To be peacefully alone with yourself in the swirling black mess of depression is impossible. The chatter and fuzz and abrasions of the illness are omnipresent. The hairshirt is not removable, and sometimes the pain is so exquisitely pointed it is unimprovable, a perfect storm. Depression is patently the wrong word. The right word is brainstorm, but that was used to label something quite different decades ago. Something the opposite. How does it feel? What's it like? Imagine that moment when a car flashes across your path and the collision is avoided by a fraction. That surge of fear and horror. The dog you're babysitting has run out the door you left open. There is something of that sensation present inside a clinically depressed person all the time. Your gut never lets you forget that the next thing will surely be, at best, not much good. That's all you can think. The suicidal Hamlet had a pretty good crack at drawing us into the depths of depression in his soliloquies. Every clear tormented thought is that of a man going under, wanting off "this mortal coil", but fearing an afterlife offering perhaps something worse. "Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; / To sleep; perchance to dream: ay there's the rub; / For in that sleep what dreams may come." Australian poet A. D. Hope wrote an extraordinary and inexplicably little-known poem called The Sleeper, very much akin in its desperation to escape as Hamlet: "Then daylight comes again / and the mind's insatiate eye / opens on its insane landscape of misery / and will not let me die." He contemplates a gun suicide; "that one quick crash of pain", but like Hamlet is afraid of another side even more terrifying. "Suffer your nightmare / dread the daylight of the dead." These are extraordinarily vivid examinations of depression as something that has to be endured. Of course, each year thousands choose not to. Suicide prevention is finally getting some of the attention in research and resources it requires, but an ongoing commitment is needed.

I know all about the "whats" of depression. I'm alert to the mundane side effects of medications and put up with them, mostly. Sometimes I can predict trajectories and undulations and happy breakthroughs. But the whys? Depression is an evolutionary anomaly of brutal elusive subtleness and mystery. The reasons for it being here with us, in us, as postulated in much science, are as insulting as they are perfectly feasible. Depression, it's proposed, is an adaptation allowing you more time by yourself to achieve . . . something. What exactly? Without the hindrances of happiness or hedonistic temptation your concentration allegedly improves. Well, can I just refute that one entirely? Good. The depressed mind is a locus stubbornly resistant to free-thinking or the expansion of ideas. Depression is a state of lovelessness. You forget what love is like. You are arid, and dehydrated so often even tears will not come. But I don't lose contact with my real self. I want the same teams to win, to watch the same programs. It's just the low level of reward that is the bugbear. What you're forced to endure, eventually, becomes the truth. Happiness is the lie and the farce. In the face of all this, this worldly carnage and death and pain, starvation, violence. Who could be calm and content? Am I one of the special ones, the terrified, who know the truth and react accordingly? EFFECTIVE treatment and understanding of depression is to some extent mired in the '60s.

The issue of stigma, I believe, is over-inflated. I have rarely been judged by my illness, even back in the '80s when it was far less visible in the media than it is now, and I was far more distressed than I am now. None of my partners recoiled in horror when I told them what the score was. I'm not sure who the stigmatisers are or whether it's just presumed they're prevalent. Perhaps, in cases, the talk of stigma prevents depressed people from opening up. There should be more talk of the illness, and less of it still leading to prejudice and fear. I'm quite well at the moment and think I may be for a while. I support the use of anti-depressants and know very well they work, at times, for me and for millions of others. In the '80s I had several courses of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). And I support its continued use too for improving the lives of the intractably distressed. Don't believe the movies' depiction of the treatment as barbaric. These days it's fast, safe but still a last resort. A lot of people reading this will be doing so while very unwell. Their families will be hugely affected by the awful pall melancholy brings. When treatments are resisted by a stubborn mind mocking such dismal efforts, it can take a hellishly long time to recover. The despair in the meantime varies from frustrating and disappointing (you can keep your chin up, have days where you're "not bad") to unbearable. And then there are those who are lost on the street. With no family or treatment. Living rough. For those living with depression and their friends and family, I would recommend two books. The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, which is an extraordinary work of personal experience, and the history and treatment of mental illness. And also novelist William Styron's short work Darkness Visible about his first bout of the illness. Ironically, it's sad that fewer people need to read about depression to try to understand it these days because so many are experiencing it or know someone who is.

Lifeline: 131 114 Movember: au.movember.com beyondblue.org.au