Doing Well - Stories

“I was being asked to do more and more at work, and this was putting me under stress. The result was I wasn’t sleeping, I was jittery, and life had become just a case of going to work, worrying about work, and maybe watching a bit of television before trying and failing to get to sleep at night.

My wife suggested I go see our GP about it. I felt I shouldn’t because there was nothing physically wrong with me – though that wasn’t true. I was breaking out in sweats, and not sleeping was leaving me feeling fatigued. So there were physical symptoms.

The GP immediately signed me off work for two weeks. That was a shock – I’d never taken much time off work. A week was probably the longest period of time, and that was about 20 years ago.

She told me she could prescribe medication – but I didn’t want that. I’ve never been the kind of person to take medicine and didn’t want to start. Then she suggested going to Doing Well.

When I did the PHQ, I was surprised that I was depressed. But I liked the self-help nature of the treatment. I learned that it was right to take time off work, because that was what was making me ill - I needed time away and I had to stop feeling guilty about it.

I’ve been off work for four months and now I feel stronger, and am about to go back. I feel far more confident when it comes to making sure I get my point of view across and so far the signs are that will improve my relationship with them."

I’ve been a head teacher for over eleven years, for over twenty years of my career I’ve been in some sort of promoted role within a school. My feeling, therefore, was one of anger towards myself that I couldn’t cope because I didn’t feel there was anything I had to deal with that was so out of the ordinary.

In retrospect I realise I was suffering depression over two years ago when I put it down to flu. It wiped me out and I wasn’t able to go back into school for four or five weeks. But when I did return, I still felt unwell. I put it down to some post-viral condition and my doctor thought it was that too.

For months I worked while not feeling quite right. Then I slipped a disk. It really got me down and I wondered to myself, what is happening?

When I got back to school I remember thinking I felt quite good, only for a few months later for it to really hit me. I broke down in tears at home with my wife and my two girls. This time I went to the doctor knowing it wasn’t flu this time.

I’d just never thought it would happen to me. I’d been a head teacher for eleven years, I was a generally optimistic person, active, and I couldn’t understand how it had hit me so suddenly. I found I wanted to detach myself from education completely, to give my brain a total rest.

It was like I had this huge blob in the middle of my head taking over my brain and stopping it from working.

My next mistake was to go back too soon. I insisted on telling myself I should go back before the end of term, because I thought the summer was too long a break before getting back into it. So I returned to work at the end of June for the last week and went in over the summer holiday. I didn’t do too badly at first, but just after the October holiday it hit me again, though perhaps not quite as bad as in the previous March.

Since then I’ve come to learn that depression is down to a number of factors, but I am apprehensive about going back to work. Can I change things at work significantly enough to help me?

"I’ve been a hillwalker all my life. To climb something like Ben Lomond, usually takes me just seven hours or so - that’s going up and getting back down again. It’s about the equivalent of ten miles on level ground and until last year I could do it as quickly as I could in my twenties.

But right now the most I can walk is about a mile and that leaves me exhausted. In the summer I went to visit family abroad and I wasn’t even strong enough to walk between the airport terminals. I needed to get someone to push me in a wheelchair.

The doctors assure me there are no physical reasons for this. I collapsed at work about 7 months ago as a result of stress at work and this in turn caused me to suffer from depression. The depression affected me mentally and physically. I’m getting better, but my body is no where near back to what it was - I get tired very easily. I miss the hills, but the way one doctor put it to me was this: it’s as if my body is telling me that it needs a complete rest.

I found the workbooks Doing Well gave me extremely helpful. I can see how some people find them daunting – they are like booklets, as much as ten pages long. I was handed my first one and I groaned because I’m a slow reader anyway. You do need to take the time over them but they really got me looking at things. You see yourself in different situations, and you start to work through the things that apply to you."