The closest thing I have to any academic understanding of how the human mind works comes from the one year I read psychology as a minor subject at university in 1974. That, and several years working in sales, and later in sales training, which (in my experience) is not an area populated by ideal subjects for a balanced study of 'normal' behaviour.
Therefore, I make no claim to being an authority on the subject. All I can talk about is what I have experienced myself.
Mental illness has for decades been a subject to be avoided at all costs - admitting that you suffer opens the door to ridicule and abuse from others. It causes embarrassment to those who are actually best positioned to help the one suffering. It sets off alarm bells with those who like to be able to predict future behaviour, like current or potential employers, and even though it may never be cited as the reason for termination, or for not hiring, it does inevitably influence the decision-making process. People are human. They like 'normality'.
When I was released from a mental hospital in 2009, following a voluntary admission when I was feeling suicidal, I spoke to a psychiatrist, who suggested that it would be therapeutic for me to revisit my long-ignored passion for music, and specifically for song-writing. It would, he said, give me something to focus on other than the problems that had led me to that state.
He was right.
I started out by trying to remember some of the songs I had written many years ago, when I was part of a gospel group for several years. The original hand-written manuscripts had long disappeared, but I managed to find buried in my archives some old music creation software, and set about learning to use the software, then creating contemporary arrangements of what I remembered of the songs. It did not take long for the creative energy to start flowing again, and I found myself writing more new music.
Several software upgrades later, and with some astute purchases through a large auction site, I now have a fully equipped home studio, giving me the tools I need to take a song from concept to being radio-ready.
With the release of DARK CLOUD, I have tried to capture the feelings and emotions I experienced in those dark days before, during and immediately after my hospitalisation. The music is dedicated to the UK charity MIND, whose staff and volunteers were most helpful in helping me put my life back on track.
Don't get me wrong - I do not consider myself to be 'normal' now. But I no longer aspire to be normal. I recognize that I have an illness that will not go away. I have just learned how to live with it.
If you have suffered, or currently suffer, from depression, you may find something here to relate to; to maybe put into words what you have been thinking. And if you are lucky enough never to have suffered through this mind-crippling disease, then perhaps you will gain some understanding of how it feels to those of us who have.
DK