Antidepressants - A Quick Note

Antidepressants - A Quick Note

As a person with diagnosed bipolar II,  I know a lot about depression.  At first it was diagnosed as Seasonal Affect Disorder (SAD).  We were living in New Hampshire, where the average day in the winter was like long enough to eat your lunch and have a cup of coffee.  Other than maybe three to four hours in the middle of the day, it was dusky … twilightishy. 

And frequently towards the latter part of our tenure there, I just lost interest in everything.  Even skiing, which had been a huge part of my life.  Didn’t care, could care less.  Why get up in the morning and do the same shit as yesterday?  And be freezing your, well, my, skinny ass off the whole time.  I stopped making Art, just kind of stood around in the classes I was teaching.  Stopped cleaning up the studio after the students left after each class.  And, yes, I got a lot of shit over that.

I drug myself into a Therapist, not an M.D., but a Therapist.  I was developing SAD.  I was just really really sad.  ALL the time.  Anyway, we wound up moving and this and that happened and the depression started to swing into periods of … how to say it? … crazy mean and sometimes downright abusively nasty.  The whole background doesn’t matter in the instance of this blog.  Just say, 1- many traumatic head injuries, 2- a bunch of traumatic personal tragedies 3- some genetic inheritance, etc.

But this is about the depression cycle part of my trials (disability?).  For me, this part of my whacko cycling can take several forms.  Sometimes everything just seems bleak, boring, stupid.  A good movie, some Netflix gorging.  Maybe a nice conversation with a friend at our local coffee shop.  And, it drains away, mostly. But there are times when it is quite honestly just crippling.  Bouts of racking weeping, no reason, just life seems too emotionally painful to continue breathing.  There is no sunlight, a vacuum where there was occasionally some small joy.  The brain occupying my skull determines that the person attached to it is the worst scum of the earth and doesn't deserve happiness or joy.  He is simply a waste of space and oxygen.

When this second stage of depression, the deep deep dark, occurs, I do have a number of tools I have used over the years to crawl out of it.  Heavy cardio based exercise.  Hit the rowing machine for an hour, followed by an hour of weights.  Fifteen miles on the stationary bike, three or four hundred sit-ups.  Go to a blockbuster movie and get the big tub of popcorn with butter and that cheese dust all over it.  Get lost in a make-believe world.  Ride my motorcycle for a hundred miles in heavy traffic.  It boils down to; A. get out of my own head and B. physically shock my body.

I have been taking a particular antidepressant medication for this for nearly two decades.  The same medication.  Say what you want, homeopathics, chiropractic, tossing snake bones in a campfire and reciting Shakespeare in ancient Sumerian, nothing really works, for me, like this medication. 

Now, for those of us with these wonderful psycho influences, considering if you really research and study these conditions, the cause, the root(s) of all this is truly a matter of physiological chemistry.  Yes, this has all been proven scientifically – it has been proven – just freakin’ accept it!  However, we are dealing with a growing organism, where cells die after reproducing new copies.  The new copies adapting a bit with each change in environment.  It’s called evolution.  (That’s been fuckin’  proven also – goddamnit!) 

All of this is very simple and plain common sense, observable in that every human has to consume (eat) a variety of foods to cover all the nutritional bases.  And, generally speaking the greater the variety, the healthier the person.  So-o-o … all this boils down to the body adapting to the change brought about by a specific chemical compound (medication) and balancing that change out to where it no longer changes anything.  Got it?  Not hard, common sense, right?

A medication a person is given to resolve a physiological problem – in particular with an organ as truly delicate as the brain, can sooner or later, just stop working.  What brought about a desired effect, one day begins to no longer do so and yet simultaneously bring about effects that are very negative.  And, this can happen quickly.  One Monday your antidepressant is doing its job and by the next Monday you can’t find a reason to get out of bed, totally blah and suddenly you can’t get to sleep, your body weight skyrockets and you’re on the toilet all day.  Or worse, you start kicking your dog for – being a dog, just doing the same doggy things he’s always done.  Suddenly it infuriates you when he hops up to sleep on the bed, or pisses on the floor because you’re too depressed to take him for a walk.

Getting off the point here …

I have just recently gone through the experience described above – except I didn’t start kicking either of my dogs.  Love my dogs, just having them hangin’ out around the house helps a lot.  But my trusty antidepressant of nearly twenty years, just crapped out on me.  In less than a month, I found myself dropping down into that horrible bleak cave of clammy darkness and complete apathy concerning everything – everything.

It has been during this change over to new medication that I have begun to really think about these psychotropic medications and what they really do. With these observations from the viewpoint of someone who depends on them to live close to a normal life. 

Which sets us up for the second part of my personal analysis “Antidepressants II – The Truth” to come in about a week.

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© Dale Clarence Peterson 2016