There are very good days. There are fishing trips, jokes, family, golf, successful projects, books to write and ridiculous ideas to pursue. There are days when the weight is barely noticeable and days when the pit in the stomach isn't there at all.
None of that persuades me that the Dog has moved out, but neither does his continued presence make those good days fraudulent. Both things can apparently occupy the same life, which may be one of the contradictions I have taken longest to accept.
There are days when I can sit in my office for an embarrassingly long time doing almost nothing. Facebook is particularly useful for this because it creates the illusion of activity while requiring almost none, and you can scroll through other people’s lunches, holidays, political opinions and grandchildren for an extraordinary length of time without actually achieving anything yourself. The computer is on, the accounting software is available, there is work I could do and probably work I should do, but somehow the distance between knowing that and doing it has become enormous.
Then the telephone rings, and something changes almost immediately. A client wants to talk about increasing the rent on a commercial property, and suddenly there is a problem to solve rather than a day to endure.
The bloke who had spent the previous half-hour examining Facebook with all the intellectual commitment of somebody watching paint dry disappears. The accountant turns up instead, apparently fully functional and ready for work.
What is the existing rent? How good is the tenant, what is the supposed market rate, and what happens if we push too hard and the tenant leaves? How long might the warehouse remain empty, what are the holding costs during that period, and how many months of increased rent would be required merely to recover the income lost while chasing it? There is also the relationship to consider because a good commercial tenant paying slightly less than some theoretical market rent may be worth considerably more than an empty building waiting for somebody prepared to pay what the valuer says it is worth.
For the duration of that telephone call, I am completely capable of being Jeff Banks. There is no fumbling for thoughts or inability to understand the problem, and certainly nothing in my voice necessarily announcing that anything else is happening inside me.
That is what the client rang for. They don’t want a tax return at that moment and they certainly don’t want to know whether I am having a good day. They want somebody who knows enough about their affairs to sit beside the decision, look at it from several directions and point out the things they may not have considered. That was always the commodity I preferred selling anyway.
Eventually we arrive somewhere sensible, the client is satisfied and the call ends. I put the telephone down, the problem has gone away with them, and there I am again with exactly the same internal landscape that existed before the phone rang.
The Black Dog is still sitting in the corner, although for twenty minutes or so he apparently had the courtesy not to interrupt. He didn’t disappear while I was giving advice; he simply became less important than the problem in front of me.
I have used that expression for years, although I am not particularly interested in who first used it, who made it famous or whether somebody else had a more historically accurate dog. This one is mine. I know what he looks like, or at least I know what the world looks like when he is around, and by now I know enough about him to understand that he doesn’t need to interfere with my ability to discuss commercial property.
That may be one of the more confusing things about depression, certainly as I have experienced it. There is an assumption that if something is seriously wrong on the inside it ought to be visible on the outside, as though the warning lights on the dashboard should illuminate for everybody to see. Yet I can be sitting in that office feeling numb, bleak and thoroughly disinterested in doing anything, and within seconds of the telephone ringing become completely engaged in somebody else’s problem.
Then I hang up and the change can be almost ridiculous in its efficiency. The professional competence remains available on demand, but whatever was sitting underneath it has not necessarily moved at all.
I sometimes wonder when the Dog first arrived, but the question assumes there was a day when he walked through the gate. I can’t remember one, and there was certainly no morning when I looked out the window, saw him coming up the driveway and thought, Well, this is new.
It seems more accurate to say that he has been here forever, or at least for so long that I cannot reliably separate the time before him from the time after. That does not mean every bad day of my earlier life was depression, because I have neither the evidence nor the inclination to retrospectively diagnose myself simply because the story would become neater.
Certainly the undulations were there well before I first went to a doctor about them, and that was more than fifteen years ago. Looking backwards, there were peaks and troughs long before anybody attached a questionnaire to them or gave me medication intended to do something about them. The medication certainly modified those peaks and troughs, but it did not, in my experience, remove whatever was underneath them.
Perhaps that is why I find it difficult to identify the beginning. I was too busy continuing, and continuing had become something of a speciality long before depression acquired a name.
There has always been an enormous drive in me not to fail. Some of that probably came from starting with very little, some from the bankruptcy that arrived along the way, and some from the determination that whatever happened afterwards I would not be seen to return to nothing. Success was never simply about accumulating something. There was always an element of proving that I could not be pushed back to where I had started.
