There wasn’t ever a choice. It was just there. Mum’s illness. Like a shadow. (You can’t shake a shadow). Even when she was well, we worried about when she mightn’t be. Such was the nature of its stealthy approach, its slipping into our lives. Depression is a sly bastard.

I was thirteen when she got sick. Though at first she didn’t appear unwell exactly – tired, tearful, her enthusiasm and energy chain-and-balled by deadweight apathy – but not ill as in flushed-febrile ill. So at first it was easier to pretend – to hope – that this was a bad day. Mum’s just having a bad day. Until the day morphed into days and then weeks and then months and finally a diagnosis was delivered and mum was admitted to the long-cool-white psychiatric ward of a cooler-whiter hospital and then there was no getting away from it. Labeled. A tag about her thin wrist, a chart at the end of her bed, medicine bottles jostling rudely for attention.

A long time ago. I remember it like it was yesterday.

There was a shift then, a gentle rearrangement of family dynamics.

I became – at 13 – my dad’s confidant. He spoke to me about Mum’s illness. Sometimes he cried. Sometimes I did too. Your wife’s borderline insanity wasn’t something you could talk about over a beer with friends, to colleagues at work, so you talked about it at home, to your firstborn, which helped to demystify the madness.

Depression thrives on stigma, in the dark: thrust it into the light and you’ll suck the lifeblood out of it. Dad made me understand that Mum’s illness couldn’t be helped, was nothing to be ashamed of, might have happened to anybody. Like a cold. Drag extraordinary pain into the realms of ordinary and immediately it is less frightening, less menacing. Talk about something that intimidates you and it’ll intimidate less.

I don’t know if my dad’s frankness was a conscious effort to make me understand, or just born of needing to download. But it set a healthy precedent: Mum’s illness was never a secret. I don’t know if they ever made a pact – we’ll always answer the kids’ questions about this disease – but Mum’s illness, my inquisitions and interrogations about it, were never out of bounds. Never have been.

And I think that’s served a double purpose: I think – I hope – it has helped Mum to understand that we understand it’s just an illness (granted a bloody awful one, but still, just another illness). And I think, given depression’s chilly ability to alienate, it’s imperative to understand that, to comprehend that the individual is separate from the illness. Even though it seems so coldly all consuming.

And I know that because my dad, and then mum herself, always invited my questions, always tried to whip depression’s suffocating cloak away and push it into the light, I have been afforded some tiny insight into an illness that afflicts millions. It doesn’t mean I’ll be safe – complacency is a poor prophylaxis for anything – but knowing what a monster looks like means you might, just might, see it coming.

So I’m lucky.

* Click here to subscribe to Beyond Blue and click here to follow Therese on Twitter and click here to join Group Beyond Blue, a depression support group. Now stop clicking.