I was ready to call work: ‘I want to die. It’s just a bug. Be in tomorrow?’

Rathcoole-raised author Tara West tells JOANNE SAVAGE about her harrowing battle with depression
Tara's new memoir explores a major battle with depressionTara's new memoir explores a major battle with depression
Tara's new memoir explores a major battle with depression

“I was sick, but it was my brain that was ill,” she writes in her new memoir of depression and recovery, The Upside of Down. “I had overdosed on brainwaves. I had mood flu. I’d hurt my thinker...but this time no painkiller was going to do the job. I couldn’t clean it up, cover it with Savlon and apply a plaster...I’d never been sick like this before and I didn’t know anyone who had.”

Suddenly ‘showtime’ Tara, who produced the goods at work, was relentlessly witty and likeable, paid her mortgage and cracked jokes, was lost, empty, as though held together by a fragile piece of string. She wondered what to do. Call in to work and say: ‘I want to die. It’s just a bug. Be back tomorrow?’

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Her sense of stability and control had been railroaded by depression and suicidal ideation; the black clouds had descended, as if from nowhere. She lay at night in the dark with her husband, terrified of this new psychological terrain, wondering how she could possibly find her way back. Was there a way back? Would she find herself estranged from normality forever? “I was beyond unhappy. Every day I’d get random glimpses of slicing open my own flesh, like a flashback to something that hadn’t happened yet. I could see my skin pulling back like loose sheets of leather, revealing my workings, releasing my guts, opening me up and spilling me out. I wanted to peel myself to death. I couldn’t bear myself inside or out.”

She had irrational fears of losing it all, not succeeding at her job, losing her house, being found out as completely terrible at every possible life skill.

“I had zero self-confidence and I hated myself,” says Tara,50, from Rathcoole, who traces some of the dark thoughts in her life to her parents’ divorce when she was eight. Back then she did her hair like Siouxsie Sioux, was heavily into a punk aesthetic but mostly liked writing and reading sedately enough in her bedroom.

After the divorce money was tight; she had to move to a rougher area, where she quickly picked up a panoply of swear-words, her mother stopped cooking and cleaning properly and they mostly subsisted on chips.

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Tara was convinced she was disgusting, that her prepubescence was disgusting. Her inner self-critic was savage.

Back then, in her late 20s, while working in the stressful world of advertising, sticking to tight deadlines and coming up with endless great ideas for workable campaigns that would generate lots of money, she decided she would write her debut novel by 30, and so she did - Poets are a Delicacy Eaten in Japan. Strangely, it looked at themes of mental dysfunction, but from a place of extreme ignorance. It was the follow-up to this, Fodder, and the current memoir that would allow her to give shape and form to the darkest reaches of her psychic experience.

“For me what helped was a combination of the anti-depressant sertraline and cognitive behavioural therapy. In therapy it’s almost like you’ve constructed a map for those darker places, making them so much less frightening to navigate.

“It was my therapist who suggested I might like to write about what I was going though. At the start, you think, well, who would want to read the random negative thoughts of a depressive? But then I remembered how much memoirs about depression had helped me in the past, because they make you realise you are not alone, actually, that lots of people get out of bed and feel like they don’t much want to continue anymore; it’s just that they are conditioned mostly not to say that.

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“It helps to know that there are other people out there going through depression, people whom you may not remotely suspect of going through such struggles.

“We still haven’t reached that tipping point where I’d say we have so left the stigma behind that it has become a completely normal, pedestrian thing to talk about being depressed.

“The ancient Greeks - fair enough, a good couple of thousand years ago - believed the body was made up of four parts - yellow bile, phlegm, blood and black bile - so a quarter of you was this black bile which was the potential to feel dark and depressed.

“That’s like dragging around a leg filled with depression. At some point it is going to get in the way and cause you problems. I think that is a really interesting way of conceptualizing it.”

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These Days Tara runs a writing and production company that allows her to do a number of different projects, freelance copywriting, writing for TV or Radio, training other people, and allowing her to pursue numerous other creative projects. “When I began to write I was influenced by this amazing teacher, Liz Rosenberg, who taught life writing at Queen’s and told me you really need to dig deep into your own emotions and your own pain for it to be authentic. I knew I couldn’t just skim over the surface of what I had been through.

“Everyone experiences depression in different ways. There’s a real difference for example in the way men and women experience it.

“I think when men are getting into negative emotion they tend towards anger whereas women close in on themselves.

Depression might not just be feeling low; it could be drinking too much, medicating to try to numb yourself,

“I had to completely unzip myself on paper.”

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The memoir takes three parts. For the middle section Tara basically used a journal she had kept while in the grip of depression; that was “pretty brutal”.

Either side of that is before and after, which really contextualises what she went though.

“In the last section what I try to show is that depression is something that you never fully recover from; you will still have bad days when you cannot function, days when the dark clouds descend, as it were.”

Tara’s debut novel, Poets are Eaten as a Delicacy in Japan, was the result of creativity that flourished despite it being a very dark time in her life.

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It was actually about one girl’s inability to function and her difficult journey coming out of that, incrementally making her way back to a place of relative equilibrium; it has nothing really to do with Japan or poets.

“I was writing with the arrogance of ignorance really,” says Tara. “Then I discovered all about mental dysfunction myself.

“The main trigger for me was that I had absolutely no confidence. I was convinced I was s**t at everything. It took a lot of CBT for me to realise, no, I was probably alright at some things actually, and there was no need for such dramatic self-loathing, because back then I totally felt I was completely unlikable, unlovable, incapable, disgusting.