Vincent Price, in the spoken section at the end of Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare (1975 – Atlantic Records), talks about an inborn need to dominate and possess. I have always understood something in that, although my version was less about possessing the world than refusing to allow the world to beat me. There was always another hill to climb, another problem to solve, another business idea to chase and another piece of evidence required to demonstrate that Jeff Banks was still moving forward.
Drive is a wonderful thing until it isn’t, and depression introduced a strange opponent because the drive itself did not disappear. I still wanted to achieve things, still hated the idea of failure and still had that internal machinery insisting that we keep going, but increasingly there were periods when everything required to satisfy that drive felt like a chore.
The irresistible force and the immovable object had somehow taken up residence in the same body, and neither seemed particularly interested in yielding. I could want to move and simultaneously feel incapable of generating any enthusiasm for the movement, which is a particularly irritating arrangement for somebody accustomed to solving problems by simply pushing harder.
That is where the rut becomes one of the Dog’s better tools. It does not necessarily prevent me from knowing what might change the day; it simply makes every alternative seem to require more effort than I want to give it.
You know there are things you could do. You can go somewhere, start something, finish something, play golf, go fishing, work in the shed, write, garden or simply get out of the bloody chair. None of those things has ceased to exist, and Logical Jeff is perfectly capable of producing the list.
The problem is that everything on the list feels like work. Even the things designed to provide relief can start looking like additional tasks requiring organisation, movement and enthusiasm that you don’t particularly possess.
On the really bad days there is a huge pit in my stomach. There is a weight across the body that doesn’t necessarily stop anything from working but seems to make everything require more effort, and over the top of it sits a bleakness capable of colouring whatever happens next. It is not always possible to point at something and say, There, that caused it.
For somebody who has spent most of his working life looking for causes, that ought to irritate me more than it does. Perhaps I have simply stopped looking, or at least stopped assuming that every movement in mood must have a transaction sitting somewhere on the other side of the ledger.
There were visits to doctors, of course, including the one where a questionnaire produced a result suggesting I was critically depressed, but I have never conducted some great forensic investigation into the source of it all. Part of me is not sure I want to delve too deeply into that darkness. I don’t know what I would find down there and, perhaps more importantly, I am not convinced I would like what I found.
That reluctance sits strangely beside the rest of my personality. Give me a business problem and I will pull it apart. Give me a set of accounts and I will search for the imbalance. Give me somebody else’s difficulty and I can spend an hour examining alternatives they had not considered.
Give me my own depression and sometimes it is enough to know that it is there. Articulating every symptom or finding an explanation for every trough does not seem necessary merely to prove something I already know.
The signs became harder to ignore as the years went on. Angry outbursts became more frequent, frustration became more obvious and my famous proposition that there was no such thing as stress began encountering the rather inconvenient qualification contained in the words until there is. I had spent years regarding stress as something other people allowed to happen to themselves, which is a particularly useful philosophy right up until your own evidence starts contradicting it.
Banks Consultancy provided plenty of that evidence, although at the time I was far more interested in solving each individual problem than recognising what their accumulated weight might be doing to me. There was always another issue requiring attention, and the ability to keep addressing them could itself disguise the fact that the person doing the addressing was becoming increasingly worn down.
There was a period when Robyn was going through menopause and there were tensions developing between her and some of the women working in the practice. I did not regard her mood swings at the time as particularly alarming, but some of the staff clearly saw matters differently. What neither Robyn nor I knew was that they had begun discussing their concerns with the HR consultants used by the practice.
That arrangement already contained the sort of complication businesses manage to create without anybody deliberately designing it. The HR consultants were also clients of Banks Consultancy, their work was handled by one of the female staff members, and I maintained overarching responsibility for the relationship. Apparently everybody was talking to everybody except the two people who owned the business.
Then the HR consultants arrived at our home, and whatever had been happening quietly in the background suddenly became impossible to ignore. We were blindsided because the discussion had progressed considerably further than either of us had understood.
Questions were being raised about whether Robyn should return to the office or whether she should effectively take an enforced holiday to give her time to “clear her head” and “get over her issues.” Whatever merit anybody believed there was in the suggestion, suddenly a situation I had not even realised had reached that point was sitting in our house demanding an answer.
