Seriously... Depression Pt 3 Interregnum

The next day, Monday, my mother took me to see our GP. Who made an appointment with a psychiatrist at the hospital. After the initial psychiatric scan - no I am not gay is the only answer I can remember giving - I was enrolled into the children and young person’s programme, to see a psychiatrist once a week for the foreseeable future. I believe I was also prescribed anti-depressants at that stage.

The next couple of months are a blur. The first few weeks my mother took time off from work to keep an eye on me – when I had opened up about what was going on, and had seen the GP and psychiatrist initially, there was a week to go before the next round of school holidays. So obviously, I took that week off.

In my appointments with the shrink, I seethed. I can’t remember what I was so angry about now, but all I know is that I was very angry at the world. I had bottled my emotions so long that they all flowed out of me in a torrent. I remember the shrink saying that my note to the parents was almost poetic, but that is about the only positive thing I can remember being said in those sessions.

In the family group appointments - yes, they do happen, and yes, I know they are a cliché – I remember a sense of my parents and siblings recoiling from my flood of emotions, self-hatred, and anger. I can’t remember if they actually did recoil, but I can remember that sense. At home, knowing that I was under an uneasy combination of eagle eyed surveillance and the others walking gingerly, as if on glass, around me.

Of all the things that I regret about this time, one in particular is my sister hearing my parents talking about the note that I had left that Sunday. She was only eleven at the time, and yet to know how devastated and hopeless I was - yes, one of the many regrets.

Slowly, glacially it seemed to me at the time, the appointments got better, I was keeping my emotions better leashed, and school had removed itself from my list of worries. I had dropped out of the end of year exams, and I believe was bragging about it. Very fucked up way of thinking, yes I know.

And the School Ball was coming up. And I had asked a girl to go with, and amazingly she had said yes. Things were as positive as they could be, it seemed. My shrink said I was OK enough to go from weekly appointments to three monthly check ups, and I continued to take the meds.