Newly published research has found that depression – compared with four chronic physical conditions – is the ‘more disabling.’
The data, collected by the WHO, compares depression with angina, arthritis, asthma and diabetes. Being a greedy sort of person, I live with not only the spectre of depression, but also osteoarthritis, and I have to say I’d never actually thought about ranking them until just now. Mental pain vs physical pain? It’s a tough one. My depression has always been cyclical, and for the most part, treatable. However, I await surgery for my arthritis which will prolong the use of my hip, if not provide a cure per se; osteoarthritis remains a degenerative condition. However, the severity of my depression has increased over the years. There is, of course, no surgery that can reliably cure depression. Psychosurgery is one branch of psychiatry that serious research has failed to bother: the numbers performed in the UK nowadays are literally a handful, and even then the legal processes involved are complex due to ensuring the patient has the capacity to consent; it remains one of the few treatments (along with radium implants) that demand patient consent.
But as usual, I digress. My depression comes and goes, and has done since I was about fifteen. My osteoarthritis stems from congenital hip dysplasia which led to me spending most of the first three years of my life in an orthopaedic hospital, having bizarre and ‘pioneering’ surgery and treatments. For thirty three years I had no further trouble from it – well, apart from being bullied at school for being crap at sport. Depression, though, has affected big chunks of the last twenty years in an unpredictable and insidious manner. It’s like someone randomly splattered black ink over the family photo album. Days, weeks, months, are spoiled, indistinct, occasionally totally ruined.
My girlfriend has promised me that when I can no longer walk unaided she will make me the fanciest, dandiest walking stick ever. I have no doubts that it will be a work of art, a work of art that will inevitably include battery fairy lights somewhere in its construction. I am not sure there is anything spangly at all that she could make me – even with her incredible creative powers – that would ease the chronic nature of my depression, and so, based on my entirely subjective opinion and anecdotal evidence, the research seems to be pretty much spot-on.
