News Letter journalist Jonny McCambridge’s memoir shines light on the darkness of depression

When he was 18-years-old, and having spent a long time harbouring “dark thoughts of suicide” and suffering “crippling lethargy”, Jonny McCambridge plucked up the courage to see his GP.

He had hoped for help, an empathetic ear, at least, but instead, the then teenager was met with brusque dismissal, the doctor more or less telling him to pull himself together, that he had “really sick” patients in his waiting room to see.

Co Antrim man McCambridge, 46, details the crushing encounter in his recently published memoir, Afraid of the Dark: A Memoir of Mental Health and Fatherhood, where he writes with unflinching, scalding candidness about his descent into clinical depression, which gripped him so fiercely, he came dangerously close, on more than one occasion, to taking his own life.

Reflecting on the incident at the doctor’s surgery all those years ago, Jonny, said: “That was 1993. It was a small country surgery. Where I came from, and a lot of us came from, depression wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t on the radar. It wasn’t language that would even have been used.”

After that humiliating appointment with the doctor, Jonny resolved he would “have to suffer in silence” and “buried everything deep inside” himself.

“It was more than 20 years before I spoke to another person about what was going on inside my head. I let it go for so long that by the time I did address it, it was almost too late,” he said.

Today, Jonny is thankful medics aren’t so quick to ascribe depression to individual weakness, but believes there is still a way to go.

“Having been through the system, I think things are better, but they aren’t perfect and mental health provision is woefully short of where it needs to be.” Mental ill health, as many will know, is indiscriminate. It doesn’t matter what blessings you may have, whether that be a beautiful wife, a newborn son, a top job in local media, for Jonny had all these, and yet he was increasingly tilting towards despair.

In May 2013, just four months after the birth of his son James, he ended up in ‘Ward 12’ of a local psychiatric hospital, his “diseased mind” having told him ending his life would be the best option for everyone.

In the book we see him return to work too soon, then having to abandon his media career; we witness him adjusting to a new life as a ‘stay-at-home’ dad, going on to become the world’s least likely blogger with the popular ‘What’s a Daddy for?’, and ultimately, finding meaning and purpose in his role as a full-time father.

Initially, Jonny said he started writing just for himself, as a form a therapy.

“It worked really well, because a lot of the things that are inside your head you can’t make sense of and sometimes it can be terrifying. But whenever you write them down, it seems to help you to come to terms with them, and sometimes it loses part of its hold over you. In that sense the writing was cathartic and it helped me and it continues to do so.”

A local literary agent Susan Feldstein, who recently set up Northern Ireland’s only publishing house, Dalzell Press, with her husband Paul, spotted one of Jonny’s blogs about mental health and approached him about writing a book.

Jonny was adamant that if he was going to write about his experiences, the book had to be unapologetically honest - and he is true to his word.

Afraid of the Dark is a beautifully written, luminous account of depression and its attendant horrors - the panic attacks, the crippling anxiety, the paralysing terror, the suicidal thoughts, as we follow him on a turbulent, frequently painful and at times darkly hilarious journey to an eventual better place.

He unsparingly outs himself as someone desperately unwell, someone who could be irascible with work colleagues, someone who couldn’t sleep, who couldn’t think straight.

He said: “While I had spoken about mental health and done a few pieces around it, there was an element of stripping away your outer skin and letting people see what’s really going on, and knowing that if you were going to write the book it would have to be honest.”

Writing so candidly, of course, brought back agonising memories.

“The night when I was put in a psychiatric unit, and came very close to losing my life, it was upsetting writing that. It upset my wife and it upset my agent when they read it because I was writing about what was very close to be a suicide attempt.”

Jonny’s memoir is also a book about fatherhood and he writes with fluidity and lyricism about the light and love his son brings, the goofing around, the happy days in parks.

“I was away from work and living the life of a stay-at-home dad and I threw myself into it with reckless abandon. That gave me back my smile, I learnt to have fun again, which I had lost. A big part of my recovery was finding the joy in life again, and the way I found the joy was through being a dad.”

But just as Jonny was starting to keep the darkness at bay, a sickening incident occurred which threatened to de-rail him and his family.

Someone, he still doesn’t know who, reported him to Social Services with a list of 13 spurious allegations, including that he had beaten up his wife and son. “The allegations were ludicrous, it’s laughable now, but it was so vexatious. It pushed me into a very dark place. The helplessness of being accused of something that you haven’t done, it was horrendous and the thought I might lose my son. I’m lucky it happened at a time when I was just about robust enough to be able to deal with it and move on.”

Jonny is in a much better place these days, but admits he will forever remain afraid of the dark.

“There’s not a day in my life where I don’t have thoughts that would probably be scary to another person; part of the battle is learning to come to terms with my own brain and what it tells me and when you can and can’t trust it.

“I’m in a good place at the moment, but the dark will always be a place of terror, but I am more equipped to deal with it now.”

Jonny’s memoir, which he insists is not a manual or self-help book, does, nonetheless, offer a torchlight of hope, enabling others to see they are not alone in depression’s deep, dark tunnel.

*Afraid of the Dark: A Memoir of Mental Health and Fatherhood, by Jonny McCambridge, published by Dalzell Press is available on Amazon.

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