Reflections on The Black Dog

Throughout his life SIr Winston Churchill suffered from clinical depression and he referred to it as his Black Dog and my friend and I early on after we had both been operated on used this phrase to cover the various visitations of depression that we got.  In many respects we used this term when it got really bad.

If you don't get doubting voices and thoughts in your head you may think what I say is strange but I'd like you to imagine that I do hear voices, I hear my (what I guess is) my subconscious all the time and it is an incessant companion and it works away at lots of things.  It does things like test jokes out whilst I am talking to people, it runs through scenarios and what if situations, it brings together loose strands and in everything it is there in the background running along very smoothly and is part of me.  I hear it as I type because in many ways it is me speaking these words.

I don't think this is unusual at all by the way - I imagine that everyone, if they stop and think, has the voice or the spoken thought there.  What happens when the Black Dog comes to visit is that a little dark cave at the back of your mind where all your innermost fears and hatreds, your foul mouth, your disgusting thoughts and your discriminations are exiled gets opened up.  The Black Dog can appear in many ways.

It's easiest way is to sow little seeds of doubt in your mind that it nurtures and cultivates and grows, weeding out the ones that won't work and looking after those that will.  Ideas are fertilised and brought to work against you.  These may be fears in meeting people, in stressful situations and they work my trying to make you do something against your will.  They eat away at you gnawing and getting under your skin, irritating and taunting you.

On Monday, I can only say that I was unprepared for the Black Dog's return.  I know I have on and off days quite regularly it is bound to happen as I'm still repairing my mind and my body from what I now see was a more traumatic event than I realised.  You rebuild on hope and a promise of better things and Black Dog takes away hope and replaces it with fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).  

It was only my friend who has his own traumatic event at the same time that I did who recognised this for what it was.  That time of year - we both were diagnosed and operated on around the same time and so July holds dark memories for us - we ignore the signs at our peril.

My 'new life' or the new me is a work in progress.  I feel I've made some big strides forward these past 2 weeks.  The Black Dog can go to hell and whilst I don't think for one moment I won't get another visit for there are more challenges facing me in the next few years I will be ready and I've friends who I will pick the phone up and talk to.  I often feel that this is a battle of me versus it (the rest of the world maybe) and yet it need not be like that.  If I'd have thought for one moment about it I may have been able to put out a hand and have it held and my mind may have been able to have been defused in time rather than suffering the explosion it did.