Trades Description Act

Brighton’s West Pier: our famously shabby landmark (watermark?)

OK, you got me. This photograph has got nothing to do with Spain. And it’s completely unrelated to walking. Unless you’ve got a Messiah complex. But I did take it today, and this is where the story starts.

Wet Wet Wet

A paddy field in Sussex

Brighton, my home town for the last 7 years, is feeling distinctly soggy as the UK emerges from the wettest April since records began, signalling another triumph for the Met office, which had predicted a severe drought and ordered a hosepipe ban. Shortly after this announcement it began to look as though the most effective way of negotiating the highways and byways of East Sussex was by gondola.

None of which is particularly relevant to what follows, apart from allowing me a slightly laboured segue into Longfellow’s observation that “into each life some rain must fall”, which seems as apt an introduction as any to the purpose of this blog: a record of my experiences as I prepare for, and embark on, an 825km ancient pilgrimage across Northern Spain, El Camino de Santiago de Compestela, to raise money for the mental health charity, Rethink Mental Illness.

I’m walking in memory of my mother Jenny, this year being the 10th anniversary of her death; Mum was someone who had a huge capacity to enjoy life and contribute to the happiness of others, but who also suffered increasingly debilitating episodes of clinical depression throughout her lifetime, severe enough to be hospitalised on a number of occasions. Yet she never received a conclusive diagnosis or effective long-term treatment. In fact, one of her doctors once described her as a ‘medical enigma’. Not terribly helpful.

Given the major advances in recent years that there have been into the better understanding and treatment of various types of depressive disorder, it’s highly likely that had she had the benefit of the vastly improved diagnostic approaches and treatments in use today, the quality of her life would have been enhanced immeasurably.

But quite apart from developing effective treatments, there is a huge amount of work that still needs to be done in changing attitudes and misconceptions around depressive illnesses and the stigma that surrounds them. Given that 1 in 4 people in their lifetime is currently estimated to suffer from some form of depression during their lifetime (Longfellow clearly wasn’t too far wide of the mark), it seems pretty likely that anyone reading this will know someone who has experienced an episode of depression, or have had one themselves.

Yet we still can’t seem to get over the idea that depression is in some way ‘shameful’ or something to be embarrassed about; just a couple of quite shocking statistics from a 2009 survey conducted by Time To Change illustrate the scale of the problem: 92% of the British public said they believed that admitting to having a mental illness of some kind would damage someone’s career, and 56% of potential employers said they would not employ someone who had a record of mental illness, even if they were the best candidate.

And although things do seem to be gradually improving – with more and more high profile figures talking about their own mental health problems – until the misconceptions around mental illness are changed in a really meaningful way, people will continue to suffer unnecessarily rather than seeking out the treatment and support that is readily available to them.

Which is the reason I have chosen to raise funds for Rethink Mental Illness: to contribute as much as possible both to the high profile campaign work they do to end discrimination around mental health and to the nationwide services they provide that actively support people suffering from a range of mental health disorders, including depression.

Needless to say, any contributions to Rethink Mental Illness would be hugely appreciated. For anyone who has suffered from a serious bout of depression, I hope the importance of the work that Rethink Menatl Illness is doing speaks for itself. And for anyone who reads this and feels no direct connection to the charity, I would still urge you make any contribution you can; even if you’ve only ever experienced a mild case of the Monday morning blues, you’ll have at least some inkling of how incapacitating a full blown depressive illness might be, and consider how much worse, or indeed better, things could be.

A different perspective…