Anxiety and depression in an evangelical context: part 2

(Part 1 is here.)

Crises

For instance, there was my visit to the Christian Booksellers’ Convention at the Wembley Conference Centre in London in 1979. In the weeks before, I’d been anxious and low, and probably should have abandoned the trip. But I went, driven perhaps by a determination to keep going. Or maybe it was simply that carrying on with what has been planned, despite its painfulness, is after all the easy option, less stressful than facing up to reality and making changes.

The night before leaving, I watched the last episode of one of the early TV series of All Creatures Great and Small, based on James Herriot’s books about a vet, practicing in Yorkshire in the late 1930s. I’d watched most of the previous programmes, and had enjoyed these gentle rural stories with their minor personal and veterinary crises, which for the most part came to a positive, satisfying conclusion.

But the story I watched before my trip to London ended with Herriot heading off to serve in World War Two, sitting in a black taxi, sadly waving goodbye to his wife as he was driven away into uncertainty. Watching this on a bleak, black-and-white monitor I was sucked  into a cloud of desperate melancholy. Herriot was turning his back on the joy, security, and routine which he (and I as a viewer) had come to love. My anxiety at the thought of leaving for London fed on the sadness of his departure for the war, even though I knew that unlike him, I would be gone for just a few days.

Then immediately after the end of the Herriot show, I switched channels just in time to hear a trailer in which a sepulchral voice intoned ‘Possessed by the devil’ over eerie, flickering graphics.  I turned off immediately, but not before I was pierced by. Were my thoughts, I wondered, animated by a demon within me?

Next day, I grimly caught the train at Glasgow Central Station, and headed south to Euston. I forced myself through the daily routine of attending  conference proceedings and viewing  publishers’ stands, but nothing I did seemed real. It was as if everything I saw, everyone I spoke to was on the far side of a pane of glass, and that I was shrouded in an anaesthetising mist which prevented me from connecting with reality. I knew several of the other delegates, and could of course have asked any of them for help and encouragement, but this idea didn’t occur to me – perhaps the thought of revealing my vulnerability simply raised the tension levels still more.

The only positive experience I remember having in the course of the week was sitting back and watching a programme from the brilliant Whitehall comedy series Yes Minister – it was the first time I’d come across the show, and the wit and ingenuity of it gave me a brief, healing respite.

I’d booked a seat on a late afternoon train on the day I was due to come home to give me time to explore London before catching it. But a claustrophobic Tube journey, and the terrible slow progress up the lift shaft from a deep station platform close to the Imperial War Museum left me so on edge and detached from reality that I was totally unable to concentrate as I wandered round the Museum. I simply wanted to get home, decided to catch an earlier train, and headed back to the station. Since my ticket wasn’t transferable, I had to buy a new one. Too restless to stand patiently in the queue for a 2^nd class ticket, I went to the 1^st class window, at which there was no queue and asked for a single to Glasgow, It was the first and only time I have ever travelled First Class!

My parents met me at Central Station. I saw them standing on the concourse as I walked along the platform towards the ticket barrier, my mother stony-faced. She was never particularly understanding of my problems, and I never felt able to discuss them freely with her. I suspect she may have regarded mental health problems in any form as somehow shameful, and I also suspect that my symptoms may have mirrored things in her own heart which she was struggling to deny. Once, when I’d talked just a little to my folks about what I was feeling, she exclaimed, referring to the local hospital for people with mental health problems ‘You’ll have me in Hartwood!’ After childhood, I never felt completely comfortable or secure in her presence.

There was another crisis the time I went to Denny to give an evening talk to a group at the Baptist Church.  They’d asked for a representative from Scripture Union to give a presentation on the organisation’s work, and I’d offered to go. As I drove through the darkness towards Denny at the end of a busy day, I felt a rising sense of panic. When I arrived, I found there wasn’t a large crowd. All I had to do was to give a short talk, and then screen and talk the audience through a series of colour transparencies. As I set up my equipment, the anxiety was mounting, and so before the meeting began, I nipped into the loo and took a valium tablet from the emergency supply with which my doctor had thoughtfully supplied me.

But there wasn’t time for it to take effect before I stood up to speak, and my heart began racing so fast that I didn’t see how I could possibly survive. But despite this, it seemed easier to continue attempting to talk rather than to admit something was wrong and ask for help.  I kept speaking,  struggling to contain the volcano of panic. It was as though my mind detached itself from my body – at one level, I was acutely aware of the physical turmoil, the trembling hands and the pounding heart, while at a calmer level high above the storm my mind continued generating thoughts and words and sentences which my lips were able to express. Eventually, the fear subsided a little, and I made it through to the end of the meeting, totally exhausted.

