DEPRESSION?

For many years I endured bouts of gloom that marched in from nowhere and occupied my entire being like some alien army, my mind grasped tight in a vice of misery. I would function on a superficial level as if I were normal and wouldn't share this fact. I would watch myself operating and wonder at it. Listen to myself chatting instead of screaming under this heavy grey miasma. I joke and my wit is intact if a little sharper, more barbed.  In fact it hardly impaired my function at all but totally filleted any joy. I can remember walking with my dog in my favourite place feeling desolate and trying to understand how this could be. All the things I loved were present and correct yet none of it was enjoyable, I was lost in the fog of misery with both exit and entrance barred. It was pointless talking about my mood and impossible for anybody to get through to me. The isolation was total.
Eventually the mood would move off spontaneously and I was capable of happiness again, or at least of a peaceful mind. During the glooms I often had a tune going through my brain, I remember one in particular was Chinatown my Chinatown and when I woke it was a warning of misery. Though a gloom is quite different from misery that can be addressed and dealt with or at least talked about. I can remember when I was teaching that during a gloom I would watch myself and even admire my performance which was detached and outside my self.
Alternatively I would drink myself into a stupor with the vain hope that it would shift the gloom and occasionally it did temporarily but it would roar back along with a hangover when I woke and the idiot song would churn in my mind like some unholy carousel. Beside which it was expensive and with the danger of revealing my pain in some drunken moment and I was terribly ashamed of these glooms. I often read about gifted people who vaunted their glooms as part of their genius as if the fact of desperate moods make them special but I knew this didn't apply to me and it sounded like a poor consolation too.
So why am I writing about this now? Because for the last few years since I had a stroke I have not had the glooms. Perhaps my brush with mortality scared it out of me or perhaps brain damage occurred. I am very glad to get out of desolation row mood and even as I type the words I am afraid of tempting fate but I will take a chance because the subject interests me and I can never resist a disclosure!
I know that we are all unique and that my own experience is not the same as that of anyone else but I would be interested in other experiences of the glump.