IT’S a fine line to walk, isn’t it, travelling back through the annals of depression just as your star is rising as a comedienne?

But the courageous Susan Calman, quick-fire wit on the Radio 4 News Quiz beloved by six million listeners, doesn’t appear to be someone who would shrink from a challenge.

At the age of 42, she is finally seeing some chinks in the self-loathing that has, until now, made her life bleak. “I am happy for the first time in my life. After decades of hating myself, I have finally decided maybe I’m not as bad as I first thought – maybe I even have something of value to offer society.”

Making what was actually her debut in book festivals, she told the Hexham audience she had been motivated to write her book, Cheer Up Love: Adventures in Depression with the Crab of Hate, because depression tended to be the first thing people picked up about her, that and the fact she was gay.

By being open and honest about her own struggles with the black crab of self-hatred, she hoped to help others wrestling with the same demon.

She herself had finally had enough of lying on a sofa in a darkened room, eating mashed potato with her hands while blotting out reality with box-sets of mostly American dramas. Bones and West Wing had finally run their course.

The key had been finding the right therapist, somebody she could really talk to – at last. Hailing as she did from a repressed, middle-class family where nothing of any emotional significance was ever talked about, that had been the case even after she was sectioned following a suicide attempt as a teenager.

“My family aren’t bad; we just didn’t talk about anything – it’s easier that way,” she said.

“I said the right things to get myself back out (of the hospital), but then I didn’t talk to anybody about my feelings for another 15 or 20 years. I didn’t seek help after that, because it was all so terrifying.”

Having been diagnosed with clinical depression, she was pretty much just left to get on with it. And she did muddle through for the most part, thanks in no small part to the woman who has shared her life for the past 14 years.

Susan described the wife she was married to four years ago as wonderful and endlessly patient, but she feared the black crab was in danger of sucking the life even out of that relationship.

That had been the real turning point, the impetus for finally seeking help. “I wallowed in self-pity for a long, long time, but I was genuinely sick of being miserable.

“There was a real danger she might leave me – depression is only ‘cute’ for so long. I finally realised I had to take control.”

The emotional benefits offered by the therapist had been matched by the physical benefits that had come from employing a personal trainer. The latter had exhausted her and raised her spirits by turn. “He makes me do exercises that are so gut-crunching, you can’t think about anything else but the pain!”

And then there had been that divergence into comedy that is now paying such dividends.

The Glasgow University graduate who specialised in public law had thrown over a lucrative legal career to earn, in her first year treading the boards, a paltry £250. In year three, she still only managed to earn £1,000.

“I practised law for seven years and I gave it all up to become a clown – my mother has never got over it!” she said.

“But comedy saved my life. It’s a great profession for a depressive and it’s a terrible profession for a depressive, but the most overriding factor of all is that it lets me express myself.”