http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic ... s-die.html
How DO you cope when your husband tells you he wants to die?
By Tessa Cunningham
Last updated at 11:18 AM on 11th May 2009
Rebecca Mackenzie's husband, Alasdair, 41, a town planning consultant, had a breakdown two years ago. Here, Rebecca, 38, a physiotherapist who lives in Twickenham, Surrey, with their sons Bruce, two-and-a-half, and Herbie, 13 months, tells what it is like to live with a depressed partner. Early morning in November 2006 and I was enjoying the first night of uninterrupted sleep since giving birth to my son Bruce two months earlier. Suddenly, the bed shook and I was woken by my husband sitting bolt upright in bed looking panic-stricken.
Instantly awake, I thought something terrible had happened to the baby, but as I checked the Moses basket at the foot of our bed, he was still sleeping contentedly.
I turned back to Alasdair and it was clear immediately that he was having some kind of crisis. He started crying and then, for two hours, my big, strong husband - a man with a black belt in karate - sat on the edge of the bed and rocked back and forth, sobbing like a baby.
It was terrifying. I held him tight and tried to comfort him and get through to him while my mind was whirring, wondering what on earth I could do to help him? He was in utter despair - his mind and body totally out of control - and nothing I could say seemed to make it better.
What on earth was going on? Until that moment we had seemed to have everything - a gorgeous house, a healthy newborn baby, a happy marriage - but all he could say was that he felt worthless.
I wanted to scream: 'If you love me, why aren't you happy? Why don't your marriage and your lovely baby boy make you happy?' I knew my thoughts were unfair - I could see that Alasdair would have done anything to dig himself out of the dark hole he was in.
As dawn broke, Alasdair was in such a state of total mental and physical collapse that I realised I would have to take charge. Leaving him in bed, I took his car keys so he couldn't leave the house and his mobile phone so he could not be disturbed. Then I rang his boss and said simply: 'I think Alasdair is having some sort of breakdown.' He hasn't returned to the job since.
I rang the doctor and explained what had happened. Seeing my husband in such torment was horrific. But I was almost relieved. He had been behaving oddly for weeks. Suffering nightmares, unable to concentrate and racked by anxiety, he had told me that he thought he was losing his mind.
I'd tried to talk to him and remind him of all the good things we had. I simply hadn't realised just how ill he was.
The community psychiatric nurse at the doctor's saw Alasdair that afternoon. We sat together as she asked him a series of questions to test his level of depression. She asked things such as did Alasdair feel sad most of the day? Had he considered suicide? Did he feel a failure?
He answered yes to every question. I can't describe how horrible it was to sit there and listen to the man I loved and thought I knew inside out admit that he believed life wasn't worth living.
He even admitted that, hours earlier, he had come within a hair's breath of taking his own life. He had stood on the platform at Maidstone East station and planned to jump because he felt so low.
But before he threw himself under the train, he'd rung me to tell me how he felt, only becoming too ashamed to admit it when I picked up the phone. My blood ran cold as I recalled how I'd made small talk with him - while all the time I had no idea that he was contemplating suicide.
Alasdair was prescribed antidepressants and a week later started private psychiatric therapy rather than join a long NHS waiting list. That was just the beginning. We have spent the past two years battling my husband's depression. It has tested us both to the limit. We've lost so much - including Alasdair's career.
In fact, the only thing keeping me going has been my absolute belief that Alasdair isn't to blame. It's an illness and Alasdair, as much as anyone else, would love to just 'snap out of it'. But the Black Dog of depression has had him in its vice-like grip.
We'll never know the exact cause of his breakdown. Whether the responsibility of becoming a father on top of the pressures of his high-powered job in town planning triggered it or whether it was a timebomb waiting to explode - the result of the build-up of years of stress and anxiety adding to his own susceptibility to depression.
Alasdair lost his mother to cancer when he was a student at the London School of Economics. She was just 48. I'd lost my father at a similar age, so I was very sympathetic when he explained that he had been depressed after her death. It was perfectly understandable.
When I met him, he had been having weekly counselling sessions for the previous five years and was on medication. I admired his honesty and he seemed determined not to let his past problems affect him now.
He was extremely successful - holding down a job as a town planning consultant with a £50,000 salary. In fact, Alasdair appeared to have a real zest for life. He was passionate about karate and loved travel. We visited South Africa and Malaysia, and went skiing in Canada and America.
In those early years, I thought the depression was long in the past. We married in May 2005 and when I fell pregnant that Christmas I thought life couldn't get any better.
Alasdair appeared every bit as excited as me. I now know that it's difficult to pick up the clues in someone you love, partly because you are just too close to see their behaviour objectively.
That's one of the frustrating aspects of the condition. Although Alasdair - unlike many men - has always been great at talking about his emotions, he didn't know what was happening either.
But his behaviour had become odd. He became very extravagant, buying things such as a new car and a top-of-the-range widescreen TV. I thought he simply wanted to buy nice things before the baby was born.
In fact, it was because he had developed an irrational fear that he was going to lose all his money - he wanted to buy everything I needed first. He started dreaming up mad ideas which he was convinced would make our fortune. One minute he wanted to run a business selling things from our garage. The next he was convinced he'd invented a physiotherapist device which would transform people's lives.
I just didn't see his despair. After all, when Bruce arrived healthy on September 4, 2006 we had every reason to celebrate. And Alasdair appeared ecstatic.
He was so gushing about his wonderful baby that it was almost over the top. Now, I know that it was all a charade. Alasdair was pretending he had emotions he didn't feel at all - a common symptom of depression.
Over the next few weeks, Alasdair's behaviour became increasingly bizarre. His memory kept failing - even forgetting what he was saying in mid-sentence. One day I found his mobile phone in the fridge. That night in November 2006 his mind and body finally broke down.
His treatment involved weekly sessions with a psychiatrist and an intensive programme of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) to break down Alasdair's feelings of guilt and self-loathing, combined with 'Mindfulness' which advocates stepping back from thoughts and simply noticing them.
While I was relieved that Alasdair was getting help, there's nothing attractive or glamorous about a partner with depression. All intimacy went out of the window. Alasdair barely had the energy or interest to wash or shave. He was completely self-obsessed.
Mercifully, the baby kept me busy. I couldn't rely on Alasdair for anything. He was listless and incredibly sleepy - a mixture of the medication and stress.
Even if he was giving Bruce his bottle, he would become forgetful and let the bottle drop out of his mouth. Bills went unpaid, tasks went undone.
I returned to working a three-day week ten months after Alasdair's breakdown. I'd come home and find the dishwasher still needed emptying. Part of his recovery was a daily one-and-a-half-hour yoga session. Watching him swan off while I was left holding the baby made me boil. I never saw my friends, my career was on the back burner, I'd lost my figure, but it was all about Alasdair.
Yet much as I may have wanted to yell 'You are useless', what good would it have done? Alasdair did not return to his job, but in March 2008 he got a job as a concrete polisher which he loves. Our combined income is barely a third of what it was.
Luckily, we've managed to keep our two-bedroom flat - which we bought with a tiny mortgage many years ago. But we really have to watch our pennies. Our second son, Herbie, was born in March last year. His birth was a sign that things were improving and that depression wasn't going to stop us having the family we wanted.
Alasdair still takes antidepressants. He has reduced the dosage, but is likely to take them for life. All the statistics say that he is liable to have a recurrence, but I still feel blessed. We've been through so much, but we are in a really good place now.