“It was two weeks after the publication of my first novel and I absolutely hated myself. Nothing I had achieved made me feel I was decent enough quality. I saw the negative in everything. If someone gave me feedback on something that’s what I would zoom in on. I constantly felt I was about to be found out as this total failure of a human, that I would lose everything.

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“I have always expected the worst and seen the worst coming.

“I imagined that everyone thought negatively about me; all I was getting were negative vibes.”

Tara had always been playing at writing, putting together bits and pieces here and there, but as she approached her 30s she was fired with the ambition to finally write a novel.

And as she did so she was taking on more and more working in advertising, putting herself under increasing strain and burning the candle at both ends. It was a case of burnout, exhaustion after a long period of hectic productivity.

“One day it just hit me like a tidal wave,

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“I was under immense pressure, so once the novel was published I was just - I had completely worn myself out and had nothing left to protect myself. I had nothing left, just felt like this rare, useless piece of raw meat completely devoid of any use.”

Luckily she had at her side her valiant husband Dave, whom she describes completely lovingly as a “kind and supportive, compassionate and understanding” man whose resilience really pulled her through this most dreadful time in her life.

“I was like a marionette. I continued at work for a few weeks just as though nothing was wrong. Then I simply couldn’t go on anymore. It felt like my brain had caved in, that I just could not function. It was awful trying to communicate it with my boss; I was just so wound up. I could barely even string a sentence together.

“I went on medication and I tried to come back to work before I was really ready to.

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“Looking back, I probably should have been in hospital. I genuinely did not know that was an option for me.

“I wasn’t sleeping or eating and I had this really bizarre nervous energy. I would be up cleaning the kitchen at four in the morning.

“I have to be striving, achieving in some sense, so, really, after eight weeks off work and medication and starting therapy I kept going and things were really not properly right for me for the best part of two and a half years.

“I didn’t look the same way, I couldn’t speak the same way, I went from kind of being office superstar full of fabulous ideas to being this lesser version of myself, damaged goods. But I guess I can say that I kept going, that I kept refusing to give up.”

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I mention to Tara that it is interesting she has chosen to call her novel ‘The Upside of Down’ as though she might feel that the darkness taught her something, maybe to value the wisdom suffering can bring with it, or to see the happy moments as hard-won instances of joyous release amidst life’s arduous struggles.

“I have always been very interested as a writer in walking that line between the light and the dark; it’s really a kind of tightrope, isn’t it, between what’s funny and what’s really depressing?”, muses Tara.

“It’s a challenge; it’s a difficult thing to do. But I think this ability to be funny and upbeat in the teeth of despair is something we are particularly adept at in Northern Ireland because of the Troubles and everything we have been through. It’s a fine line to walk...To like tell a joke at a funeral almost! I think we do have that rare skill.”

Can depression, terrible as it is, really teach you things about yourself?

Tara does think so.

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“It helps you grow as a person, I feel, and it helps you let yourself off the hook. You don’t put as much pressure on yourself to be perfectionistic; suddenly it is enough just to be able to get through the day.

“I do think Covid has meant we are talking about depression perhaps a lot more frequently.

“I think maybe people are that bit more open because Covid has meant us not being able to see lots of people we love.

“We have been taking our feet off the pedal that bit more, I think. Let yourself off the hook a bit, we can do that in this climate, and hopefully for most of is it will all be OK in the end.”

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Finally she is keen to emphasise that even with those who seem to have it all together on the outside - the penthouse apartment, the prettiest Pomeranian, the job as hedge-fund manager that actually involves lots of obligatory champagne and sushi lunches, the revolving door of close friends and the coolest haircut that looks as though Vidal Sasson himself had styled it - this need not suggest all is at psychological equilibrium behind closed doors.

Depression is indeed higher in areas of socioeconomic deprivation, and among those dealing with negative life circumstances, such as unemployment and drug or alcohol addiction, but it can also be cruelly indiscriminate, turning its dark, laser-like focus on those who seem to have it all.

Celebrities across the globe have written in detail about their dark nights of the soul; poets have written some of their best verse on the darkness within; the great and good have found themselves eyeballing the abyss while trying to transcend that darkness visible.

CEOs, head honchos of major corporations, all kinds of high flying corporate types ,have found themselves temporarily pinioned by this most ghastly and insidious illness.

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Tara has some helpful advice on how to come though the other side of this:

“When you are feeling unwell and depressed, talk to yourself as you would a friend. You could have it all - the house, the dream job, the dream partner, maybe you’ve fulfilled the ambitions that meant so much to you for years - but you can’t help the way you feel. It is a chemical imbalance in your brain.

“A mental illness is still a physical illness; it is happening in your brain physically and you cannot change the fact of that unless you get the correct medication; just the way you can’t wish away a broken ankle or a slipped disc, you can’t wish away depression - if only it worked like that.

“I was on sertraline for a long time and it was simply fantastic and really helped me to function. Sertraline and CBT completely and utterly turned my life around.

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“Then, over time, I tried coming off them and it has never really worked for me. I think some people need to stay on them in order to be able to function and do the things they want to be able to do.

“We ought to have much less stigma about the use of drugs like this.

“People always ask me, when I speak about mental health, about my attitude towards medication, and it has always been the same. I am a huge advocate for medication because it has made a real difference for me and it has helped me though some very difficult times, though obviously the best weaponry you can have in your arsenal against depression is a combination of talking therapy and psycho-pharmaceutical intervention.”

The Upside of Down by Tara West is published by Dalzell Press and is available now.