Then there was the time I went the theatre in Glasgow with a couple of colleagues, Elizabeth and Barbara to see Hamlet. I hadn’t been to the theatre often, but recently I’d seen a performance of Macbeth with a group of friends from church, and as I looked down from our seats high up in the gods had been captivated by the quality both of the performance and of the language and I was hoping for a similarly enriching evening. This time, we sat in a short row of seats immediately above the stage on which an extremely energetic Hamlet  sweated his way through his angst.  The stage set was minimalist.

Sometime after the performance began, when we’d already begun dipping into the box of chocolates we’d brought with us, my heart began racing for no apparent reason. It wasn’t that I was particularly empathising with the disturbed Prince of Denmark, or distressed by anything he said. I guess the episode was triggered by the dramatic lighting effects and the pervasive atmosphere of tense, raw emotion. I began taking deep breaths, trying to control the panic and the pounding heart, while at the same time part of my mind was clinically monitoring my pulse rate – well over three hundred a minute it seemed.

I expected to die where I was sitting, and simply accepted this as a fact. I could have got up and run, but there was nowhere to run to. Somehow, I survived to the end of the performance, said good-night to my colleagues, and collapsed into my car, weak and trembling. A few days later, I had to make a return visit to another Glasgow theatre, the Pavilion, taking a group of kids from our church Sunday School to the panto. I was dreading this, but whether because the Pavilion’s cheap, tawdry environment and the excruciating awfulness of the panto made for a less emotionally charged experience than Hamlet, or because I’d raided the emergency valium supply beforehand, I survived that particular challenge relatively unscathed.

After leaving Scripture Union, I spent a few years as school librarian at Airdrie Academy in Lanarkshire. Again I felt rising panic when I’d to present library skills classes to groups of kids, alleviated by the occasional valium, and even greater panic on occasion when I was confronted with a group of pupils crowding round my desk, impatient to have their books marked out, and I knew I’d have to stand there recording transaction after transaction until I’d stamped the due date in the final pupil’s last book.

After my time at the school, I took up a post in the Educational Resource Service in Hamilton which involved providing a library service to Primary Schools throughout Lanarkshire. The most imaginative aspect of this work was the development of themed learning exhibitions for pupils – which included books, pictures, audio and video presentations and computer software running on a BBC microcomputer. My colleagues and I would take it in turns to visit schools with the current exhibition displayed in a mobile classroom, and would work with small groups of children.

Each of the subjects we covered related to one level or another of the school curriculum. My favourite, I think was the three-part exhibition based on Kathleen Fidler’s children’s novel, The Desperate Journey. The first part of this project focussed on the crafting community in the Golspie area of Sutherland in the early 19^th century, the second on life in an industrialising Glasgow where the characters in Fidler’s story move following being cleared from their croft, and the third on the developing Red River Settlement in Canada, their ultimate destination.

On a typical day’s visit to a school with, say, the Highland Clearance module, I’d climb into the mobile van at my base first thing in the morning with our highly-individualistic driver Harry. His involvement made our own journeys rather desperate, as he seemed to have a phobia of motorways, would never return home by the same route he’d taken on the outward journey, and slammed on the brakes whenever he saw some interesting debris lying on the road, before jumping out of the cab to assess its potential salvage value..

On arrival in the appropriate school playground, the first task was to set up the exhibition for the day, unpacking all the items which had been protected with bubble-wrap to keep them safe on the journey, displaying the books and artefacts on the shelves, and switching on the computer. It took about thirty minutes to get organised before I was ready to welcome the first group of children.

I’d normally work with one class per visit – the kids would come out to the van in groups of six or seven, and I’d guide them through the learning process. Some days – or perhaps most days for some of the time - I was able to lose myself healingly in what I was doing, in the creative interaction with the pupils – at one school, in fact, a visiting HMI came out to observe me at work and described me, to my considerable delight,  as ‘a skilful educator.’

