Description

By M.M Johns

ISBN: 978-1-84747-819-1
Published: 2008
Pages: 129
Key Themes: autobiography, depression, empowerment, relationships

ALSO AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

Description

This first-person account tracks the real life of the author who slowly became engulfed by an acute depression, and his subsequent attempt to gain back his former lifestyle. The work offers an insight into the mind of a person diagnosed with depression – explaining how the illness started, the deterioration felt as it took hold, and the author’s progress through recovery. It endeavors to explain the distorted thinking that controls everyday life, making the smallest tasks which we all take for granted seemingly overwhelming and impossible.

About the Author

M. M. Johns lives in Stirling in Scotland. Educated in South Africa and Zimbabwe, he served in the British South Africa Police for three years prior to joining the British Army for nine years. He worked in the UK for several years before moving to South Africa where he was employed in the Security Industry as a Consultant in Loss Prevention for corporate clients. He returned to the UK eleven years ago to work in the Hospitality Industry. He retired due to ill health in 2007 and now writes from home more as a hobby, something to do, and the result is that he has now written one non-fiction and two fiction novels. A Cheerful Depression is the story of his journey into depression, a suicide attempt and the recovery process.

Book Extract

“So there I was – knowing that complete strangers could see me as the total idiot I thought I was for being so weak and defenseless against the wrongness of my own mind. Yes, defenseless, knowing there was nothing I could do to control these feeling raging through me. My mind was not responding to logic, my body was responding to my mind. The fight or flight response was always present. Flight was the only option; after all it would have been ridiculous to fight everyone I perceived as threatening. But that was another worry, what if someone inadvertently bumped against me and I lashed out, not maliciously but instinctively. That would have led to all sorts of trouble, so there was a conscious effort, a deliberate act of awareness of my surroundings at all times to concentrate on, especially when the anxiety was at its highest and the adrenalin was coursing around my body. All in all it made for a pretty scary existence, scared of my own shadow, scared of other people, scared of my reactions, scared of my lack of reactions, scared of the way my mind was working. I was alone in this scary living nightmare, for that I was grateful, there was no one at home to observe my fear, my, of time, cowering abjectness. A wimp of the highest order of wimps.

Now I want you to picture in your minds eye a 6’3”, 220lbs man full of self confidence, able to make decisions instantly, able to cope with whatever was thrown at him; now in this constant state of panic and fear. Got it? Not a pretty picture! Not that most people, as I now realize, could ever see that side me. The public persona thing again. The image of how we want others to see us.”