Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression Read Online Free PDF

claw stuck fast. I cannot eat. I can scarcely breathe. It is ten months since I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression, months without beginning or end. Time moves like treacle, running thick and heavy through my days.
    I hate this flat. It is beautiful, a mansion flat two floors up with high ceilings and ornate fireplaces, but I know that behind the façade, the walls are running with tears. My tears. Pain has seeped into the plaster.
    The flat is laid out in two parts, with a long, narrow corridor connecting the two. At one end there is a large, light-filled sitting room and two bedrooms, Molly’s and mine. The rooms are painted cream and white, testament to an earlier time when I tried to decorate myself out of the dark.
    My bedroom is small; kept dark by the linen curtains which I made myself and which I keep shut fast against the day. The white duvet cover has scorch marks in it from the cigarettes I smoke in the dead of night when I am dragged from sleep by some unknown, unseen terror, but too dazed with sleeping pills to know what I am doing.
    At the other end of the corridor is the kitchen, and my study, where I rarely go. Sometimes I venture in to sit at my computer in front of the dead, blank screen and flick idly through my piles of books. They are dusty and sad, with a long neglected air. I never stay in there for long.
    The kitchen is huge and half finished, as if somebody has abandoned it in despair. They have. It was me. I decorated half of the flat and then I simply gave up. There are no units, just a few rudimentary cupboards; the fridge is ancient and most of the shelves in it have collapsed. The hot water tap is stuck fast. I haven’t the energy to call a plumber. I’m not sure that I even know how. Sometimes this strikes me as odd. I used to head up a staff of forty and handle a budget of millions. Now, I can’t even call a plumber so I wash up by boiling a kettle for hot water. I no longer think that’s strange. I think it’s normal. When they come to visit, I see the way my friends look at the kettle and then at me. I don’t know how to explain, so I say nothing.
    As I walk down the corridor, I keep my hands pressed to the wall because I am shaking so hard I can hardly stand. The next thing I know, I am flat on the ground, my face pressed into the carpet. I think, how did this happen? Did I stumble and fall? I have no recollection of it. It was as if some great hand took me by the throat and flung me to the ground. If I hadn’t been here, I wouldn’t have believed me. I tear at my throat, uselessly, trying to pull the monster away. I think, I will die now. There is no other way.
    Or, just one. Vodka. When the pain is this bad, I know of no better anaesthetic than vodka. No prescribed tranquilliser comes close. Believe me, in the past few months I’ve taken them all, with my psychiatrist’s blessing.
    He does not bless alcohol but then he’s not in the state I’m in. Nor, oh lucky man, has he ever been. Sometimes I think only those who have suffered severe depression should be allowed to treat those with severe depression. I am sick and tired of theory. I have put on a stone in six weeks. My body feels spongy and heavy, weirdly unfamiliar. It is as if my flesh has been pumped full of a thick viscous liquid. I complain about this to my psychiatrist.
    ‘You should not put on weight on these particular pills.’
    ‘Well, I have. And I hardly eat.’
    ‘There is no evidence to suggest that this medication affects the metabolism.’
    I say, ‘I am the evidence.’
    Just as I am the evidence that antidepressant medication does not work. Or at least, it does not appear to work on me. We have tried four different types; nothing seems able to lift this dark despair. The most recent makes me shake so badly that at times I can’t hold a cup of tea or a pen. I cannot even write my own name. It also, if that is possible, makes the throat monster worse.
    ‘It may be the illness reasserting