It was hardly the ideal environment for a man whose default setting was that he should be able to fix things. Worse still, there was no single problem to fix because every part of the situation seemed connected to another person, another relationship or another responsibility.
During the day I had the women at work and all the tensions that had developed there. Then I would come home and download the day’s events to Robyn because she needed to know what was happening in the business. The office might have been physically somewhere else, but Banks Consultancy followed me through the front door every evening and took a seat.
So did the Dog, although I doubt I thought of him in quite those terms at the time. There was simply work, home, more discussion about work and the expectation that somehow I would keep navigating through all of it.
There were times when Robyn and I took things out on each other because, in many respects, we were the only two people sufficiently confident within the relationship to do so. That doesn’t make it right and it doesn’t make the person receiving the anger responsible for causing it. It simply describes something that happened between two people who both cared deeply about the business, about each other and about getting through whatever was happening around us.
My temper can be explosive, and I recognise some of my father in that. Recognising where something may have come from doesn’t magically make it disappear, nor does depression provide a retrospective excuse for the people who happened to be standing nearby when it went off.
When I am down, my tolerance for what I regard as stupidity becomes particularly thin. The Logical Bystander inside me starts demanding explanations for why people are doing things that make absolutely no sense to him, and the possibility that somebody might simply approach the problem differently can become considerably harder to entertain.
Robyn and I can be spectacularly different in that regard. On the DISC profiling system she is a High S, and her scientific background fits comfortably with the description. She researches, considers, follows processes and wants to understand the information before proceeding. Her professional life in food-labelling regulatory affairs hardly encouraged a cavalier approach to detail either.
I am a High I and quite capable of being mentally three problems further down the road while she is still assembling the evidence required to answer the one before last. Neither approach is inherently wrong, but put the clinical scientist beside the results-driven husband, add a struggling business environment, staff conflict, depression and a deteriorating tolerance for anything I consider illogical, and you have all the ingredients required for some fairly ordinary domestic diplomacy.
The difficulty when I am down is that other people’s methods can cease looking merely different and start looking idiotic. That is not necessarily because they have changed what they are doing; sometimes the alteration has occurred entirely in my tolerance for watching them do it.
I don’t suffer idiots particularly well at the best of times, and the book, Dumbing It Down probably contains enough evidence of that to establish the case beyond reasonable doubt. I have spent much of my life feeling as though I am dragging people up hills, sometimes almost literally, and the Cub Scouts episode at Chidowla all those years ago remains one of the better early examples.
My Cubs were city kids, and whatever enthusiasm they had brought with them did not extend naturally to charging up a bloody great hill in the Australian bush. Every few metres somebody needed encouragement, somebody wanted to know how much further there was to go, somebody had discovered another reason why continuing upwards was an unreasonable expectation, and I seemed to spend most of the climb cajoling, encouraging and metaphorically dragging the whole bloody pack behind me. Progress was being measured less in metres climbed than in objections overcome.
Meanwhile, the Yass Cubs had been bred in country air and apparently regarded a hill as an invitation rather than an obstacle. They went off ahead of us like a bushfire, scattering up the track with an enthusiasm that made my lot look as though they were participating in an entirely different activity. Their leader didn’t appear to be dragging anybody anywhere. He had effectively unleashed them, while I was somewhere behind conducting individual negotiations over whether civilisation would ever be seen again.
The difference between us as leaders was therefore difficult to ignore. My counterpart merely had to point his Cubs in roughly the right direction and try to keep them within the same postcode, while I was required to supply motivation, reassurance and the occasional verbal towrope just to maintain forward movement. His lot ran; my lot had to be dragged, and I suspect even then I found myself wondering why something that appeared so straightforward to one group could require such extraordinary effort from another.
That hill has followed me through much of my life, although the people on it have changed. There have been employees, clients, business associates and occasionally entire organisations where I have felt myself back behind those city-born Cubs, explaining something I regarded as obvious, pushing for the next few metres and wondering why I appeared to want them to reach the top more than they did. The frustration is not simply that somebody cannot see what I see; it is the feeling that, having seen the path myself, I have somehow acquired responsibility for dragging everybody else along it.
