Raising Kane; She Burst On to the Scottish Political Scene Like a Lippy Teenager, but Soon Rosie Kane Found Holyrood Was Every Bit As Cut-Throat and Macho As Westminster. Depression Set in and the Msp Suffered a Much-Publicised Mental Collapse. Three Months Later, in an Exclusive Interview, She Tells Vicky Allan the Whole Story

Summary

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ROSIE Kane says her depression is like a coffee bean. It's small and dense, located somewhere in her body; in her head or in her heart, she's not sure. It moves around. Sometimes it's darker, sometimes lighter, but it never gets any bigger. In November, she remembers, it was tight and black, but now it is a pale and frothy cappuccino colour.

November was the worst time, just after an attack in the Scottish parliament by SNP MSP Stewart Stevenson, just after she dropped out of all her work. It was then, on her couch, in the empty days, she disintegrated fast. Depression always sounds melodramatic and Kane describes hers vividly with her usual brio and frank metaphor. Hers is a certain kind of mind, more poet than theoretician. Depression is coffee beans and "absolute blackness". It's not unfamiliar talk, according with experiences in Andrew Solomon's 2001 study The Noonday Demon: At Atlas Of Depression, with stories I've heard from a depressed friend. A need, as Kane says, "to not hear or speak".

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Raising Kane; She Burst On to the Scottish Political Scene Like a Lippy Teenager, but Soon Rosie Kane Found Holyrood Was Every Bit As Cut-Throat and Macho As Westminster. Depression Set in and the Msp Suffered a Much-Publicised Mental Collapse. Three Months Later, in an Exclusive Interview, She Tells Vicky Allan the Whole Story

She made a trip to Lanzarote in the optimistic hope that the sun would drive away the angst. And then when she returned there was the couch. She slept long hours on that couch, lying there till her body almost became a part of it, her unwashed hair matting into dreadlocks. Her teenage daughters, who had never seen her sleep through the day, thought she was exhausted. She never told them about the blackness. "The feeling of needing to shut off. It's not about being suicidal. I was never suicidal. But to shut off - if you had a switch, if you could temporarily go into a coma. That was what I was craving. This switch, this switch off. I didn't want to be dead, but I wanted death. A coma would have been good, a nice wee coma."

It would be nice and rather neat to say that, three months on, Scottish Socialist Party MSP Kane is back in action, the same feisty firebrand she ever was, bouncing up out of the blackness, but she is not quite that. Her return to parliament - on February 26 this year - is deceptive. Depression isn't quite that easily shrugged off and she is, she says, still ill, buoyed up by Seroxat, counselling and psychotherapy, tak...

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