It takes one to know one

Since being diagnosed with depression and subsequently reading lots of stuff about it, I've realised just how widespread the illness is.

Take last night for example, it was the culmination of the latest Doctor Who series and at the grand old age of 47, I've finally managed to migrate around the sofa and watch from the comfort of sitting on it instead of cowering behind it!!!!!

What I saw was slightly different from what DM saw. He saw an action-packed thriller, where two Doctor Whos and a Doctor Donna saved the world along with a number of ex-Dr Who assistants. What he saw was exactly what happened. What I saw was that the writer of the episode knew what it was like to suffer from depression.

He/she was obsessed by the bees leaving our world (a classic case of depressive worry) and had written Donna's character to belittle herself all of the time -"I'm nobody, I'm just a temp from Chiswick". She repeated that over and over again in the way that only someone who knows what it's like to be depressed would have done. Clearly Catherine Tate was acting (and bloody marvellously too, if I may say so) but the person who put the words into her mouth knows what it's like alright.

I used to say that you can tell the lonely by looking into their eyes, I still believe this to be true and I now know that you can tell the depressed by what they say.