Shoot the damn dog

I’m currently reading the book Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression and it’s… depressing.

I’d thought of reading the book because I wanted to understand depression a little more, as I felt I was a little more susceptible to its callings (for reasons I won’t go into here); and with greater understanding, the theory goes, comes greater resilience to it.

But I had second thoughts about starting the book as I learned the author (Sally Brampton) finally succumbed to her depression and had committed suicide in 2016, about 8 years after the book was published.

Would reading her words help me tackle depression? Would her ideas about what worked and didn’t work for depression mean anything if in the end suicide was the result?

Having almost completed the book now, I must say it wasn’t so much what the author thought worked or didn’t worked (in tackling depression) that so important, but the very raw sharing of the thoughts she had and experiences she went through, making me realise, cliche as it may seem, I’m not alone in this.

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There’s this paragraph that I love because of how something as innocuous as being disinterested in something that would have earlier brought you joy could be a symptom of something much darker:

These days, I rarely think about suicide, unless I happen to be passing through one of my infrequent black holes. On days like that I cannot think, cannot feel but, above all, I cannot connect. I remember standing in my garden, a place that I love, and looking at a flower, blooming on a plant that I had grown from seed. Ordinarily, I take intense pleasure in plants and, being naturally selfish, in plants that I personally have grown, but on that particular day I looked at the flower and felt nothing, not even interest. It was a flower, an object, a thing with no power to rouse admiration or pleasure or wonder.