Sally Brampton is an unlikely poster girl for clinical depression. She was the founding editor of British Elle and has written several successful novels. She belongs to a world of glamour and high achievement, fancy lunches and designer clothes. You would not expect to find her curled up under her duvet, immobilised by a storm of sobbing, or chain-smoking in a locked psychiatric ward. You certainly would not expect this alpha female to take an overdose of hoarded tablets because living had become unbearable. The depressive’s longing to die, says Brampton, is “not a character failing or moral flaw. Nor is it, truly, a desire to die so much as a fervent wish not to go on living”.

Piquantly, she owes her life to one of the most troubling aspects ofher illness. “There is still a common belief,” she says, “that depression is simply a chemical imbalance of the mind that requires chemical intervention.” Butnothing about this condition is simple. Brampton had “treatment-resistant depression”, which means that drugs do not work.Throughout her long, frustrating illness all kinds of medication was tried – often with terrifying side-effects such as sweating and shaking – and nothing killed the pain. But at least her inbuilt resistance meant that she woke up from her attempted suicide.

In Shoot the Damn Dog (a reference to Churchill’s Black Dog), Brampton’s obsessively honest, angry account of the disorder that nearly destroyed her, she aims to explode the myth that depression happens only to losers. “Although I dislike the confessional,” she says, “I was (and continue to be) so repulsed by the stigma around depression that I determined I must stand up and be counted.” She is indignant about the secrecy, the shame that surrounds this illness.

Clinical depression, which affects 10% of the population at any one time, is not to be confused with laziness, malingering or feeling a bit low. It has no connection with a person’s moral fibre, and it does not dim the sufferer’s intelligence. Just as her body resisted drugs, Brampton’s steely mind resisted therapy. She was in the depths of despair, barely able to get out of bed, yet she never lost her sense of who she was – and a woman who has edited Elle cannot be expected to place much faith in a therapist with “unkempt hair who wore, to my cynical and weary eyes, a series of unnecessary scarves”. (This style of dressing, so popular with the therapeutic community, should be called “shrink-wrap”).

Eventually, Brampton accepted that she needed to make a proper study of the emotional landscape of her childhood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since so many of her anxieties concerned impermanence, it was alarmingly nomadic. Her father worked for Shell, and the family moved all over the world. Brampton and her two brothers were sent to boarding schools in England. At home, there was a fear of expressing emotion. “As one therapist told me,” she says, “I have been beautifully trained to have no needs or, when I had them, to deny them.” Both her brothers later suffered from depression, and a close examination of the family history convinces her that her illness has a strong genetic component.

Brampton’s writing about her parents is fascinating. She learns that their odd habits are signs of recognised medical conditions. Her mother suffered from “dysthymia”, a low-level form of depression. Her father discovered, belatedly, that he was likely to have Asperger’s Syndrome. Asperger’s is on the autistic spectrum, and though sufferers can be perfectly functional, they often have difficulty reading people’s feelings. From early childhood, Brampton was encouraged to swallow and reabsorb her emotions, until she lost the power to express them.

This brave and moving memoir challenges all the clichés about mental illness. By the time her affliction was diagnosed, Brampton had been self-medicating with alcohol, and she urges a greater understanding of and compassion for addictions that may be covering severe depression. “How do you help somebody who is depressed? . . . treat them as you would any other ill person.” All who know the pain of depression will find the book immensely useful, and so will their friends and relations. “I wish,” Brampton says, “that I had not spent so long trying to manage the unmanageable because I was so ashamed.”

SHOOT THE DAMN DOG by Sally Brampton
Bloomsbury £14.99 pp326

Available at the Books First price of £14.39 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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