Richards The Happy Depressive

How to live, thrive and survive with chronic depression
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80381-861-0
Verlag: Grosvenor House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 154 Seiten

Would you like to be a Happy Depressive? Do you live with chronic depression and face the prospect of living with this condition for the rest of your life? Or do you care for someone who does? Does this sometimes make you feel helpless and alone? Wouldn't it be great to have a good friend who understood how you feel? Who has been through the same struggles and found a way to cope and be happy? You could pull up a chair, put the kettle on or open a bottle, and talk without shame about your shared experiences. It is rare for us to find that person, so let this book be that friend. Steve Richards has lived with depression for almost 40 years and plans to live with it for much longer. In The Happy Depressive he shares his own life experiences with frankness and honesty and explains how depression has affected him along the way. He also describes in detail the coping strategies that have helped him live a happy and fulfilling life. Happy Depressives do exist, and he invites you to join their ranks.

Steve Richards was born and raised in South Wales. He was imbued with the Welsh love of language from an early age. At school he was torn between his love of English, literature and storytelling and his aptitude for mathematics and physics. He chose the latter and enjoyed an interesting professional life, firstly as a civil engineer working on major transport projects and later as a technical advisor to the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg. Throughout his working years he tried hard to keep his creative side alive, using the small gaps a busy career offers to write short stories and articles on subjects close to his heart. He also pursued private study of psychology and on retirement took the masters level course he had always dreamed of completing. In retirement he spends most of his time on voluntary work with young people, particularly disadvantaged teenagers: working with boys to encourage alternative and positive models of masculinity; working in schools to improve sex and relationship education; and with young offenders undertaking community service. He is married to Anne who helps him cope with life and has the dubious honour of being the first to read everything he writes. He is not a professional counsellor or therapist but offers something which those professionals may lack - lived experience. He has suffered from depression since his late twenties but has lived a fulfilling and happy life and hopes to do so for many years to come.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Richards, Steve

Leseproben

2

Two Voices

It was my first job out of college, working in a design office in the thriving metropolis of Sidcup in Kent, and I was already bored. My first task was to design some reinforced concrete beams for a power station in Paraguay. The first time I did this I was quite excited as it was much more practical and real than anything I did at college. Within days of me finishing the design and signing off the drawings, real people in Paraguay were going to be building that beam. The two hundredth time I did that, six months later, the excitement had waned – and there were still many beams to go.

Sitting at my desk, with my Concrete Designers Handbook open, and trying to build up enthusiasm for beam number 201, I got a slightly ominous call. It was from the MD’s secretary and he wanted to see me straight away.

I went up to his office on the top floor and found him with one of the directors and they asked me to take a seat.

“How are things going Steve?” asked the MD. “Are you settling in OK?

“Yes thank you sir. Beavering away on the Paraguay substations.”

“Excellent, excellent. You ever done any surveying?”

I had the feeling that the right answer was yes. It wasn’t a total lie – I had done a two-week surveying field trip at university. We mainly got drunk and terrorised the locals. One night the rugby boys decided to raid the girls’ dorm and scare a load of botanists half to death, and nearly got sent home. In the day we did learn the basics of how to use a level and a theodolite so that counts surely?

So I said, “Yes sir. Why?”

“Daniel here is running our Philippines Mini-Hydro project and we need someone to go out for three months and do a spot of surveying for the feasibility stage. You up for that?”

“Definitely, sir.”

“OK, he will fill you in. You will need to leave next Monday. Have a great time.”

I knew the right answer was yes. Voice 1 had told me so.

Later that day voice 2 woke up.

“Surveying? What do you know about surveying?

“Why didn’t you tell them you only had two weeks mucking about in the Buckinghamshire countryside?”

Voice 1 had the answer. “Because then they wouldn’t have sent me.”

“Exactly, they would have sent somebody who knew what they were doing, not someone who is going to screw up. In the Philippines of all places – you have never been further than Spain and then you were freaked out because they didn’t speak English.”

“I expect they will have translators.”

“You know even less about hydro power – what is a mini hydro anyway? Richards you are a damn fool.”

I was twenty-one – only six months out of university. It was about five years before I consider my depression really started, yet I was already familiar with the two voices in my head. Not truly voices of course, more streams of thought, but streams which seemed to come from two entirely different people. Voice 1, who I later came to think of as the real me, was rational and confident. He knew that I was clever and adaptable, that I had rarely failed at anything I tried, and he was bored and craved adventure. Voice 2, who I later came to view as the voice of depression, was Mr Negative. He was the stoker of my fear of failure and delighted in telling me how many ways that failure might come. Learning how to manage these two voices would become key to my survival as a happy depressive. So in my case of the job in the Philippines let’s see who was right.

