The “crazy lesbian” is everywhere. From the dreary melodrama dragged out again and again by programmes like The L Word and Lip Service, to Natalie Portman sprouting feathers of the mind and having unhinged girl-on-girl sex in Black Swan; popular culture seems to have diagnosed all gay women with non-specific mental illness.
I’ve suffered from depression since I was a teenager and after a thankfully short and unsuccessful career as a tortured adolescent poet, I’m just beginning to get used to my status as “another crazy lesbian”. Girls I’ve dated have even rolled their eyes at me when I’ve opened up to them about head stuff (FYI, I try not to do this on first dates, but lesbian emotional over-sharing is a definite thing). For lesbians, the stereotypical deranged dyke has become an in-joke . But how much of my own depression and anxiety (which is far from derangement, incidentally) is actually rooted in being gay?
A number of studies have shown that LGBT people are more likely to have poor mental health than heterosexuals. According to the NUS, we are ten times more likely to commit suicide than straight people. With the huge pressure that often surrounds coming out and the prevalence of homophobic bullying, this is hardly surprising. As illustrated by the recent tragic case of Lucy Meadows , the country’s most widely-read newspapers are about as kind to the LGBT community as The Meat Trades Journal is to the cow community. There are even charities like MindOut (an offshoot of Mind) and PACE that focus entirely on the mental health of non-straight people.
I was diagnosed with clinical depression around the same time as I came out. I was nineteen and I’d been spending entire weeks in bed, wondering if I was ever going to stop feeling like one of those bird-masked plague doctors was trying to push my brain through a sieve. Depression is like a physical presence. A lot of people subscribe to Winston Churchill’s description of it as a black dog; for me, it’s more a beak-faced bastard watching indifferently through a pair of eyeholes. As a teenager, the trouble I was having accepting my sexuality was a major contributor to my fragile mental health. I was prescribed antidepressants (which I still take), I was given some counselling and things slowly started to level out.
But I’m certain that my depression wasn’t and isn’t entirely a by-product of lesbianism. I remember having my first major panic attack when I was about nine and I tried to comprehend infinity. I was a quiet, pensive kid. The word “daydreamer” always cropped up in my school reports and I had my first therapy session when I was eleven. When my older brother went through a Satanist phase, his goth friends liked me because I was “spooky”. To this day, Wednesday Addams is a style icon of mine.
So I was prone to rumination and depressive episodes long before my sexuality became a major worry. What’s more, when my family and friends were fully supportive of my coming out, and even when I started getting comfortable with my sexuality, the depression lingered on like a squatter in the attic bedroom. The problem I now have is that I feel like a traitor for perpetuating the “crazy lesbian” stereotype. Every time I bring up my mental health, I can’t help feeling that I’m letting the team down.
But I’ve come to realise that I can’t allow other people’s misconceptions about mental illness to silence me. I’d rather be labelled “another crazy lesbian” than treat my mental health as taboo. “Crazy” is only how the eye-rollers choose to see me when they hear buzzwords like “depression”. In reality, I use antidepressants in the same way that diabetics use insulin. They don’t alter my personality; they stabilise my mood and prevent panic attacks. In fact, an unexpected side-effect of my depression is that I’m never surprised by anything that goes on in my head. I just know it all so well. When you spend so much time locked inside your own mind, you learn to find your way around. You get to know every dark corner and the spectres that lurk there become less and less horrifying. Craziness is a lazy, superficial and ultimately meaningless concept that hints at being out of control. That’s exactly what I’m not.
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