The Black Dog doesn’t invent that part of me, which is an important distinction. He simply shortens the verbal towrope. When I am travelling well I can explain, cajole, encourage and perhaps even laugh at the absurdity of having to drag another reluctant Cub up another metaphorical hill, but when I am down the patience required to do that disappears remarkably quickly. Somewhere ahead of us I can still see the Yass Cubs disappearing into the distance under their own steam, and the bloke holding the rope starts wondering why the hell everybody can’t just walk.
Robyn has therefore probably seen versions of my depression that many other people never have. Clients see the bloke who answers the telephone and discusses their commercial property. Staff see the employer who eventually makes a decision. People at golf can see somebody capable of sledging, laughing and carrying on.
The person living in the same house gets the unedited version, and there is no particular fairness in that arrangement. The people closest to us are often the people around when there is no longer any professional reason to maintain the performance.
That creates another difficulty because soothing me is not particularly easy. The Rock analogy keeps returning throughout my life because somewhere inside the silo I constructed there has always been an assumption that the burden of what needs to happen belongs to me. If I am the person who is supposed to carry it, somebody offering to help carry it can create the absurd response of irritation rather than gratitude.
Logical Jeff can see the problem with that immediately, and he could probably prepare a respectable presentation explaining why the behaviour makes no sense. He doesn’t always get the deciding vote, particularly when the other Jeff is already convinced that one more person asking what is wrong simply represents another problem requiring an answer.
Sleep, strangely enough, has rarely provided the dramatic evidence one might expect. Depression does not generally have me pacing the house at three in the morning, staring tragically into darkness while contemplating the human condition. I have a CPAP machine, and the routine is so embedded now that going to sleep is remarkably uncomplicated.
The mask goes on, my head goes down and generally I go to sleep. Ten hours is not unusual, whether I am up, down or somewhere in between, so the Black Dog has apparently never regarded obstructive sleep apnoea as sufficient reason to find alternative accommodation.
Fishing can interfere with the arrangement, but that is because the prospect of an early alarm somehow turns me into a child waiting for Christmas morning. If I know I have to be up early for a trip, I can sleep sporadically while some part of my brain apparently remains on sentry duty waiting for the alarm.
The more troublesome nights are those when I wake early for no particular reason. Then the radio in my head can switch itself on and decide that the silence at four in the morning desperately needs a soundtrack.
A song appears and decides it has been commissioned for an extended season. I try to quieten it, another part starts, I return to the first one and eventually I am lying there wanting sleep while my internal radio station demonstrates that it has absolutely no respect for broadcasting hours. Sometimes the music reflects something going on inside me, while at other times I suspect my brain simply enjoys having an audience that cannot leave.
Being awake and alone does not necessarily bother me, though, because in many circumstances I prefer solitude. That is another part of my depression that does not fit neatly into the expected picture.
I enjoy people, but I have never been particularly interested in spending my life monitoring my P’s and Q’s merely to satisfy the requirements of a group. Being alone can be much easier because solitude removes the need to contribute, explain or manufacture enthusiasm simply because the people around you expect some.
Fishing may be the best example. I can be in a boat with one of my sons and still experience solitude because companionship does not necessarily require constant conversation.
We can sledge each other about the number of bites, the fish caught or the amount of sunburn we are accumulating, but there is no requirement to fill every silence. There is the water, the expectation that something might eventually take the bait and the simple business of being there.
You don’t have to perform being fine for the ocean, and the ocean has never asked me to explain what is wrong. It is quite content to let me sit there staring at a rod tip while nothing happens for an hour, which at times makes it considerably easier company than people.
A crowd can be lonelier. There are times when sitting among people feels less like company than shrinking, particularly when the conversation requires a version of yourself you don’t particularly feel like supplying. Solitude removes that obligation, whereas a room full of people can occasionally make the absence of connection much more obvious.
Perhaps that is also why the most extraordinary conversation I remember about my depression involved somebody doing almost nothing. She gave me something I was much more accustomed to giving other people: time to talk without immediately being told what I should do next.
It happened at a retreat where, during one of the sessions, I had told the group that I was suffering. I cannot remember the name of the woman involved, which bothers me because I remember what she did far more clearly than I remember her. I am fairly certain she was not a professional counsellor, although whatever experience she had taught her something many professionals and amateurs alike occasionally seem to forget.
