2013-06-18T23:00:50-04:00 Kat Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=kat-brown Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Kat Brown Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1084264 2011-11-10T18:00:00-05:00 2012-01-10T05:12:01-05:00

Kat Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kat-brown/
She didn't fight in wars, but she made the world - my world at least, and many more - a brighter place. When I knew her at school, she made life better: she was popular, clever, talented and kind. She had awesome handwriting and incredible style. And like many of those whose lives we remember today, she died at a ridiculously young age. All because of a mental illness that gets swept under the carpet and misunderstood.

I hate the word depression. One of the major obstacles to it being regarded as a terrifying, disabling illness, is because its name sounds ridiculously light. A depression is a sofa dimple, a financial recession, feeling a bit low because that person you fancy went off with a fool. It is not an appropriate name for a killer illness.

Part of the reason I feel so strongly is that a large chunk of my life was owned by that illness. Ten years ago, when I was 18, my mother finally relented and took me to my GP. I remember her saying in the car, "If they don't find anything wrong with you, you'll just have to get on with it." I was terrified. I didn't have any 'it' to be getting on with.

I told the GP that if I flunked out of university, which seemed fairly likely at the time, then I would kill myself because there was simply nothing else for me to cling on to. I told her how I had planned to do it. And she, funnily enough, realised that feeling suicidal and living in a brain- black hole were not normal, and put me on anti-depressants. This was three years after I started showing symptoms of the illness. Back then the internet was just AOL dial-up and dodgy chatrooms; there were no helpful blogs or support sites. You couldn't even Google your symptoms.

I didn't know I was ill because, as far as I knew, what I was feeling was completely normal. Maybe you were supposed to feel like your brain was slowly eating its way through your will to live. Maybe that explained The Jerry Springer Show.

I waded my way through my languages degree in a fog of inertia coupled with insomnia and mania. At one point, while I was on probation for missing all my morning classes - the only time I could sleep was 4am - I held 12 positions in my college. I was even playing in sports teams, badly. I was high on sociability. I did everything I possibly could to fill my time because it distracted me from the vertiginous horror that my own mind inflicted when I was alone.

People who don't have depression, who've never had it - and this isn't a dig, you're bloody lucky - seem to think it's an indulgence. All that sitting around, moping. Ooh, and sometimes cutting yourself for attention!

Well, no. When I cut myself, and I didn't do it a lot because it was too noticeable, it was as a last resort. I was so full to bursting with loathing, misery and, that key word again, terror, that cutting was the only way to get a release. I remember excusing myself from watching It's A Wonderful Life with friends in order to hyperventilate in the bathroom before cutting and wrapping my arm in a sleeve. I never wanted anyone to see my scars, and when my mother finally did, she told me off for attention-seeking. Perhaps some do want others to notice their scars, but I firmly believe most just want to forget they exist entirely.

I apologise if all this wallowing in things past sounds slightly orgiastic. By some magical quirk, I got better in 2005, and bar one set-back in 2007, have been depression-free ever since. And you forget - you do, you forget what it feels like to have that awful thing in your brain every minute of every day.

Once better, I was so relieved to be so that I found it difficult to identify with people who were ill. I would find myself getting irritated with my brilliant, talented housemate for never leaving his room, for being the shell of the man I loved. So I can only imagine what it's like for people who have not had depression, who have to watch their friends and family alternately fade away and explode into mania. This is why we need to talk about it more, at all, and often.

People still don't understand enough about depression, even now with all the blogs, the websites and the famous faces associated with it. Some of the most brilliant, funny, wonderful people I know are crippled by depression and it's a hideous waste.

Good on public figures like Stephen Fry and Alastair Campbell for speaking out about their own experiences and, most recently, to Allie Brosh.

The author of the brilliant web comic Hyperbole and a Half posted a searingly truthful cartoon about her so-titled Adventures in Depression, and some of the comments from sufferers nearly made me weep. Then this comment from a reader: "Wow. I never really understood what proper, actual depression felt like until this post. I think I've been a bit of a shit friend to my friends who have it. Soz dudes."

So let's not be shit friends. Let's understand what depression is and give it the fear and respect it has wrenched from us over the centuries.

Have we really got to 2011, 10 years after it was finally diagnosed in me, with people still unable to find the help they need? If what it takes is a rebrand, to re-term depression "Mind Scorpions" or "Relentless Fucking Misery Disease", then so be it. Any illness that drives people to take their own lives is one that needs a sight more attention paid to it.

For further information, try Rethink Mental Illness, Mind - an excellent mental health charity, and Turn2Me - online mental health support]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.889706 2011-07-06T10:11:49-04:00 2011-09-05T05:12:01-04:00

Kat Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kat-brown/
Writing for free is a grey area. Despite the ubiquity (and importance) of blogs and that many high profile sites trade content for prestige only, it's often looked down upon if it makes up part of your career. When, as a newly-hatched post-grad, I joined one journalism forum, the stance was: "Don't write unless you're paid. It undermines you and it undermines journalism."

The view tends to be that writing unpaid is something to do only on work experience, when every nib is a valuable cutting. I was certainly less keen on writing for free when I was unemployed for two months, but I wasn't any less keen on writing.

So why write for free?

Free is why people write fanzines, update blogs and tweet. It's pressure off, it's the opportunity to practise something you enjoy and share it with people immediately. And particularly online, there's a limited supply of people who will pay. My pitching skills are sufficiently atrocious that, if I were only to write for money outside my main job, I would probably forget how to hold a pencil within a year. I don't want that, because I love writing and I need to do it.

As the internet is absolutely massive, there's plenty of room for you to write about, or find, exactly what interests you. Six years into my career and I have yet to be hired as anyone's all-in-one The Archers, Pokémon, sharks, X-Men and cocktails expert, but that's ok because we have the internet!

The very reason I wanted to write in the first place was because writers made my life brighter. Instead of sitting in my rainy corner of England, I was reading about the Countess of Chichester and her show jumping llamas in Style. I was wandering around with Jilly Cooper, Dylan Thomas, John Donne and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I was following rock stars on tour and falling so in love with Laura Barton's barbed wit that I wrote her a fan letter when she left The Guardian.

Reading a piece that someone has written with care, reason and wit makes my day. It's what I want to do, to get better at, and you don't get better at something by sitting on your hands like a human vending machine, waiting for someone to put a coin in.

In the event that my online habits die and I become able to string more than 800 words together at a time, then fine: writing for free will be acceptable because I will be "working on my novel". Until then, I will be working on my navel. And why not?
]]>