At the start of the fourth season of ‘How Shall I Say It?’ Jens Dendoncker already looked back in a short video on the way in which he had experienced the recordings of the program. He also talked about his depression, something he still struggles with to this day, although things are getting better in the meantime.
Listening well
In the context of Red Nose Day, Jens tells his story in more detail to his good friend Johan Terryn. Together they reconstruct what happened a year ago when Jens deliberately disappeared from the spotlight. “I woke up one morning and could hardly get out of bed,” says Jens. “I was crying. My girlfriend had to help me get out of bed. I barely got into the shower. Physically everything was okay. I didn’t stop crying. And then we said, ‘Okay, there’s really something going on here. A certain fear has become so great that it completely mortgages my life.’”
“That same day I went to talk to people from the Erasmus Hospital in Antwerp. They took me in that day. What preceded it were a few weeks—months even—of lingering feelings of anxiety, of depression, of not feeling well, of gloom. And that became more and more intense and intense, until that particular morning.”
In total, the presenter was intensively supervised for about three months. “I was admitted for almost three months, from November to the end of January,” it sounds. “With intense guidance: group therapy and individual therapy and other forms thereof. It always gets to you at a bad time and I think for a long time I’ve been like, if I ignore it, it’ll go away on its own. But that doesn’t help you move forward, because then you’ll get it double and thick later. So don’t try to hide and cover up those early signs. There have been days when I literally couldn’t get out of bed. That has a very paralyzing aspect, nothing works anyway. You feel very heavy, it really chains you to your bed or chair.”
Chest pressure
Jens also told us exactly how such a panic attack feels to him: “You get an enormous pressure on the chest, your breath is cut off a bit”, he describes. “There is a certain thought – a kind of obsession – that you don’t let go and that constantly pulls you by the scruff of the neck. It’s a really bad feeling because you feel like you’re going to lose control of your own body. That is very personal to me, many people will describe a panic attack very differently.”
How does he deal with such an attack? “What I usually did are small aids. I tried to sit somewhere with my hands on the floor, making as much contact with the floor as possible, and then just counting so I could pull those thoughts back. And watch my breath.”
Jens doesn’t know why it escalated so badly last year. “That’s the problem: there isn’t really a concrete reason. I had a very good life in itself, everything went well for me. I had a job that I liked, a love and a house, so it’s very difficult to pinpoint something that made me slump into depression. It came out of the blue.”
Red Nose Day
Now he wants to come out with his story. “In the context of last year’s Red Nose Day campaign, I thought it was very important to get this out there. As ambassador of Red Nose Day, I thought it was impossible to disappear from the face of the earth for a while without communicating about it. That felt very wrong to me.”
On the occasion of Red Nose Day 2021, he especially wants to give a message to people who are in a similar situation: “It can really happen to anyone. Speak up and don’t wait to get professional help. Because it doesn’t help to ignore the first signals, on the contrary: then you will get it twice and thick later. So try not to obscure or hide the first signals, but just listen very carefully.”
ALSO WATCH: Jens Dendoncker’s full testimonial
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