I'm Fine: A White Christmas Lie

It's the day after the day after Boxing day. We have now eaten so much I can barely make out the keys with my pudgy fingers as I type. We ate beef, Dauphinoise potatoes, stuffing made with sage, chestnuts and all manner of pig products, Yorkshire pudding and more. We had our blinis garnished with sour cream, lump fish caviar and smoked salmon with Champagne, ate Yule log, mince pies, pannetone, and more. And the only exercise was not mine - Mat ran the Park Run locally.

Probably a good job that I didn't try this given that I'm unable to move my back properly due to the rather large steel rod in my back, accompanied by its screws, and in my elbow several exceptionally irritating wires. Just quiet - this year we wanted to make sure that this Christmas was especially quiet, no one else than us invited and very minimal communications with others by text or online.

There are two 'spirits' of Christmas prevalent in my life's version of A Christmas Carol (non alcoholic ones I mean, though more on that later!): the ghost of depression and the ghost of anxiety. These two terrible twins love to get at me before Christmas and after it. This whole year I've spent time and money fighting these twins, who are perpetually in the 'terrible twos' phase, exploring and exploiting what they can do and causing nothing but trouble.

It was only earlier this year that I started to realise that I had anxiety as well as depression. Although I've always described myself as someone who couldn't relax at all and whose only hope of an afternoon of not fidgeting madly was to sit in front of the television with my phone to play a game on, a film to watch, and quite possible an enormous amount of leg fidgeting while all of this went on. I literally could not sit still, worrying and worrying about the things to come over and over again, mind reading, fortune telling, forecasting and predicting every possible outcome I could think of.

Now I connect this anxiety I recognise with childhood memories of a familiar sense of unease I now know they represent. I can remember as a child feeling a tremendous discomfort in my stomach, a sense of dread that at three years old I had no vocabulary to articulate. I used to pull in my stomach to try to make the feeling go away. Now it overcomes every part of me and I can finally sense it - I know that I'm anxious - whereas before it was so much a part of me; so stressed and over-sensitised was I at all times, even in sleep, that I didn't even notice it anymore. It's worse at family functions or holidays, work situations or places where I have to see people. So yes, generally quite bad when I get out of the house. Sometimes not even that.

And then we have depression, which is my more familiar of the terrible two. Depression has lived with me a long time and pops up to say hello too often. I think it's when I see the happiness of Christmas that sometimes I feel that that completely unrealistic world - whichever one I'm watching - will be completely out of reach. And let's not even talk about what was going on inside my brain. A whirring of at the very least a trio or quartet of thoughts would un-file themselves from the copious cabinets that somehow found the space to be stored within my brain. The thoughts would be picked at random from the past and begin to circulate slowly at first inside my head.

While White Christmas plays cheerfully in the background (well, okay, Die Hard, but that's hardly realistic in its happy ending amid the lovely bloodshed and broken glass) the after effects of Christmas kick in: excessive sugar, fat, additives, alcohol and the rest that equal a Christmas meal come out to play havoc with my synapses and my digestive system simultaneously.

As I lost my sense of smell almost entirely after the accident, and it hasn't come back yet, I'm finding it hard to taste things as well as I used to. What I can taste and smell are rarities I do really appreciate. I can just about smell Poême, my favourite perfume, and I can taste most of the flavours of the delicious stuffing Mat made for our Christmas dinner.

Even so, I've indulged as above with Christmas eats and Champagne etc. The come down from all of this unhealthy list might mean a higher than normal purchase rate on Pepto Bismol for some; for me it usually means that depression can kick in. I've noticed that if I drink only small amounts and allow plenty of space between days, the depression can hold off. But add to this sugary food, fatty snacks with all their additives? I may as well eat a triple super-sized Big Mac meal. So Christmas is not going to go 100% well since I allow myself to be put under food (and less so drink) assault.

I've changed my eating and my drinking - cutting down massively on the latter in particular (I never really overeat that much). In fact the only time I've drunk every day for a while this year was on a holiday I took earlier this year. Gone the excess, gone the quite often daily glass of wine; remaining the anxiety and depression when they come with only the prescribed medication and the sense that they will probably pass even if it doesn't feel that way, and eating as healthily as I can (apart from the odd sugary snack or crisp. Hey, I'm only human!) I'm now below the Government's weekly health recommendation for alcohol consumption. Now I just need to work on my addiction to crisps.

So there are my ghosts or spirits. They came back right after Christmas day as I came down from all the foods listed at the top of this page, added to which were a couple of glasses of Champagne and a nice glass of red. I noticed on Twitter my fellow sufferers from mental illness getting ill or antsy right after Christmas - or even on Christmas afternoon itself. We made it to Christmas Eve; then we needed to make it to Boxing day and beyond.

