Finding True North: The healing power of place

In this post Linda Gask presents Finding True North: The healing power of place, a book published in April 2021 by Sandstone Press. 

What does it mean to ‘recover’ from depression? The answer you receive to this question will vary by the profession, training, experience, and ideological stance of the person you ask. Some will speak in terms of a reduction in the number of symptoms of depression you have ticked ‘yes’ to. Others will focus on regaining ability to function in the world, particularly in your relationships and ability to work. How do you ‘recover’? Is it simply about taking the tablets, going to therapy- or both? Or is there more to it? 

What about mindfulness, and exercise, and all the other suggestions people helpfully provide? There will also be a few who will admonish you for your choice of words to describe a shade of normal human unhappiness and add to the guilt you were feeling for being depressed in the first place. Personally, I’ve found the writing of Damien Ridge and David Karp very helpful in beginning to make sense of what recovery from depression entails. They draw from the real experiences of people who have suffered it, including Karp himself, and not from what can seem, to the depressed, as the disembodied theories of others.

During my career I delivered and received both pills and therapy. Medication was rarely sufficient on its own and doesn’t alone bring about the life changes we often need to make, even if it fuels the energy to be able to make them. An awareness of the tacit knowledge gained from both personal and professional experience of depression, along with wanting to challenge the stigma associated with being a professional with mental illness, informed my personal writing too, and memoir has seemed the most natural medium for my exploration of the phenomena of mind and mood.

Linda Gask

After taking early retirement from a stressful academic post, I found myself struggling with a new diagnosis of chronic kidney disease. Meanwhile my husband was trying to care for his elderly, dementing mother and it felt like the future we had planned for ourselves was slipping away. Feeling adrift, I began to disappear for long periods (with his blessing) to a cottage I found in Orkney and set about trying to ‘recover’ - documenting my attempts at understanding the process in my blog Patching the Soul. 

Gradually my second memoir Finding True North began to take shape and the process of writing it served not only as an opportunity to re-examine how previous treatment had or had not helped me, but to record the impact of, for example, trying to lead the kind of sensible lifestyle, I had for years been prescribing to my patients but failing to adhere to myself. Getting a good night’s sleep, taking more exercise, drinking less, eating healthily, and discovering how incredibly hard it is to be a ‘good’ patient- as if I didn’t really know it already. Giving myself time to explore and practice mindfulness meditation, trying to being kinder to myself, forgive others for the sins of the past, and, of course, forgive myself. Finding out how the lessons learned in therapy must be revisited repeatedly throughout a life.

As time passed, not only did the realisation come to me that I had spent so much of my life travelling because I had been searching for a place that I could call home, but that I had found it on an island, Mainland Orkney, in the far North of Scotland. Yet, even then it was apparent that what mattered even more was the need to nurture the sense of an island of calm and safety inside myself. Recovery is as much about re-discovery as anything else – locating the sense of who you were before depression, and what it is still possible for you to become. Re-discovering those values that matter to you so much and define you. Your own personal True North.

Now I am remarkably well in spirits despite continued problems with my physical health; and still taking the tablets. The book, which benefited so much by shaping in collaboration with an editor, who understood the story I was trying to write, perhaps sooner than I did, is out in the world. I hope it helps others as much as writing it helped me to rediscover my life.

Bring on the next Act.