Margaret Drabble on depression and agoraphobia.

Here is a very worthwhile essay by the English writer Margaret Drabble. A taste, on agoraphobia:

I used to criticise my mother for her inertia, her agoraphobia, her unwillingness to walk down the street. She'd feel better, I told her, if she got out and about more. In her last years she lived in a large, detached house in Suffolk without ever visiting the village shop. I didn't know where the shop was, and had assumed it must be out of range, but on one of my visits, curiosity and restlessness compelled me to seek it out. I discovered that it was only 10 minutes' walk away.

Man, oh, man, this hits home. I used to feel this way about my grandmother, a tiny, sweet, anxious woman who rarely left her Brooklyn apartment. Who hated travel of all kinds. Who never learned to drive. Who depended on my grandfather to deal with the outside world -- to do the grocery shopping, and drop off packages at the post office, and pick up her prescription medications from the pharmacy. Before I started having panic attacks, I couldn't fathom what was wrong with her. Why in the world would anyone stay inside all the time -- or refuse to learn to drive?? I loved my grandmother deeply, but considered her to be frail mentally as well as physically. Her refusal to engage in life? That was a character weakness. Something that could be cured by sucking it up a little.

Only later, after I'd developed my own case of agoraphobia, did I begin to grasp what my grandmother had been going through all those years when I was looking down my nose at her from my perch of youthful self-satisfaction. Only then did I begin to understand the depth of her fear, the way it had taken over her life, worming its way into all her thoughts, whispering its plans of ambush should she venture outside her comfort zone.

It's at least good for that, panic. For teaching compassion.

Another taste, on coping:

We all tackle it in our own ways. I have long been a believer in the therapeutic powers of nature, and had faith that a good, long walk outdoors would always do me good. It might not cure me, but it would do me good. I agreed with the poet Robert Southey, who in his old age mildly remarked that "I am less sensible of the want of spirits when engaged in walking than at any other time and therefore spend more time out of doors than I might otherwise do."

There's a good reason your mom would tell you to go spend some time outdoors when you were down in the dumps as a kid. It works. When I was living in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, my version of this method of dealing with panic and depression was to spend upwards of ten hours a week mountain biking. I rode the trails of the Santa Monica Mountains obsessively, as often as I could. I'm confident that it was the single most effective thing I did to stay sane during that time.