Beyond...yes. What is beyond? It's New Year's bloody eve. The least favourite night of the year for many; the most stressful for others, possibly because six nights after stuffing your face with all those blinis, turkey, stuffing (stuffing on stuffing) the television is telling you that the greatest night of your life is coming up and you'd better find some way to stuff yourself into your best dress and heels. I'm restricted to flats thank goodness, and with my restricted movement I think that I may also need to wear a tent to hide my Christmas pudding tummy. I'm not inviting Depression and Anxiety to come with me because I'm going to go to a party and try to have a good time - fewer drinks, less food and who knows, maybe they won't even come back the next day.

Nothing Munch To Worry About: The Serious Cost of Mental illness

Whether he's hearing a scream, or screaming, there's definitely something to scream about

I feel bad about my own worrying. I mean, what do I have to worry about compared to most? Not only do I not have Ebola, but I'm not involved with the Band Aid umpteenth revival.

This week, in creative writing class, we had to write about something which interested us (no prizes for guessing what I chose), and then write a piece about it, using facts we found through research. Below is my offering. I think it's more Comment is Free than me, in terms of style, but I do believe that worrying too much is dangerous. Even if I am a first class worrier. And I'm going to try hard not to worry about that.

"It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.

"So it is."

"And freezing."

"Is it?"

"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately."

Worries are something few of us can say we’ve never experienced from time to time. In the past few years, worries have come easily to us Brits more than ever before as uncertainty abounds: the economic situation is insecure; we have – at best – a shaky government. 

At work, redundancies have been common and the future seems less sure than ever, which leads to money worries with little or no job security or secure future for ourselves and our families.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew! - Sing it, Hamlet

Those retired from work are, for the first time in many cases, seeing their children in a worse economic situation than they were in themselves as young adults. Things are tough whether you’re eighteen or eighty, but no less so than for the working population, who are juggling national and personal challenges with one very full pair of hands. Knowing this, it can’t be a surprise that this might have affected how many worries the average person experiences, and only a step farther to understand that ongoing worries might lead to illness and absence from work.

In the UK, 1 in 4 people suffer from mental illnesses, myself one of those “ones in four”. Recently, the World Health Organisation has reported that four of the ten leading causes of disability in the US and other developed countries are mental disorders, and estimate that, by 2020, major depressive illness will be the leading cause of disability in the world for women and children[i]. 

Before this year, I had never taken time off work related to depression, despite having suffered from it at different points of my life during the last twenty or so years; when I did take time off work, I sometimes related my illness to other causes or sometimes I worked through my illness despite the debilitating nature of the condition on my sense of well-being. In this I exemplify another statistic: that university-educated professionals are less likely to take time off work when depressed, and, if they do, are reluctant to tell their employer the reason why[ii].

Talking to my friends and family members, it is amazing that the statistic is only one in four. Almost everyone I have spoken to has experienced some period of their life where worry has turned to stress or worse. But I never knew about their illnesses / worries before; and they never knew about mine. We were all keeping one big secret from one another.

Employers are required to support any employee returning to work after a period of illness, and to make what are called ‘reasonable adjustments’ during this time. In the light of our secrecy this is hard to fathom. Personally I just don’t know what a reasonable adjustment should be – maybe don’t mark me down as a failure at my job if my eyes tear up in the office one day? Treat me as totally normal is probably the best thing I can think of.

These reasonable adjustments, though, and more direct action to help workers suffering with some kind of mental illness, are imperative for employers to take action on. In Europe, depression is said to cost workplaces £77 billion annually, with the greatest economic loss coming through absenteeism and lost productivity, according to a recent report by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and King’s College London[iii]. 

Many employers have publicly taken steps to pledge their commitment to addressing mental health, through signing the Time to Change pledge to end the mental health stigma and by founding the City of London Mental Health Alliance. This is a start – and only a start – to helping employees know that the companies for whom they work want to support them (and this makes sense. It's not as if doctors have an instant cure; partly why there's so much mystery around mental health).

Further, employers are starting to focus on mental health as a priority topic among the other ‘inclusion and diversity’ focuses, and many like my own employer, have set targets to address mental health awareness and support within their own organisations.

None of this stops me worrying – well – a little, but no more, nor enables me to ditch the medication and the therapy for depression in one fell swoop. However, knowing the statistics tells me my employer has as much to be worried about as I do. It must act to resolve its own, similar worries about an insecure future and potential financial loss. It makes economic sense to do so. Organisations and their employees have to work together to keep going amid the uncertainties that we all continue to face. It remains to be seen which organisations (and employees) will embrace the challenge and come through it stronger.

Seriously, though, we need to worry less!

[i] http://www.nami.org/template.cfm?section=about_mental_illness National Alliance for Mental illness

[ii] http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2014/03/WorkplaceDepression.aspx

[iii] http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2014/03/WorkplaceDepression.aspx