This Ted talk by Andrew Solomon is very good.

I want to say that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They’re not very effective.They’re extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They’re a disaster. But I am so grateful that I live now and not 50 years ago, when there would have been almost nothing to be done. I hope that 50 years hence, people will hear about my treatments and be appalled that anyone endured such primitive science.

…So now people say, “You take these happy pills, and do you feel happy?” And I don’t. But I don’t feel sad about having to eat lunch, and I don’t feel sad about my answering machine, and I don’t feel sad about taking a shower. I feel more, in fact, I think, because I can feel sadness without nullity.

It’s timely in a week where the Office of National Statistics reports the highest male suicide rates since 2001 (and a rise in all suicides); while women are more likely to suffer from depression, men are more likely to die from it.

Matt Haig, writing in the Guardian about his own depression:

Suicide is now – in places including the UK and US – a leading cause of death, accounting for more than one in 100 fatalities. According to figures from the World Health Organisation, it kills more people than stomach cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, colon cancer, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s. As people who kill themselves are, more often than not, depressives, depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It kills more people than most other forms of violence – warfare, terrorism, domestic abuse, assault, gun crime – put together.

…So what should we do? Talk. Listen. Encourage talking. Encourage listening. Keep adding to the conversation. Stay on the lookout for those wanting to join in the conversation. Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you “admit to”, it is not something you have to blush about, it is a human experience. It is not you. It is simply something that happens to you. And something that can often be eased by talking. Words. Comfort. Support. It took me more than a decade to be able to talk openly, properly, to everyone, about my experience. I soon discovered the act of talking is in itself a therapy. Where talk exists, so does hope.

There’s an honest piece about depression in this week’s Sunday Post by the very talented and exceptionally nice Chae Strathie, whose books make lots of children very happy.  For Strathie the illness wasn’t so much about feeling down – it was about not feeling anything at all. As he puts it, it was more a black hole than a black dog.

It sounds melodramatic now, with the benefit of hindsight. But at the time it was all too real and impossible to see a way out.

Of course, being a Scottish male in public I put on a brave face and told no one about what I was going though. If bottling up emotions was an event in the Commonwealth Games, Scotland would sweep the field. When it comes to keeping schtum about feelings, we’re world-class.

I’ve experienced similar issues, and like Strathie I went to the doctor about it. If you can relate, you should go too.

Robyn Wilder’s description of being an ex-smoker is perfect.

I am a retired cigarette enthusiast, which brings with it the following woes:

• Getting up from my desk at the end of the day and all my joints cracking at once because cigarette breaks are the only breaks I know
• Dreaming that I had a cigarette, and waking up all a-panic
• A sudden passion for biscuits
• Having to ransack the house for a lighter when I want to light a candle
• Unquenchable Haribo Tangfastic addiction
• The three seconds between me telling a smoker I don’t smoke anymore, and them inevitably telling me about all the times they’ve tried to give up
• Those awkward silences at the pub that you can’t break by just fucking off outside for a cigarette
• The fact that my risk of emphysema and various cancers is only slightly reduced. Slightly reduced? Are you kidding me? I have a pot belly now
• Social acceptance from smug, evangelical ex-smokers.

I stopped smoking two years ago today. I don’t miss the cigarettes, but I do miss being thin.

Probably not one for lunchtime, but here’s one for the men: why one man has decided that he’s going to start washing his hands after he urinates.

Fidopiastis says he’s heard all of my hand-washing protestations before, and to all of them he has the same response: “Perianal sweat.”

Fidopiastis’s message isn’t getting much attention, it seems: I’ve had entire nights out where as far as I can tell, I’m the only person who bothers washing after using the bathroom.

[Via The Browser]