Mental Mountains: Depression and Climbing

‘Why do people put a hose on their exhaust and put it in a car window? There are far more efficient and less grim ways to kill yourself.’

This was how my mind drifted along at 4am as I lay on the sofa trying to sleep. We were staying somewhere in Scotland, and I had been drinking and watching Netflix with my brother. I was with my family, I had everything I needed to be content and happy, but I couldn’t keep my mind away from casually leafing through the options of how I could best escape the obligation to exist. The crux of it is, finding a way that doesn’t leave everyone around you thinking they could have done more, blame themselves or feel they should have seen it coming.

I lay there in the dark and wrote a note on my phone, trying to articulate the great anvil of dark clouds building in my head:

It’s getting harder to keep the fear and despair down, it’s all I have. Moments of pretending, between the slowly gathering darkness that threatens to consume me every time I stop to think. It stalks me every day and grows until it will not be ignored. I’ve let it fester and rot in my head. Let the idea bed-in like a tick until it’s too swollen and grotesque to ignore and I must act now or be overrun with disease. I want to go without ceremony or noise, just a vacuum, a space where nothing used to exist.

A few months later, my body sore from climbing and post-climb celebrations, I stumbled slowly towards Lukla, Nepal. As the sun beat down on me, my mind wandered back to this occasion just a few months previously and my determination to find a way out of the endless obligation to remain on this planet. I realised that determination had dissipated, not instantly or fully but something had changed. It had taken me the previous three weeks of sitting with myself, to finally get sick of talking myself into a desperate dark oblivion. I decided I wanted to change. I wanted to get better, really get better.

Five months later, I sat again in Chamonix, unmotivated and frustrated. The sun was shining, but my clouded mind had decided that drinking alone in a dark room forever was the best course of action. Nothing was exciting or engaging, I had nothing to offer the outside world but indifference and apathy. Nothing had changed since my epiphanies in Nepal. I was back in the same pit once again.

My life has been punctuated by periods like this. Moments of extreme highs quickly overshadowed by desperate lows brought on by what I now know is and was depression. It follows that I have been trying to write this short piece for around two years. When I feel motivated words come easily and I enjoy the idea that my thoughts might resonate with others – perhaps encourage them or motivate them to make necessary change. But most of the time, I just have nothing to say. Even if I did, I couldn’t summon the energy to put it down on paper.

The response I often get from people when I make myself vulnerable and speak about the reality behind my guise of carefree enthusiasm. Of course I do, don’t most people hide the majority of what they feel? Aren’t we all well practised at putting on a facade that the world can deal with daily? My experience has been that as long as I stay distracted and surrounded, I am safe from those thoughts. God forbid I should be alone for enough time to think. Repeatedly I have conversations with people I assumed to have it all together only to find they have battled hard or are still in the throes of dealing with something which I’d never have guessed at.

It’s too easy to believe the happy-go-lucky performance played out each day by many of my closest friends. We have become talented method actors, taking on a role until we cannot separate it from our true selves. Paradoxically, we hear that we are in a major mental health crisis at the moment, whether this is truly the case or not I don’t know. It certainly seems that throughout the pandemic, the isolation and stress associated with Covid has pushed people to despair and anxiety. I do think that part of this tidal wave is a real representation of our own willingness to talk about the parts of our lived experience that previously would have been considered a weakness. So these two intertwined realities exist: increased openness about our mental health but a seemingly endless ability to carry ourselves day-to-day, in a way that suggests nothing is wrong.

I’ve been taking antidepressants for about five months now and I don’t believe they are a long-term solution or a silver bullet. However, they have changed my life, they have shown me that I was ill. Like antibiotics going to war on infection, the drugs immediately began to balance the chemicals in my brain. Within days I felt a rush of enthusiasm, I felt excitement again – an emotion I thought I had lost completely. I wanted to see people, cook, engage and most of all I wanted to climb again.

For months at a time, maybe years, I had been acting, pretending I cared about people, pretending I wanted to go climbing, pretending I wanted to keep living. But pretending affects other people, being on autopilot is not the same as taking the wheel, sincerity is lacking in interactions but only those who know you best notice. I was lucky enough to have someone in my life who wasn’t afraid to tell me that I needed to make changes. I procrastinated hard, made excuses, employed diversion tactics which worked well for a while. I made it so that I didn’t actually have to confront anything or do the work on myself. Finally, I caved and went to counselling.

Three months ago, I had my first session and one month down the line, I started taking antidepressants. For the first time in my adult life I felt stable, happy and able to deal with the idea of a future beyond the next big route in the mountains. The twists and turns of the mental journey are many and although the trajectory trends up, taking antidepressants hasn’t been the solution. It feels more like a temporary ceasefire on the war in your head, to allow time to find a real and lasting solution.

The journey or outcome will likely be different for any other person, this is just my experience and outcome so far. All I can say is that it’s been a fight, and one which I know many people are going through each day. So look out for the people around you, even if they seem okay, we’re mostly good at hiding feelings, especially from ourselves.

By talking about the mental health battles within our community, we hope we can normalise these types of conversations, which can ultimately improve the quality of life for everyone around us. If you think you or someone you know might be struggling with their own mental health battles, why not reach out to one of the following groups for support or consider donating to their cause: