Found this in the archives of The Guardian today. It's a fairly old article, but helpful nonetheless.
I find the observations regarding writers & artists with depression/bipolar disorder interesting. I've always hated that old cliche about genius and madness being related, but given the very clear relationship my own ability to write seems to have with being off the meds, there may be a kernel of truth to it. At least for some people.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Depression : the early years
So-- a little background.
I was first diagnosed in 1988 as "major depression recurrent." I was in college then, and the first drug I was prescribed was Norpramine (desipramine). I'm not sure it was much of a help. It gave me dry mouth and extremely weird dreams, some of which became indistinguishable from waking life.
This was not particularly helpful. I have an overactive imagination at the best of times. My definitive Norpramine experience, aside from a four-pack-a-day Mentos habit, was the night I ended up creeping around my parents' house in my nightgown with my father's gun, not sure if I'd actually heard an intruder or just dreamt I'd heard one.
That was over the Christmas holidays. back at university, I'd been seeing a psychiatrist through the school's health service. I told the woman-- who was lovely, by the way; I wish I could thank her, but I can't remember her name-- I told her the Norpramine wasn't really helping. I was still, on top of being insecure and overwhelmed by school and life in general, deeply depressed. I slept constantly. The thought of food made me sick, so often I just didn't eat. No doubt I made everyone around me miserable with my clinginess.
I felt old and frail at the age of 21. I was sure my body would give out. I honestly couldn't imagine I'd live to see 30. Not that I wanted to. I loathed myself.
Ironically, during this period I looked better than I ever have since (I was 21, after all) and I was having some pretty fantastic sex, even if I was overwhelmed by insecurity and a real terror of being alone. I was also working, by which I mean I was writing and making films and artwork. Both these issues-- sex and work-- have become significant in my post-drug life.
The creative work was a slight distraction from a world that had come to look pretty awful. One of the metaphors I've often used to describe depression in the past is that it feels like wearing shit-colored glasses. Everything looks like shit. I also felt like I had no skin. I felt everything around me, I mean everything, and none of it felt good. It all hurt, like I was one big open wound.
I think I should point out something here. For me, depression wasn't about sadness. It was about pain. Yes, sadness is a form of pain, but not all pain is sadness. And after two solid years of solid, pointless pain, dying started to look pretty good.
It was at that point that the psychiatrist told me about a new drug that had just come out called Prozac. She asked if I wanted to try it. I said, why not? I didn't tell her I was thinking about dying. If I had, things might have taken a very different turn. She gave me a prescription and I filled it, and went back to the apartment I shared with three other people, including a very sweet three-year-old girl, who I adored.
Things outside my head weren't going very well either, largely due to what was going on inside. I couldn't concentrate, and my internship at a commercial production house was a disaster. I was still having crazy waking dreams. One morning I was utterly convinced my roommate Toby was hanging from the shower head in the bathroom-- which of course he wasn't. Something was wrong between my boyfriend Jose and me. He was pulling away and I didn't know what to do. I wanted to marry him, but he'd grown distant. My relationship with my parents was tense.
About a week into the Prozac I woke up one Saturday convinced that my being alive was doing no-one any good, myself included. Jose didn't want me. I was a disappointment to my parents. I hated everything about myself, and my work would never be any good. I just wanted it all to stop.
I took out an x-acto knife and spent an hour or so testing it against my skin, wondering if I had the strength to cut as deep as I needed to. I turned the mechanics of slitting my wrists over in my mind. I knew what I had to do to really bleed out.
I wish I could say I didn't do it because of my family. In hindsight I know I would probably have killed both my parents that day too, if I'd done it, and scarred my sister. But at the time I'd convinced myself they'd get over it, and ultimately be a lot happier without their fuck-up daughter around.
What actually stopped me was my roommate's little girl. I'll call her Tammi. I'm not a kid person, but this little girl-- I'd fallen in love with her, and she was fond of me. What stopped me cutting my wrists open was the thought that Tammi would know what I'd done. She might see them carrying my body out. I couldn't stand the idea that the last thing I did would be to hurt that sparkling little girl.
I put the x-acto knife away and went back to bed and stayed there for the rest of the weekend.
Not long after, the Prozac kicked in. I felt like Saul of Tarsus. The shit-colored scales fell from my eyes. I felt not happy, but normal-- which was so novel after two years of non-stop misery, it pretty much felt like happy. After two years of everything looking like shit, the ordinary colors were beautiful. The crisis in my relationship with Jose evaporated. (We broke up a year later, but that's a different story.) My parents still drove me nuts. I graduated with honors , and most importantly, I didn't want to die anymore.
For that, I'll always be grateful to Prozac.
I was first diagnosed in 1988 as "major depression recurrent." I was in college then, and the first drug I was prescribed was Norpramine (desipramine). I'm not sure it was much of a help. It gave me dry mouth and extremely weird dreams, some of which became indistinguishable from waking life.
This was not particularly helpful. I have an overactive imagination at the best of times. My definitive Norpramine experience, aside from a four-pack-a-day Mentos habit, was the night I ended up creeping around my parents' house in my nightgown with my father's gun, not sure if I'd actually heard an intruder or just dreamt I'd heard one.
That was over the Christmas holidays. back at university, I'd been seeing a psychiatrist through the school's health service. I told the woman-- who was lovely, by the way; I wish I could thank her, but I can't remember her name-- I told her the Norpramine wasn't really helping. I was still, on top of being insecure and overwhelmed by school and life in general, deeply depressed. I slept constantly. The thought of food made me sick, so often I just didn't eat. No doubt I made everyone around me miserable with my clinginess.
I felt old and frail at the age of 21. I was sure my body would give out. I honestly couldn't imagine I'd live to see 30. Not that I wanted to. I loathed myself.
Ironically, during this period I looked better than I ever have since (I was 21, after all) and I was having some pretty fantastic sex, even if I was overwhelmed by insecurity and a real terror of being alone. I was also working, by which I mean I was writing and making films and artwork. Both these issues-- sex and work-- have become significant in my post-drug life.
The creative work was a slight distraction from a world that had come to look pretty awful. One of the metaphors I've often used to describe depression in the past is that it feels like wearing shit-colored glasses. Everything looks like shit. I also felt like I had no skin. I felt everything around me, I mean everything, and none of it felt good. It all hurt, like I was one big open wound.
I think I should point out something here. For me, depression wasn't about sadness. It was about pain. Yes, sadness is a form of pain, but not all pain is sadness. And after two solid years of solid, pointless pain, dying started to look pretty good.
It was at that point that the psychiatrist told me about a new drug that had just come out called Prozac. She asked if I wanted to try it. I said, why not? I didn't tell her I was thinking about dying. If I had, things might have taken a very different turn. She gave me a prescription and I filled it, and went back to the apartment I shared with three other people, including a very sweet three-year-old girl, who I adored.
Things outside my head weren't going very well either, largely due to what was going on inside. I couldn't concentrate, and my internship at a commercial production house was a disaster. I was still having crazy waking dreams. One morning I was utterly convinced my roommate Toby was hanging from the shower head in the bathroom-- which of course he wasn't. Something was wrong between my boyfriend Jose and me. He was pulling away and I didn't know what to do. I wanted to marry him, but he'd grown distant. My relationship with my parents was tense.
About a week into the Prozac I woke up one Saturday convinced that my being alive was doing no-one any good, myself included. Jose didn't want me. I was a disappointment to my parents. I hated everything about myself, and my work would never be any good. I just wanted it all to stop.
I took out an x-acto knife and spent an hour or so testing it against my skin, wondering if I had the strength to cut as deep as I needed to. I turned the mechanics of slitting my wrists over in my mind. I knew what I had to do to really bleed out.
I wish I could say I didn't do it because of my family. In hindsight I know I would probably have killed both my parents that day too, if I'd done it, and scarred my sister. But at the time I'd convinced myself they'd get over it, and ultimately be a lot happier without their fuck-up daughter around.
What actually stopped me was my roommate's little girl. I'll call her Tammi. I'm not a kid person, but this little girl-- I'd fallen in love with her, and she was fond of me. What stopped me cutting my wrists open was the thought that Tammi would know what I'd done. She might see them carrying my body out. I couldn't stand the idea that the last thing I did would be to hurt that sparkling little girl.
I put the x-acto knife away and went back to bed and stayed there for the rest of the weekend.
Not long after, the Prozac kicked in. I felt like Saul of Tarsus. The shit-colored scales fell from my eyes. I felt not happy, but normal-- which was so novel after two years of non-stop misery, it pretty much felt like happy. After two years of everything looking like shit, the ordinary colors were beautiful. The crisis in my relationship with Jose evaporated. (We broke up a year later, but that's a different story.) My parents still drove me nuts. I graduated with honors , and most importantly, I didn't want to die anymore.
For that, I'll always be grateful to Prozac.
First off...
...I should start by saying what this blog isn't. It's not a jeremiad against anti-depressants. It's not a self-help column. It's not an attempt to get famous.
"My, but she's negative..."
If that's what you're thinking, that's fine, and this blog is probably not for you. I'm not writing this to make friends, much as I like to do that. I'm writing it in the hope that it might help or even comfort someone somewhere who's going through the same experience. If that's not you, well, be grateful.
It's not fun.
After 22 years on various antidepressants, I made the decision about 8 months ago to make a serious effort to get off them. I didn't make the decision lightly. I'd tried before, been fairly incapacitated, and quickly went back on. But by this time the side effects were becoming intolerable and the benefits were dwindling, and I had a relatively stress-free job and a supportive spouse, so I decided to try again.
I expected to return to the same familiar symptoms I left behind when I was twenty-one. Instead I've encountered a whole cornucopia of new ones, both cognitive and physiological. Weird stuff I'd never experienced before. I still don't know if the change is due to being much older and hormonally different, in different life circumstances, or what. I'll describe the specifics later. Bear with me.
I sort of dropped out of sight for a while. I missed some work, because there were days I was so dizzy I couldn't really walk, and my heart rate was so elevated I was kind of afraid to. I also had to deal with some minor surgery, which I ended up having done with local anaesthetic only, out of fear of a possible interactions with the general anaesthetic.
When I surfaced again and began reconnecting with friends, I discovered that one of my closest ones had been going through precisely the same thing at the same time. She was getting off a different drug. Excited and surprised, we spent an evening sharing our experiences and describing our withdrawal symptoms and the new sensations we were now being bombarded with. A lot of them were the same. A few were very different.
It felt good to be able to share the bizarreness we'd both been through. I find that depressives tend to flock together, because it's comforting to be able to describe how you're feeling and have your buddies understand. Not suprisingly, New York City is a great place to find fellow depressives.
After that evening with my friend, I started to wonder whether I should document the various stages my recovery/adjustment was taking. Maybe it would be useful to someone else.
Hence this blog.
"My, but she's negative..."
If that's what you're thinking, that's fine, and this blog is probably not for you. I'm not writing this to make friends, much as I like to do that. I'm writing it in the hope that it might help or even comfort someone somewhere who's going through the same experience. If that's not you, well, be grateful.
It's not fun.
After 22 years on various antidepressants, I made the decision about 8 months ago to make a serious effort to get off them. I didn't make the decision lightly. I'd tried before, been fairly incapacitated, and quickly went back on. But by this time the side effects were becoming intolerable and the benefits were dwindling, and I had a relatively stress-free job and a supportive spouse, so I decided to try again.
I expected to return to the same familiar symptoms I left behind when I was twenty-one. Instead I've encountered a whole cornucopia of new ones, both cognitive and physiological. Weird stuff I'd never experienced before. I still don't know if the change is due to being much older and hormonally different, in different life circumstances, or what. I'll describe the specifics later. Bear with me.
I sort of dropped out of sight for a while. I missed some work, because there were days I was so dizzy I couldn't really walk, and my heart rate was so elevated I was kind of afraid to. I also had to deal with some minor surgery, which I ended up having done with local anaesthetic only, out of fear of a possible interactions with the general anaesthetic.
When I surfaced again and began reconnecting with friends, I discovered that one of my closest ones had been going through precisely the same thing at the same time. She was getting off a different drug. Excited and surprised, we spent an evening sharing our experiences and describing our withdrawal symptoms and the new sensations we were now being bombarded with. A lot of them were the same. A few were very different.
It felt good to be able to share the bizarreness we'd both been through. I find that depressives tend to flock together, because it's comforting to be able to describe how you're feeling and have your buddies understand. Not suprisingly, New York City is a great place to find fellow depressives.
After that evening with my friend, I started to wonder whether I should document the various stages my recovery/adjustment was taking. Maybe it would be useful to someone else.
Hence this blog.
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