No Supplement For Depression

One of the down sides of my day job is that it has wired my body clock to get up early. For years I was a night owl, and now I find myself incapable of staying in bed past about 8am. Which wouldn’t be so bad except that it turns out that the other demographic that gets up early is the mentally ill.

I don’t know why. As a group, they don’t seem to have a lot on. I can’t picture anyone checking their watch in the morning and thinking “Oh no, I was meant to be stood awkwardly in a supermarket aisle, staring into the middle distance and muttering to myself ten minutes ago!”

For whatever reason, the crazy are early risers. I noticed it again this morning when I went to Holland and Barret. A man came in behind me and began talking to the sales assistant in one of those voices that was four times louder than it needed to be at any given moment. He said he needed something for energy, because he felt tired a lot, lately, and that “…maybe I’m depressed.”

He said that last part in a way that screamed “I’m very depressed, that’s literally the only thing wrong, please help me.”

The sales assistant, I assumed, decided that fixing someone else’s mental health problems wasn’t really her field of expertise. She volunteered that tiredness could be caused by sleeping too little or too much, proving in the process that her medical training began and ended at the phrase “do you have a loyalty card?” She then went on to question whether the guy ate too much red meat or possibly not enough, before ultimately recommending some B-vitamin supplements. Regardless of her line of questioning, the guy would break off on tangents — that he used to go to the gym but then stopped and was trying to get back into it, for example — that implied that all he really needed was someone to talk to. Again, he mentioned that maybe he was depressed, with a hopeful quality to the phrase like maybe this time she’d take the hint and give him a hug or agree to be penpals or really anything that would staunch the flow of his soul as it leaked inexorably into a void of crippling loneliness.

Instead she sold him some vitamin B pills, with the advice that if he didn’t feel any better he should maybe talk to a doctor.

After he left, as the assistant was ringing through my stuff and asking if I had a loyalty card, I asked her if she could cure my depression like the last guy had assumed she could.

“Well, he’s probably just not getting enough B-vitamins,” she said, entirely seriously. “He said he doesn’t eat a lot of red meat, and B-vitamins are really important for your energy levels and nervous system, but if he keeps feeling tired he should probably see a doctor…”

She said it in the exact same way as she’d said it to the depressed guy before me. I realised that her tone wasn’t what I’d assumed — one of a menial store worker politely trying to sidestep the minefield of someone else’s loneliness. The last customer had been making a not-very-subtle cry for help, and it wasn’t that she’d picked up on it and decided that the situation was way more than she was willing to handle. It was that she hadn’t picked up on it at all.

When I’d mentioned the other guy thinking she could cure his depression, what I was really trying to say was “It’s okay, that guy was a little crazy and it wasn’t your job to fix him.” But she didn’t notice that, either. She just kept on extolling the virtues of vitamin pills. She was just one of those people who has no function except to repeat whatever sales pitch she’s been told to repeat, devoid of empathy or even detectable brain waves, forever.

I realised that there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t lead to some sort of insincere and reflexive recommendation for a herbal supplement. I could tell her that I had a gun, and that if she didn’t empty the till I’d hurt her, and all she would do is calmly, mindlessly intone that I should drink some camomile tea to make me calmer. It made me want to lacerate myself with something and stumble back into the store squirting blood in all directions, just to see if she would obliviously recommend aloe vera pills or some ginger root extract.

I didn’t do either of those things — I’m not as crazy as the other early risers — but I left feeling nearly as depressed as the guy before me.