Travel: A Cure for Depression

For Abigail Butcher, the thing that finally pulled her out of depression and off the antidepressants she had come to rely on was walking away from the life she already had. She packed up, went abroad, and spent her days meeting strangers, eating food she had never tried, and arranging her hours the way she wanted them.

The trouble built up in layers. She saw a fatal car crash, then not long after was caught in a second one herself, which put her in hospital for two months. While she was recovering the losses kept coming: the relationship with her boyfriend ended, her pet died, and doctors found pre-cancerous cells on her cervix that would need careful monitoring. Her physician told her plainly that she had to bring her stress down if she wanted to stay healthy. Instead she drifted into taking sleeping pills at night, and before long antidepressants became part of her daily routine.

The guilt was the part that grew fastest. She blamed herself for the days she missed at work, and that guilt fed into thoughts of ending her life. She kept the lights off and the curtains shut; the house felt heavy and grey.

On paper there was nothing missing. She had a lovely home in London, friends and family around her, colleagues who respected her at a company where she held a senior position. None of it registered. She felt flatter and more exhausted than she had in years, leaning on the medication without anything actually getting better. She cried most days.

The turn came when she left for another country and started doing small, ordinary things: exercise classes, time in the sun, rest without the usual dread. A colleague gave her the advice that stuck. Go home, the colleague said, and set yourself goals, but keep them small, nothing enormous. Do more of what you love. And get off the pills, because you don't need them.

So she bought a round-the-world ticket for three months and began cutting back on the antidepressants, teaching herself to steady her own moods again. Somewhere in South-East Asia she made up her mind to quit the demanding, high-pressure job entirely and work for herself as a freelance journalist. She describes her life now as calmer and far happier. Her reasoning is blunt: if the job you have is making you think about killing yourself, there is an argument for trading it for something that makes you want to stay.

The pieces that remade her life were not mysterious. A lower-stress routine. Travel. Figuring out what she genuinely enjoyed and then doing it. Listening to friends and therapists who had good sense. A new country, a new way of living. And taking full ownership of what she thought and how she acted.

She also wrote herself a set of rules to live by. She would do what she wanted, when she wanted, without fretting over other people's opinions, and she would weigh only the views of those she loved and trusted. She would make time to actually live, perhaps putting in longer hours when she worked for herself but fewer days overall, which left room for the things that eased her stress. People and situations that dragged her down she would leave behind, carrying forward only what was good. If someone hurt her, she decided, it was because she had let them, and she would stop handing out blame to anyone but herself. She was in charge now. And when life started to pile up again, she would go sit by the water, breathe, think back on the trip around the world, and give herself a firm talking-to.

Original Story: Daily Mail, Femail, article 1375491, "Beating depression: One woman tells how she travelled to the ends of the earth with inspirational results." Submitted by an anonymous contributor.

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