Black Dog of Depression

This dark  and meaningful  Black Dog, is a reminder that we are all  human and fragile and some people need alittle more sympathy and understanding  than  first seen.

I have known depression through my Mothers long fight against it, and recently have been 'down' myself.... down is one way of expressing this awful illness but it is not always easy to get back 'up'.......

It is an illness and deserves to be brought out into the open and not be a thing of stigma and ridicule.

The Tb is a small black dog with a little bit of bling to brighten the day. Attached is a black personalised Travel Track  tag  and a small keyring.

If taken to  events, please ensure he is logged both in and out correctly  as several bugs have gone to meets then have vanished, thanks.

The ‘black dog’

Little did they know how shaky those hands were. For decades, Churchill had avoided standing too close to balconies and train platforms:

I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand back and, if possible, get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything. A few drops of desperation.

Churchill knew it and named it his “black dog”, following Samuel Johnson (who, like many great men, suffered from the great disease of manic-depression).Churchill was so paralysed by despair that he spent time in bed, had little energy, few interests, lost his appetite, couldn’t concentrate. He was minimally functional – and this didn’t just happen once or twice in the 1930s, but also in the 1920s and 1910s and earlier. These darker periods would last a few months, and then he’d come out of it and be his normal self.

In an early letter to his wife Clementine in 1911, after hearing a friend’s wife had received some help for depression from a German doctor, he wrote:

I think this man might be useful to me – if my black dog returns. He seems quite away from me now – it is such a relief. All the colours come back into the picture.

But normal for Churchill was in a sense also rather abnormal: when he wasn’t severely depressed and low in energy and lying in bed, Churchill had very high energy levels. He wouldn’t go to sleep until two or three in the morning, instead staying up and dictating his dozens of books. He would talk incessantly in a tantivy of whirling thoughts. So much so that the then US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, once said of him: “He has a thousand ideas a day, four of which are good.” These are manic symptoms, part of the disease of manic-depression (which includes but is not exactly the same thing as today’s “bipolar” illness terminology).

After some time, Churchill would go back into months of not talking, not having any ideas, not having any energy. And then he’d be back up again. His mood swings were neverfar away.