She walked with me to the next activity, asked the right question and then listened. The important part was probably the listening because she did not treat the silence between my words as something she needed to fill.
There was no immediate attempt to repair Jeff Banks. She didn’t need to identify the cause, produce a strategy, give me three things to do before breakfast or tell me about somebody she knew who had once been depressed and cured themselves by taking up Pilates. She simply created enough space for me to talk.
So I did, and in the process something shifted for a while. I was able to get some things off my chest and, in the process of articulating them, almost help myself through some of what I was carrying.
The experience was extraordinarily uplifting, not because she had supplied an answer but because, for once, an answer had not been demanded. That is not a small distinction for somebody who has spent much of his life being the bloke people come to for answers.
Even the ordinary question How are you? rarely creates that opportunity. My answer is normally fine, almost automatically, and then I bounce the conversation straight back to the other person. In many cases that is probably where the real question was heading anyway.
They ask how you are, you say fine, you ask how they are, and now everybody has observed the social convention and can get on with discussing what they actually wanted to discuss. There is nothing particularly dishonest about it because most of the time nobody is requesting a comprehensive mental-health report in the first place.
Fine is simply efficient, and efficiency has always appealed to the accountant in me. It also allows the Black Dog to remain invisible without requiring any elaborate deception on my part. I can say fine and prepare a tax return. I can say fine and prepare financial statements. I can say fine and play golf, go fishing, write something, attend a meeting or talk somebody through the consequences of increasing the rent on a warehouse.
Old accountants never die; they just become imbalanced. I heard that expression somewhere along the way and, professionally at least, I haven’t reached that point yet. Computer accounting has made the mechanical part of the job considerably easier. I can maintain a small parcel of clients and, if necessary, process their work within a couple of months after the end of the financial year. Tax returns still get done, financial statements still get prepared and obligations still get satisfied because those are the things that have to happen.
They are not necessarily the things I most want to do, and that difference has become more obvious as retirement has crept closer. The work that has to be done can still be completed through discipline, while the work that involves somebody needing my judgement can temporarily provide something discipline alone cannot.
The telephone call that initially annoys me can therefore become something quite different once I answer it. Somebody has a problem, and suddenly there is a reason to sit up, think and point them towards somewhere they might need to go.
For that period, usefulness pushes the numbness aside, but it does not necessarily remove it. When the call ends there is no guarantee that the temporary sense of purpose will survive the click of the telephone returning to its cradle.
For years I probably thought of depression in terms of peaks and troughs because that was the most obvious way to understand it. Medication reinforced that picture because my experience of the original treatment was that it modified both. The peaks became less pronounced and the troughs became less deep, although what that actually meant to the person living between them is a much larger question.
We will come to that later because there is considerably more to that story than whether a line on an imaginary graph became flatter. Treatment deserves better than being reduced to a few paragraphs in a chapter that is really about recognising what was being treated.
What matters here is that flattening the undulations did not make me believe the underlying issue had disappeared. Whatever the medication changed, my experience remained that the Dog was still somewhere in the house.
That is why the question of when he leaves is almost impossible for me to answer. It assumes something I no longer believe to be true, because I cannot identify a period when I confidently decided he had packed his belongings and moved elsewhere.
There are very good days. There are fishing trips, jokes, family, golf, successful projects, books to write and ridiculous ideas to pursue. There are days when the weight is barely noticeable and days when the pit in the stomach isn’t there at all.
None of that persuades me that the Dog has moved out, but neither does his continued presence make those good days fraudulent. Both things can apparently occupy the same life, which may be one of the contradictions I have taken longest to accept.
Perhaps he is asleep on those days. Perhaps he is somewhere else in the house, perhaps I am simply too busy doing something worthwhile to notice him, or perhaps trying to define his precise location gives the metaphor considerably more work than it deserves.
All I really know is that it seems as though he has been here for a very long time. Long enough, certainly, that separating his arrival from everything else that was happening in my life has become impossible.
That makes the title of this chapter slightly misleading because I cannot identify the day the Black Dog learned my address. By the time I understood enough to give him a name, he already seemed remarkably comfortable with the place.
More than fifteen years after first going to the doctor, I suspect the greater discovery was not that the Dog had finally found where I lived. It was that I had eventually recognised something that had apparently been living alongside me for years, and recognising him was never the same thing as persuading him to leave.
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