The first thing I needed to do was break it to my then girlfriend (now wife) that in less than a week I was going away for three months. I told her in Safeways and she claims that we were halfway through the weekly shop when I casually said

“Oh, by the way, I have to go the Philippines for three months.”

“What? When?”

“Next Monday.”

She thought I was joking. She still teases me about this today.

A week later I was flying Club Class on Cathay Pacific to Manila. (This distorted my idea of what air travel was like for years to come. I had only ever been on one package holiday flight to Spain before this. Now I was reclining in my own private berth on a plane and being served delicious food with real cutlery. It was a long time before I got that treatment again.)

We had a three-hour stopover in Hong Kong and this is where Voice 2 scored his first points. As I left the cabin to walk down the steps to the bus I almost took a step back in shock. I remember feeling like someone had turned on a powerful hairdryer and aimed it up my trouser legs as the heat and humidity hit me. I managed to recover without stepping on any toes and walked down to the airconditioned bus, by which time I had a film of sweat all over my body.

“So you are going to spend three months outside surveying in this heat eh? Good luck boyo.”

By the time we reached Manila it was late and I was braced for the temperatures so it was less of a shock, but Voice 2 was chuckling away and telling me how unprepared I was. He would have a few more victories over the coming three months. The first of which came on my second night.

I had arrived about 1 am and tried to go to sleep but for me it was about 9 in the morning and there was no way I could persuade my body to sleep. I reported to the office the next day highly jet-lagged and met my new boss, Vernon. He was very short, with a bald head and a bushy beard and was almost as wide as he was tall. He was an enthusiastic rugby player who was hooker for the expat team in Manila. I had experienced the Welsh version of the rugby boys at home, with a very working-class machismo I found intimidating. At college I had met the English version – just as intimidating but posh with it. Vernon was a prime example of the latter, and I immediately knew I could not confide my uncertainty about my surveying skills to this guy.

“He is going to eat you for breakfast,” Voice 2 gloated.

At the end of the working day, when all I wanted to do was collapse into bed, Vernon announced that he and the rest of the team were going to show me around Manila. I dutifully changed and met the others outside my hotel in the relatively quiet business district of Makati. They took me to a few local bars then we took a taxi to another district where the “girlie bars” were located.

As soon we left the taxi scantily clad young women were calling “Hey Joe, want some company” at us and trying to drag us into their bar. Vernon clearly had a particular destination in mind so we fought our way through and made it to the one he had chosen. Within minutes we were sat at the bar while women wearing even less crowded around us and sat on our laps while those wearing nothing at all danced above us. I was terrified. I tried not to put my hands anywhere too rude while I longed for my bed.

“You are well out of your depth, boyo,” said a familiar voice.

It was well over a month before I dared to leave my hotel at night (though it turns out that with practice and exposure you can get used to semi-naked women sitting on your lap).

His next victory came after our first trip into Northern Luzon. Outside of the urban areas most of the Philippines was made up of flatlands, with a patchwork quilt of paddy fields, and hills covered in light jungle. It was not how most westerners picture jungle, which is more accurately rainforest, but a drier tangle of slender trees and bamboo which is quite difficult to penetrate once off the many logging trails used to transport timber.

We were checking out a potential site for a mini-hydro station and Vernon led us on a 13km route march up the mountain to the proposed dam site. We had to hack our way through the bamboo to find the site and then made our way back down the river to where the power station and turbines would be located. I was young and relatively fit but not used to that climate.

That night back in the hotel I started to get terrible stomach cramps and a headache from hell and had to call the hotel doctor. He told me I was severely dehydrated and that it was not enough to drink a lot on such trips but I also needed to take in enough salt to replace what was lost during perspiration. I spent two days in bed drinking litres of rehydration fluids (a disgusting salty mix of essential minerals) before I could return to work.

“Ha – I told you in Hong Kong you were not up to this you wimp. What are you going to be like when you have to do a survey as well as climb a mountain?” The answer, it turned out, was pretty rubbish.

Vernon introduced me to the equipment I was to use in my surveys. It was a very fancy piece of kit which not only measured differences in height (or level as we called it) but also distances and angles (the measurements made by a theodolite). He demonstrated how it works and it did not seem a world apart from instruments I had used at college so my confidence rose a little.

When it was time to go back to site and do the survey I travelled up alone with my driver, Pedro, by Land Rover. We stopped by the local electricity co-op to pick up my crew, then went on to Jaen, where the station would be built. Using my combined level/theodolite I made a “traverse” – i.e. we made our way up the mountain path measuring the increases in height from our starting point and the direction we were travelling in. When we got to the path through the bamboo we used our machetes (called “bolos” in the Filipino language Tagalog) to try and widen the track as much as we could so we could make sightings through the instrument, which we had to set up hundreds of times on its tripod. Once we reached the dam site on the river we turned and traversed...