The Black Dog

The black dog was a name I’d heard used to  describe depression mainly by people would had had addictive problems. 

So what is, the black dog? I would describe to as the most terrifying form of depression. One minute your fine, your having a laugh with a friend on the phone and feel totally normal. The next, the call ends and suddenly you drop into a bottomless pit. You feel like your on the top of a seventy floor build and the roof has just given way beneath your feet. Your falling threw the air, with bits of debreu fall around you. With no control of you body you drop powerlessly threw the air. You know that there is a floor below and you braise yourself as you know it’s going hurt when hit the floor below, but then it will be okay. Your body jolts for a split second as it hit’s the floor. Then the floor gives way. Each time you drop threw a floor you can feel your body gaining more and more speed and the pain intensifies. You feel you are going beyond the human capacity of pain and your lost in darkness.


As you drop threw the blackness and are lost to humanity. Your life feels empty and the pain in beyond measure. By the time you’ve gone threw the fiftieth floor there is no connection with anything as your sucked into the black abyss. The emotional pain is beyond measure and by this point you just want to kill yourself to end the pain.
It is often said that people who commit suicide are selfish. For those people who have black dog depression, they are beyond the comprehension of how others view them, how they impact on others lives. At this point everything is gone. You feel so empty that the thought that anyone would care about you is beyond belief. It feels like you, have been flatted by a steamroller at speed. Their is no time to think of others, as the darkness comes on you with such force and speed.

I can’t tell what can pull someone back from this. I don’t know if it’s luck or a split second sense of awareness that pulls the person back into this reality. All I can tell you for sure is when your in it, nothing or no one can say or do anything to reach you.

 

In the early eighties my introduction to counselling and therapy was with the Samaritans. I then became interested in clinical psychology, while studying sociology and then counselling.  

 

Over the last two years I’ve experienced the black dog personally so I have sat on both sides of the desk.

 

Depression is a deliberating illness, sometimes caused threw relationship, work, bullying, childhood trauma and or abuse, chemical s that cause reactions in the brain, or when something so horrific and unthinkable happened that brain can not cope and threw depression shuts down.

 

Although this was horrific, I found I couldn’t take prescribed drugs as the side effects were as debilitating as the attacks of the black dog. For most of the last two years I’ve been a wreck.

 

It has been the love and support of friends, quiet a lot of counselling and I have studied herbs to learn what will help me on a day to day basis.

 

Herbs are as powerful as any drug but side effects are positive, as herbs are able to work in more than one area of the body at any given time. Like anything, uses without proper supervision or understanding can be dangerous if the quantities are exceeded or their other medical conditions exist.  

 

It isn’t possible to treat yourself on your own, so please seek help from your Doctor, a herbalist and look for some good counsellors who specialist in this area of work.

 

I wish you well on your journey.

 

Love to all jo x  

  

 

What lies Below

It was a beautiful summers day as I hanging washing out the back. The birds where singing and the air was filled with the scent of flowers,when my neighbour came into the garden, we shared. I had just moved into the property and we hadn’t met before. I started to speak to her while I hang the last of the washing. She leaned against the redbrick wall of the house chatted in a very casual way, between puffs on  her cigarette.

She was younger than myself, as we joked her clear blue eyes sparkled and I warmed to her straight away. I asked her if she had any plans that afternoon and as she don’t. I invited her to come and have a cup of tea and sit in the sun on my balcony. As I had planed to sunbath and read that afternoon and I said she was welcome to join me.

After an hour or of general girlie chit chat about boyfriends and make up extra , I notice she was really hot in her long sleeved blouse. I reassured her that although we living in town, we weren’t over looked as this was the highest building around, as we were girlie she could take your top off  and get some sun to warm her body which was healthy.

She hesitated and then took her top of. My eyes fell on the white skin of her arms and on seeing the slash scares up her arms I said. “ You didn’t want to kill yourself ,this was a cry of help.”

Her eyes fixed on me and she fell silent, for what seemed like an eternity. Then her sparkly blue eyes filled with tears “ You’re the first person in my life to understand.” Her body seemed to go limp as she started to let go of years of pain.

She talked for over three hours. Telling about her childhood, her father left when she was little. Leaving her mother to raise three children of which she was the oldest.

It wasn’t long before he stepfather moved in and how much she hated Friday’s. He would sending her mother out on the game and when they got back from school he would sexually abuse her. Telling her that if she didn’t do as he said he would sexually abuse her younger sister and brother and then beat her mother.

Over the coming months she would regularly appear and we talked. After a while she started to see that life could be different. She’d come and hide with me as she didn’t always want to go shoplifting with her mother but didn‘t feel strong enough to tell her face to face.

We didn’t just talk about her past but talked in general about cooking and many other things. She stopped self harming, as the emptiness inside started to disappear. She began to understand herself and organise her feelings, gaining inner strength and develop a new identity.

Self harming isn’t about making yourself bleed, to the person trapped inside their body feeling frightened and unable to communicate when emptiness is so endless it’s away of reminding themselves that they are still alive and can feel.

These people, are our beautiful and fragile, who need our help to find their way home.

Love to all jo x