When darkness falls
Depression is such a strange thing to happen to you. People refer to it as a black dog sitting on your shoulder waiting to pounce, and that is a good description because once you’ve had depression there is always the fear it will leap on you and completely smother you in darkness.
My first depressive episode happened when I was 19, working at The Auckland Star as a cadet reporter and living in a flat in Mt Eden. My boyfriend of two years and I had just broken up, he had moved out, I was living on my own and I wasn’t dealing with it very well.
I stopped eating, I got sick and my parents eventually picked me up and brought me home, where I would eat only yoghurt and lie in bed all day for two weeks.
They took me to the doctor, who could find nothing wrong with me and sent me home.
These days I’m fairly sure a diagnosis of depression would be made and a script for antidepressants written out. But this was 1981 and everyone just hoped I would come right.
Which I did. Got myself off the couch, fitted into some size eight jeans, went back to work and tried not to think much about it.
In years to come I would have some more bad times, which I called breakdowns, but they were never for too long, usually brought on by a life event – usually a relationship problem – and then I would come right.
But then in 1992 my third child, Virginia, died of cot death. I picked myself
