Don’t you find reading about celebrities who commit suicide, depressing? I do. Not because I’ll miss them. My reason is much shallower.

It is because I feel my own life pales when compared to the fame, talent, ridiculous amounts of money and beautiful partners they always seem to have. Yet, inexplicably, they take their own lives??? People like Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain, Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway … the list goes on and on. By killing themselves, they make my humdrum existence seem worse than it is. I mean, what’s left for me to do? What’s the point in continuing?? If all the things I mention above – fame; a money-making  occupation (… usually glamorous); attractive women; a spectacular home; plus, plus, plus … are not enough to make you want to carry on living – then what is?

But not all celebrities commit suicide. So, it can’t be fame, money and glamour or a combination of these, triggering their deaths. I mean there is nothing intrinsically terminal about being well-known or being wealthy; and I can’t see anything deadly about being good-looking.

And of course, not all suicides are celebrities. Ordinary people also take their own lives. In all these tragic events, there seems to be one common dominant factor, Depression.

Although, at times we all get depressed, we don’t necessarily end up killing ourselves. It depends on how miserable we are as to our reaction. For instance, decades after attending boarding school, I still get down on a Sunday night. Boarding-school-blues, I call it. Fortunately, it is not terminal. It just makes me feel intensely sad.

But it seems, for a large part of my life I was a low-level-depressive; without recognising it for what it was.  I just thought I was being pathetic, procrastinating, lazy or ineffective. Then one day I was diagnosed with full blown depression. I was clinically depressed. The doctor prescribed some pills, which would make life bearable. Apparently.

Traumatically, they did the exact opposite. In the weeks after I saw him, on at least three occasions I contemplated suicide. Suddenly, I understood how people could kill themselves.

After a month on the pills, and because of the suicidal thoughts, I decided they were not for me. They completely neutralised my feelings. I had no idea whether I liked or hated what I was doing. Suddenly nothing appealed to me. After at first tolerating my emotions flat-lining, I decided I was not going to live like that.

It was worse than being depressed. At least when I was depressed, I felt something. On the meds, I was just an automaton. A large unthinking, unfeeling, hunk of meat. Crucially, I did decide never to think about suicide again. But it was scary how thoughts of ending it all, wouldn’t completely disappear. They lurked on the fringes of my conscious mind, just looking for a gap to appear. So, I threw the pills away.

Serendipitously, on the day I discarded them, my boss, while talking disparagingly about a colleague who suffered from depression, said, “If you think about it Gemmell, there are no depressed people on a sinking life raft.”

As he uttered that casual, throwaway remark, I had an epiphany. In a blinding flash I realised to cure myself of depression, all I had to do was to, (metaphorically) get onto a sinking life raft.

This then, is my quest for a metaphoric, last chance, leaky, rescue vessel …