It's so uplifting and inspiring when you start the day off right, isn't it? Well I wouldn't know, actually, because I'm pretty sure that's never happened to me and it certainly didn't this morning.
First of all I slept in. When I finally woke I was so completely exhausted still that it took me a while to keep my eyes open long enough to actually get up. Then there was the hunting like a headless chicken for something to wear, the phone (both my mobile and landline) refusing to work when I called for a taxi, the traffic, the weather, etc etc.
Then there was the radio in the taxi. It was the Nolan show, a very well known and popular talk radio show on Radio Ulster in the mornings with a bloke called Stephen Nolan who lives to sensationalise and antagonise. But he was being reasonably sensible this morning - when I got into the taxi, there was a discussion about tourism infrastructure in Northern Ireland. Someone called in saying that there's nothing for families and children to do here because there's no rollercoasters. And the taxi driver was all 'Aye, right nuff, there's nathin like that here, like rollercoasters or annyhin' (actually there is, in Portrush, a very well known amusements park called Barry's. It's not massive, but it does have some of those types of things). Now, I personally object to that because I think we have much better things for kids to see and do here - my 6 nieces and nephews had a ball at the various tourist/museum type attractions that we took them to last summer. The Giant's Causeway, the Ulster Museum, the Folk and Transport Museum - they loved it. But whatever, I wasn't going to get into a debate with this guy over something like that.
Then the next item on the show started. It was Alastair Campbell talking about his new book The Happy Depressive which talks about his problems with depression, with alcohol abuse and his mental breakdown in the 1980s. Obviously this is something I was rather interested in. But the taxi driver started scoffing and laughing - 'Why on earth would he think anyone would want to read annyhin like that, like? Sure who'd wanna read sumhin about depression?' etc etc etc. He looked at me in the mirror like he expected me to join in his laughter and mock a person with depression who's had the audacity to write about it.
I know this wasn't the worst thing in the world for him to say on the subject, but something about his attitude just really irked me. He seemed like a fairly stereotypical working class Belfast man - and there has been a huge, huge problem with suicide amongst that very group. Swathes of young men all over Belfast (usually in working class and/or deprived areas) have been taking their own lives, and it's been a problem that the authorities have been struggling to deal with for years now. That he could be so utterly untouched by any sort of mental illness in his family, his friends, colleagues, anyone that he knows seems highly unlikely to me, therefore. But he had such an overwhelming sense of ignorance about it that I found it really bothering me. Thankfully this all happened towards the end of the journey, so I didn't have to deal with too much about it. But I really felt like just telling him 'I have depression, that several of my friends do/have had, and that I find it both interesting and important that someone like Campbell should write a book about this because we need any help we can get to knock down the ignorance and stigma towards the disease from idiots like you' to see what he'd say. But of course, I didn't. I'm just writing a ranty blog instead.
I get that people don't understand this. It's a very hard thing to understand if you haven't experienced it yourself, and even then everyone's experience is different. And I know that there are some people who are just a bit judgmental and think that you have to just pull yourself together. Those people, I tend to think, are just blocking out their own feelings. It's very often a sort of knee-jerk reaction that suggests to me that it's almost hitting a sore spot, like they have their own crap to sort out but they're just ignoring it and don't want to acknowledge that there's a different way to do things, or that different people might think differently.
But that someone could find it *funny* that a person was sharing their story of mental ill-health with others, who couldn't possibly get their head around the idea that there might be people interested in this - it just blew my mind a little bit. How could a person be so utterly ignorant of the world in which they live? How could you live in a city where suicide is a huge problem, and there are constantly public health drives against it, and find depression amusing? And to think that expressing that in public is perfectly ok? To not even consider that the person you're talking to might have some experience of depression, either personally or through friends or family? I just don't get that.
And mostly it's just incredibly sad that this is what we have to deal with, this is the sort of attitude that exists out there that has to be challenged. It's hardly any wonder that people don't want to talk about it, don't want to admit to it, when this is the sort of thing you're faced with.
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