I do not believe in all that stuff," she says, her lipsticked mouth pursed like a prune. "Hypnotherapy and psychotherapy and droning on about your inner child. It's ridiculous."
I want to protest-but then I notice that the two women sitting along the other side of the dinner table have transferred their interest from the chocolate tart to me.
They all want reassurance that my desire for psychotherapy is a mere middle class indulgence; that suicide is something contemplated by mad people, not by the hostess of a little west London dinner party.
"So do you do the whole thing then-lie on the couch and talk about your childhood?"
"Do you go several times a week like Woody Allen?"
"Do you see a man or a woman?"
Coffee, anyone-while I enter-tain you with my nervous breakdown? Sugar and cream with the lithium?
But confession is not on the menu tonight. I change the subject, hoping that if my non-believing dinner guests ever find themselves clinging to the fag end of their sanity, they may have more to rely on than a stiff upper lip.
It is a popular myth that all you need is the ear of a good friend now and then, to carry you through the times when life spins senselessly out of control. Depression and its ugly sister, anxiety, although compounded by loneliness and isolation, do not simply afflict inadequate saddos who don't have any friends.
The way the telephone remains resolutely silent after you have told your sob story to most of your friends makes the business of paying a stranger to hear your misery seem comfortingly sane. Friends, good or otherwise, cannot cope with sustained distress.
But aren't there pills for this kind of thing? Anti-depressants? Prozac? Isn't depression merely a chemical dysfunction in the brain?
Anti-depressants can be helpful. Prozac is said to have put many analysts in New York out of business. But, as Oliver James has pointed out in these pages, while medication can raise your serotonin levels and make you feel a hell of a lot better, it won't cure you. Neither will therapy.
Outside the American Declaration of Independence, happiness is not compulsory. Life can stink. No number of hours lying on your back on a therapist's couch in Hampstead or on Central Park West is going to change that. It will not bring your husband back nor turn your mother into a goddess. But at a time when pills had stopped working for me, and I found myself huddled by the telephone listening to the Samaritans' engaged tone, it kept me functioning. Therapy held me together.
My dinner guests may look at me with the curiosity usually reserved for people who have spontaneously grown an extra limb, but I'm not alone. Throughout the developed world we are generally unhappier than we were 30 years ago. This is a dirty secret. Despair, like a broken classroom window, is something no one wants to own up to. Everyone waits to see who will take responsibility. When you say: "I can't cope with my life," people breathe a sigh of relief and let you spill out your miseries. Later they may mutter to you in private that they too have had a "little problem." Part of the late Princess Diana's appeal was that she carted the shit for the rest of us.
I know many people, men and women, who have consulted therapists. One friend with an eating disorder-as it happens, rich enough to buy Kuala Lumpur and still have enough money left over for the parking meter-baulks at therapy because "it costs too much."
Does it work? Does it matter? When it helps, it helps. Whatever gets you through the night. Whatever gets you to the point when you can get out of bed in the morning and deal with an imperfect reality. Whatever enables you to take the Samaritans' number off automatic redial and cook dinner for some of your sceptical friends.
Whether you believe in it or not, the concept of "good" therapy is open to interpretation. Recently I shared a park bench with another mother. We began chatting and she told me that she had been seeing a counsellor, which had helped her enormously.
"I'd been having an affair for the last five years," she confessed, adding ruefully: "Um... with my father-in-law."
"So what did your shrink say?" I asked.
"Oh my God-I couldn't tell him something like that!" she protested, looking at me with horror. "What do you think I am-crazy?"
Well yes, probably. But no more than the rest of us.
