Precisely 32 pages into The Unwelcome Visitor, Loose Women panellist Denise Welchs chatty, conversational account of living with clinical depression, my stomach abruptly swooped upwards before plunging into liftshaft freefall.

This was not the plan. Having suffered from debilitating depressive episodes on and off since my early teens, I have deliberately body swerved what I term Low Mood Literature on the Tolstoyan grounds that each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way and its actually quite tedious (sorry) to plough through other peoples usually quite niche travails.

But these days theres a celebrity out there for every mental health cohort; the drinkers, the thinkers, the wild swimmers, free runners, gardeners and agoraphobics all have their various champions.

Thats not a bad thing but it is A Thing. Former Labour spin doctor Alistair Campbell is due to publish his Living Better: How I Learned to Survive Depression and I can safely predict there wont be much crossover between the readership of his book and Welchs. But by God, there will be a readership for both in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Theres a mental health tsunami on its way, says Welch, speaking to me on the phone from her home in Cheshire. As lockdown eases off so many people will need treatment, but the NHS just hasnt got the resources. So what are they to do?

Self-help memoirs are a start. Welch has written two best-selling autobiographies but The Unwelcome Visitor: Depression and How I Survive Itis different. It concentrates on her tormented inner life rather than the relentlessly upbeat pocket-rocket persona she projected in public.

Welch thinks as she speaks as she writes; calling her depression the unwelcome visitor is her one and only foray into metaphor.

The likes of Stephen Fry and Ruby Wax have written very eloquently about their mental health battles, she says. My tribe wouldnt be drawn towards someone who was Oxbridge-educated. My book is aimed at Becky from Bolton.

She needs help too. So does her husband and her friends. They need to understand that she cant just pull herself together, that she cant control the pain. Im relatable. I dont have the answers. I am just telling my story, my truth and if I can help people then that will be my proudest legacy.

Welch was 31, a hugely popular soap star and self-confessed party girl when severe post-natal depression hit after the birth of her first baby, Matthew. It never quite left.

The next thirty-one years have been spent learning how to manage her Unwelcome Visitor, the grim reaper who appears unbidden, draining the colour, leeching the joy from her world.

I tell her that despite my best efforts, her plain prose reduced me to rubble. I felt, as a young person might say, triggered when I abruptly welled up with tears of recognition at her shameful, secret post-natal trauma.

I wanted my feelings back: just to be able to experience emotions again, especially for my baby; just to be normal, Welch writes in The Unwelcome Visitor.

Even though Im not religious in the least, I used to pray, Dear God, please, please, help me to love my baby.'

I had no inkling that I would be spirited back to the aftermath of a wretched labour in 2008 when I too felt desolate, empty, mad and as terrified as she was of being unmasked as a wicked, unnatural woman devoid of maternal feeling.

I literally couldnt bear to look at my desperately-wanted second daughter, with her unnervingly intense brown gaze. Instead, I would fix my own eyes on the middle distance while baring my teeth in a caricature of a smile so she wouldnt guess I was broken.

For her part, Welch recounts that years later, long after baby Matthew had grown up to become Matt Healy, singer in the achingly cool band the 1975, he wrote a song She Lays Down, that painfully captured the slow-motion horror of post-natal depression.

Link:
Denise Welch on her struggle with depression: 'I feel grateful that I'm still standing' - Telegraph.co.uk

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