave me the confidence to speak up more regularly.
To read the back story which mainly led to what I have mentioned above please click the following link SIEV 36.
It was several years after SIEV 36 when I tried to write down everything I could remember about that day, it still took a while but I got there eventually. Initially it was just for me to record what I could of the incident but decided writing it down was the best way for me to let those closest to me read, in my own words, what happened. Since then writing on a regular basis has helped me get to know myself better and get certain things off my mind.
There were lots and lots of thoughts swirling around, constantly, with no clear direction of where those thoughts were going or their purpose for being there in the first place. After a considerable amount of time learning about myself and how my mind worked I wrote things down in notes (usually scattered in notebooks, sticky notes, word docs or on my phone), then letters, then an attempt at a small book just for my family, before eventually evolving it in to the creation of these blog posts.
One of the things with depression is you struggle to focus or concentrate properly, you try to figure out your thought process and why it is happening to you but you just end up ruminating making things worse.
I have always had an active mind and quite often over my life people have accused me of thinking too much and over thinking. It has only been in the last couple of years my mind and thought processes have started to slow down. Who knows why, it could be because I now have a better understanding of how my mind works or just simply getting older, or both. Part of my problem was the constant over thinking I have always done, combine that with depression and you have a recipe for disaster. My mind was consuming itself and I shut off from the world so I could try and figure it all out but I couldn’t.
Thankfully since I was a kid the stigma surrounding mental health has reduced dramatically. Although there are still people who do not understand or just don’t want to understand how much it actually affects a person’s life, they find it easy to label someone as, “crazy”, “moody”, “bad tempered” or “loner”.
It took several years for me to admit it but there were also a lot of other things that happened that more than likely didn’t help my situation and would have contributed to my journey towards depression; and then a major event triggering PTSD. During my depression journey I found admitting to myself something was wrong was the hardest part but it was like a weight was lifted off me.
Typical childhood
My childhood was pretty good, there was no physical or mental abuse, unless you take into account the typical teasing and banter from my older sister. We had a very close family that did lots of activities together like bush walking, camping, four wheel driving and visiting family and friends all the time.
Dad moved out of home and back again a couple of times during my high school years and although not ideal for a teenager to experience, we dealt with it the best we could as a family. As a child, I was upset my parents had separated but as I grew up I accepted it was part of life and never blamed either of them.
Celebration and mourning
On my Birthday in 1996 I was at home and had several friends over for a small gathering. As the last person was leaving, the phone rang; I answered it and it was my grandfather. My grandparents lived in Sorell which you had to pass through to travel to the Tasman Peninsula. We had a police and emergency services radio scanner at the time and my grandfather asked if we had it on because, as he put it: “There are a shit load of police cars and ambulances racing past our house”. I switched the scanner on and we started hearing the police talking about a dead body count, the first we heard was it was up to ten.
Over the next several hours the body count kept climbing and we watched as wave after wave of helicopters flew injured people from the Port Arthur massacre to the Hobart Domain where they met ambulances to race them to the hospital.
Although I was never directly affected and didn’t know any of the dead or injured, it impacted every Tasmanian and I have relived that day every year on my birthday since.
During my later high school years and into my college years my grandfather, Don, had been suffering from cancer. He initially refused chemotherapy but the pain eventually got too much and he finally accepted treatment. I had a brilliant childhood growing up around my grandparents and have very fond memories helping my grandfather fill up the water truck and driving around delivering water to people.
Within twelve months my family lost my grandfather on mum’s side and my grandmother on dad’s side. Both deaths so close together hit the family extremely hard. My grandmother, Charlotte, was another wonderful person in my life who I was lucky enough to grow up with.
During the health decline of my grandfather mum held everyone and everything together; she has always been a very stoic person. But when we got home after my grandfather’s funeral she finally broke down. It was only one of very few times I have ever seen my mother cry, she was determined to never show weakness or let people see her cry. For a while I was very much like her in this regard.
Social expectations have changed, society is more encouraging now of people to open up, and it is not weak to cry or show emotion. It’s alright to shed a few tears for a moment, then pick yourself up and move on.
Before I had my breakdown I could read sad stories, watch sad TV shows and movies without feeling much emotion but since, I now struggle not to cry during an emotional scene. I do occasionally get frustrated at feeling like that but it reminds me I’m not heartless.
I had never seen my dad cry either but several months after my grandmother passed was the first time I had ever seen him struggle to cope. I still never saw him cry until many years later on the anniversary of my grandmother’s death. He was the man I idolised; I was his shadow on all the bushwalking and camping trips but now my rock steady dad was broken and struggling with the loss of his mother. Dad went through his own struggles for several years but eventually managed to deal with most of his issues.
My sister was not around much anymore at this stage. She is five years older than me and had been travelling quite a lot. She spent several months in America and then went to live and work in the UK. While in the UK she started dating an American she had met previously who was now living in the UK as well. They eventually got married and now have two beautiful daughters. It was only while working on writing this did I discover some of the mental health issues she went through at the time and what she did to seek help.
You need to communicate
Mum had always told my sister and I to talk about what was on our minds, even if it wasn’t to her or dad, just talk to someone. For me this was conflicting because it was the 80’s and 90’s where I was regularly talked over the top of by other people and told things like, “Children should be seen and not heard”; “Big boys don’t cry”. With phrases like that drummed into me I just kept my mouth shut and bottling everything up.
Eventually, albeit over a very long time, communicating started slowly coming to the forefront of my mind. I was already writing things down, they were only small notes, and usually anything I had to do with boats and the sea. They were not the sort of notes that would help me analyse my thoughts and my feelings when I really needed to though.
Now, as a parent and husband I find communication really is the key and we have solved so many problems by early and regular communication. You might feel weird or stupid sometimes talking to a baby or toddler because you don’t think they understand you but, they will grow with confidence knowing how to communicate and that you are there for them.
What to do?
I finished college in 1997 and then in 1998 really struggled to find a job. I was constantly calling and sending letters to companies but never got a job offer. Dad was living back home at this stage and one day my parents told me I needed to go on the Dole (Centrelink). I hated the idea, the thought of me going on the Dole meant I was a failure, I thought I would never be any good at anything. I knew I didn’t want to go on the Dole but eventually I reluctantly took myself off to Centrelink to waste many hours waiting in line. I was given a little book to record all the names and numbers of the companies I was supposed to be calling, but I still couldn’t get a job. Mind you I got to the point I didn’t even call places I just looked names up in the Yellow Pages and wrote them down in the book.
I wasn’t happy with life, I had never thought about suicide before; I didn’t have any real reason to but I had been out with the car one day and as I pulled back into the garage I sat there staring out down the driveway. I started to think about gassing myself in the car. What was the point in going on? I was a tall skinny boy who thought girls didn’t like me at all and I couldn’t get a job so what was the point in living? My sister was living her life and away all the time and mum and dad weren’t getting along. I felt I was nothing and useless. I started to think about the process of gassing myself when all of a sudden I imagined myself dead in the car and mum or dad coming home to find me. I thought about the impact it would have on them to find me like that. With tears streaming down my face I turned the car off, got out and went on with living.
I never mentioned it to anyone; suicide wasn’t the sort of thing to talk about in those days. A few weeks later dad managed to get me a part time job working in the oil store at the petroleum depot he worked at. I was so thankful I didn’t have to stay on the Dole. After my first day working at the depot I came home dirty and tired but I had the biggest smile on my face from finally getting paid for a hard day’s work, I had started to feel a sense of purpose I hadn’t felt for quite a while. Over 15 years later I finally mentioned to dad about the day I thought of committing suicide and he told me they knew I wasn’t in a very good frame of mind and he had moved the keys to the gun safe so I couldn’t get to the guns. I had grown up around guns and at no point did I even consider trying to use one to end my life. All these years later and it is amazing to think how times have changed so much to the point where we openly talk about mental health and suicide on a daily basis in society, yet years ago there is no way people would mention it; and the suicide prevention method was to move the keys to a gun safe.
Sailing The Unknown 