But I’d frequently feel stressed during these visits, constantly anxious that I’d panic, that I’d be unable to make it to the end of the forty-five minute session with the current group of children. I found a series of consecutive daily visits to schools very wearing, and one morning, having driven to work, and travelled with my eccentric driver to that day’s destination, and wrestled the Victorian exhibition into place (checking that the mannequin’s clothes were uncrumpled; tying the replica fire-place in position; ensuring that the crêpe-paper flame in the grate looked as realistic as possible; wiping the previous day’s dust off the aspidistra’s leaves; and unpacking and displaying a cornucopia of objects ranging from wood-and-leather bellows to an authentic sampler stitched by a young girl in 1804) I had had enough.  I remember leaning my head against one of the shelves, and muttering melodramatically to myself ‘They’re asking me to give more than I’ve got to give!’

Somehow, I made it through the day. That evening, instead of going home to my flat, I drove to my parents’ house and burst into tears. The next morning, I saw a doctor (not my own GP) who signed me off for three weeks. This, frankly, was not the right decision. What I needed was help and encouragement to cope with my job, rather than space away from it. My work was not really the issue, and three weeks of introspection at home without the healing therapy, and the sense of purpose and satisfaction which working gave me on the better days could only make my outlook increasingly negative.

Once final crisis. In 1989, I signed up to go on a holiday for Christian single people somewhere in Wales. This was actually a very positive move. I’d gone out with a woman for a few months a couple of summers previously, and though in the end we decided we weren’t right for one another, I’m eternally grateful to her for all I learned from the experience. I was still looking for someone special to share my life with, and I had the courage and confidence to book the week in Wales.

Unfortunately, as the date of the holiday drew closer, I felt less and less positive about my ability to cope with it, until I was struggling daily in a mist of anxious lethargy. I knew some folk who lived in Wigan in the north of England, and they kindly invited me to stay overnight with them to break my journey.

I was due to leave from work on the Friday at lunch time. The night before I had a dream which I guess was pure gangster-film cliché, although I’ve never actually seen anything like it on-screen. I was the victim of a gang of thugs. I’m sure there was a reason for their antagonism, but I can’t recall it. They held me upright in a wooden tub, and poured concrete around my feet. Once it had set (which in my dream it seemed to do with inordinate speed) I was casually tossed into the deep end of a swimming pool where my chances of survival were zero!

The next day I headed south from Hamilton, feeling particularly gloomy and tense. The traffic on the motorway was heavy, and there were frequent delays. Anxiety filled my bladder frequently – I’d to stop to go to the toilet at every available opportunity. The Motorway Services seemed too far apart, and the delays due to traffic congestion had me worrying  I might not make it in time.

Eventually I arrived in Wigan, where I was warmly welcomed, and given a demonstration of Richard’s model railway (he raised his eyebrows disapprovingly when I referred to it as a ‘train set’) which filled half of the front room. We had a meal, and then sat chatting. Throughout the evening, I struggled to hold back a tsunami of panic, attempting and to converse without revealing the inner turmoil, and to interact normally. I didn’t know these folk well enough to crack up in their living room.

Finally, I escaped upstairs, and went to bed in the little room over the front door, but I slept badly. The traffic rumbling past outside didn’t help, but the main stressors were fears about the long journey to Wales which still lay ahead, uncertainties about the singles holiday, and my sense of complete inadequacy to cope with either. Sometime during the night, I made the decision to abandon my trip, and head back north.

I was up early, and I remember sitting on the edge of the bed waiting until it was a reasonable time to go down for breakfast, and leafing through one of the books in the room – it was the poet Sir John Betjeman’s children’s story about the adventures of his teddy Archie and the Strict Baptists.

I shared breakfast with my hosts (who, incidentally, were strict Baptists) and waved goodbye to them, saying nothing about my decision to return home, and even, when they invited me to drop in and stay over with them  on my way back north, lied that I’d keep this kind invitation in mind. At the motorway interchange, I took the slip-road heading in the direction of Scotland with a great sense of relief.

By mid-afternoon, I was back in Crossford in Lanarkshire where my parents lived. I stopped at a call box and phoned the people in Wales to say I couldn’t make it, and then called my folks to tell them I was in Crossford, not Caernarvon, and that I’d be on their doorstep in about two minutes – it seemed better to phone first rather than arriving unannounced. I had this delicious sense of having reached a secure place.

It wasn’t like that, of course, because the insecurity lay within me, and back at home on the Monday morning, facing the two empty weeks of annual leave which lay ahead I was once again in the grip of the familiar dread.

These were some of the particular moments of crises during those thirteen difficult years. The rest of the time, I engaged in a daily struggle with my untamed emotions, but I simply couldn’t have coped without the help I received.

(Part 3 is here.)