Funny, lively and charismatic, you'd never guess Kevin Sutherland has been secretly battling depression for years. As he tells Susie Weldon, discovering a hidden talent helped him cope

Kevin Sutherland is the last person you'd expect to suffer from depression. Captain of a skittles team, pub quiz- master, the 51-year-old quality assurance engineer from Cheltenham has always been the life and soul of the party.

Funny, charismatic and widely liked, he is as big a personality as he is a physical presence.

But for a number of years, Kevin concealed a secret that most of his family, friends and colleagues still don't know, a secret he initially even kept from his wife Mel – that some days he sank into an abyss of depression so deep and so black he didn't know how he was going to find his way out.

Those days are fewer now. After years of trying all sorts of treatments, from medication and hypnosis to Chinese herbs and cognitive behavioural therapy, he's finally achieved a form of relief in writing poetry.

Much to his own surprise, Kevin now finds himself pouring out his feelings in words.

"I find it incredibly easy to write, I don't know why," he says.

"Some days I'll write a 1,000-word poem and other days I can't write a bean."

His poems, which he's just collected into a volume entitled Depression: My Story Through It, are simple, direct and powerful. They reveal his deepest fears, his sense of loss and wretchedness and his struggle to deal with the bleakest moments.

In his favourite poem, The Door to Happiness, for example, he says: "I'm in a room of loneliness, of anger and despair, of emptiness and misery, no one else is there."

In one poem, he asks: "When will I feel I am here? When will I feel I exist?" and in another, he pleads: "Let me be the person I know I am inside. Let me be the person I want to hold with pride."

But his poems aren't all bleak. Kevin's humour comes through and he also speaks of his determination to fight his depression: "Do not let it beat you, do not let it win. Fight the nasty bastard, fight it from within."

Kevin has been writing for only a year, but so hooked has he become that not only has he enrolled on a creative writing course, he even went to Cheltenham Literature Festival, something neither he nor Mel could ever have imagined him doing before.

"Those are my skills," he says, waving a hand at the impressive decking outside. "I'm a practical man, not a literary man."

We're in Kevin's and Mel's sitting room in Up Hatherley on the outskirts of Cheltenham where they live with her 11-year-old son William. Kevin has two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.

He's modest, even shy, about his writing, but otherwise comes across as confident, good humoured and very likeable.

You'd still never know he suffers from depression. He can even joke about it, saying: "When did you feel horrible? All day long. What caused it? Being awake!"

Kevin's battle with depression began in 2001 after his first marriage broke down. Difficult times at his former job added to the pressure, as did the sudden deaths of two friends.

He met Mel, a widow, in 2003 and they initially became friends before falling in love and marrying. Eventually, the pressure of being "happy Kevin" became too much.

"It was a cross between fear and lack of trust," he says of that bleak time.

"I lost the ability to believe what people were telling me. Mel would give me a cup of tea and I'd say 'it tastes like coffee'. I couldn't trust anyone, not even myself.

"I didn't leave the house for two weeks. I just couldn't go out of the door. Sometimes I couldn't even phone the doctor to make an appointment. I felt fearful all the time that there was a disaster just around the corner."

This period was very tough for Mel, too. Desperate to support Kevin, inevitably worried about whether she had contributed in any way to his black moments, it felt like "a kind of bereavement", she says.

"There was one desperate point when we thought there was nothing there for us. But we held on, and things got better."

It was Mel who persuaded Kevin to get his poems published, in the hope they might help others, and although she finds some of them unbearably painful to read, she's enormously proud of what he's achieved.

He has now branched out into writing children's stories, and although he still suffers from depression, he now feels he has a future.

"Some days are very good and some days aren't," he says, "but I do feel positive about the future."

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Depression: My Story Through It

by Kevin Sutherland costs £5 from www.chipmunkapublishing.com