Ben Locker talks about his experiences of living with depression

He has just been elected as the new councillor for Mile End, Colchester, and plans to champion mental health issues.

Here, he speaks frankly about his experiences of living with depression.

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DEPRESSION isn’t just about feeling sad.

It’s part of it, but to compare the life-sapping melancholy of depression to normal sadness is like comparing a paper cut to an amputation.

Sadness is part of every life. Depression eats away your whole being from the inside.

It’s with you when you wake, telling you there’s nothing or anyone to get up for. It’s with you when the phone rings and you’re too frightened to answer it.

It’s with you when you look into the eyes of those you love, and your eyes prick with tears as you try, and fail, to remember how to love them.

It’s with you as you search within for those now eroded things that once made you who you were: your interests, your creativity, your inquisitiveness, your humour, your warmth.

It’s with you as you wake terrified from each nightmare and pace the house, thinking frantically of how you can escape your poisoned life; escape the embrace of the black dog that is eating away your mind like a slowdrip of acid.

Always, the biggest stigma comes from yourself. You blame yourself for the illness you can only dimly see.

Like so many others, I suffer from depression. I also thought I was strong enough to resist it, but I was wrong.

Let me take you back to 1996. I’d just begun my final year at university and had visited my doctor to complain of feeling low.

He prescribed an antidepressant and the effects were remarkable.

About six weeks in I was leaping from my bed each morning with a vigour and enthusiasm I had never experienced. My mind began to make connections with an ease that it had never done before.

The only problem was the drug did much more. It broke down any fragile sense I had of social appropriateness.

I’d frequently say ridiculous and painful things to people I had no right to say them to.

So, after a few months, I decided to stop the pills and spent a week or two experiencing brain zaps and vertigo. But it was worth it. I still felt good, my mind was still productive, and I regained my sense of social niceties and appropriate behaviour.

I had hoped that was my last brush with mental health problems, but it wasn’t. On reflection, I have spent over a decade dipping in and out of minor bouts of depression – each one slightly worse than the last.

Last spring I experienced a crippling bout of depression. I couldn’t work. I began retreating to the safety of my bed – using sleep to escape from myself and my exhausted and joyless existence.

So I returned to the doctor. “I think we should test your thyroid,”

she said.

“But an antidepressant might help in the meantime.”

Here I realised that, although I didn’t stigmatise mental illness in others, I stigmatised it in myself. I hoped my thyroid was bust. Tell someone your thyroid’s not working, and they’ll understand and wait for you to recover. Tell them you’re depressed, and they might think you’re weak, or lazy or lying.

The tests confirmed my thyroid was fine, so I stuck with the antidepressant.

A month into the course, the poisonous cloud began to lift and I even felt my creativity and urge to write begin to return.

My wife said: “You’re becoming more like the person I first met.”

The drug had givenme objectivity about my illness, made me view it for what it was. I realised I had been going through cycles of depression for years. It was a process of gradual erosion, almost impossible to spot while you were experiencing it.

But the effects of the drug didn’t last. By September I was deeply depressed again and returned to the doctor. I was given a more powerful prescription.

Again, the initial effects were miraculous and my engagement and interest came flooding back.

But the respite was short lived.

By February I was haunted and helpless again – and I’ve cycled fromdespair to fragile health ever since.

I’m now in the hands of a psychiatrist, who has boosted my medication and referred me to a therapist. It’s early days, but I am regaining hope and becoming more productive – although the last year has almost wrecked my sanity and my livelihood. Step by step I’m getting back on my feet.

So if you know someone with mental illness, please remember two things. One, it could easily happen to you. And two, no one stigmatises their illness more than the people who suffer from it. Reach out to them.