Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression by Sally Brampton Page A

responsible.’
    I know what the psychiatrist is thinking. The terrace is three floors up. Sally is clinically depressed too.
    ‘It’s not as if I was going to jump,’ Jane grumbles to me later. ‘I want to be dead, not a paraplegic.’
    Her psychiatrist reckons this is their last chance to crack Jane’s immoveable depression. Crack: that’s the word he uses. When I hear it, I think of depression as the shell around a nut. We are trapped fast inside it.
    Jane’s down for ten courses of ECT. Her first is tomorrow, at ten in the morning. ‘When the national grid goes down,’ she says, ‘you’ll know I’m under.’
    They’re going to do it in her room, wheeling in a machine and attaching electrodes to her head. She shows me where. They have to strap you down, to stop your body jerking too violently and breaking bones. Or your neck. The procedure only lasts for two minutes.
    ‘What if it doesn’t work?’
    She draws a finger across her neck and shrugs.
     
     
    I have a stalker. Her name is Grace. She’s a tiny Spanish woman in her sixties. She wears big round dark glasses and follows me wherever I go, crying in a low whimper.
    She tugs at me constantly. ‘Why am I here? Why I am here?’
    ‘Because you’re sad,’ I say, ‘Just like everyone else.’
    ‘But I never get any better.’
    ‘You will.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘Because everybody does.’ I am lying. Not everyone does. But it is what I want to believe and so I say it out loud.
    ‘No,’ she cries, punching me on the arm with a tiny fist. ‘I won’t, I won’t. I won’t get better.’
    It’s what everyone thinks, of course. Nobody thinks they’ll ever get better. They think they’ll cry until eternity.
    I want to buy Jane flowers, to cheer her up before her ECT. There’s a certain, grim sanity in that thought. So I go to the nurses’ station and ask permission to leave the hospital, to go to Sainsbury’s, which is down the road.
    They look doubtful.
    ‘I’m not mad,’ I want to say. ‘Just sad.’ Instead, I say, ‘It’s just down the road, I won’t be long.’ It’s weird having to explain yourself, to ask permission to go to a supermarket. I haven’t done that since I was a child. I haven’t been locked up since I was a child at boarding school.
    They say that they have to call my psychiatrist. I need his permission to leave the ward.
    I go and sit in my room and wait.
    Grace sits with me. She pulls out a crumpled piece of paper from the big plastic handbag she carries everywhere.
    ‘What does this mean?’ she says.
    I look at the paper.
    ‘It’s the drugs you’re on,’ I say.
    ‘But what do they mean? What are they for? Why do I have to take so many?’
    Why? Why? Why? I know just what she means, but I have no answers. Since I have been here they have doubled the amount of antidepressant medication I was on, then doubled it again. My original dose wasn’t enough, they said, to touch the sides. I think I’m on a lot now, but I have no way of knowing. I take my pills with blind submission. Just as I take the tranquillisers and sleeping pills they give me.
    I shrug and hand back the piece of paper to Grace. ‘I don’t know about your drugs. I’m not a doctor.’
    She subsides into a small, quivering heap in the chair by my bed. I lie on the bed and stare up at the ceiling, feeling Grace vibrate beside me. Even in her stillness, she is agitated. She suffers from severe anxiety, as well as depression.
    A nurse puts her head around the door. ‘You can go out,’ she says to me.
    I swing my legs off the bed, search for my shoes. I haven’t worn proper shoes for a week. I put them on. My feet feel stiff, uncertain.
    Grace is bolt upright. ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘To get some flowers for Jane. She has her first bout of ECT tomorrow.’
    Grace clutches her bag in excitement. ‘Can I come?’
    I look at her. I have listened to her in group every day, twice a day, for a week. I know all about her dead daughter