I can actually understand that. Clinical depression and I have been bedfellows for years and years now, and it's a relationship I have long given up hope of ever being divorced from. I have also taken prozac, although I don't now. It did make me feel pretty good. Actually a little too good. I wound up doing some things I pretty much wish I hadn't done now, which we won't get into here. Oh well...
I have tried to explain this malady to friends and acquaintances and very rarely see the light of understanding in their eyes. They listen to me politely but I'm pretty sure they're probably saying something like "God, Lyn, get over yourself," or "Get a grip," or "Such a Diva!!" in their minds. I'm sure they think that all I really have to do is pull myself up by own bootstraps, but if that was true, I'd be the first in line to buy a pair of boots (not owning any). It's not bootstraps that does it -- it's more like that bonk on the side of the head you get when you don't drink your V8.
Clinical depression is not about feeling sad. Unless I've just lost a parent or loved one, or pet, I rarely feel sad. It's more about really not feeling anything. It's worse than apathy. It's more like a lack of a needed spark. If you listen to the clinicians explain it, it makes perfect sense. There are synapses in your brain that your nerve impulses run through, and they need to be bathed in certain chemicals, such as serotonin, for those impulses to make the leap from one synapse to the other. In clinical depression, the person might have the serotonin bath, but it doesn't stay long enough for the impulse to get through. Thus serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, or anti-depressants such as prozac. When the bath is there, there is no signal. Or the bath leaves and here comes the signal. Everything is mismatched and delayed. Reactions, if they happen, are delayed and sluggish. Feelings, if you have them, are delayed. And the sensation of being out of body and space and time happens a lot.
Another thing that happens a lot is lack of activity. Given a quiet day with little or no outside stimuli, I have been known to sit for hours, and even as the sun goes down, never turning on a light -- just sitting there in the dark. My mind is flying through vistas of thoughts, memories, songs or other odd bits of things, and my body is catatonic, hypnotized, almost totally unable to move on it's own. My mind can beg, plead with my body to move, but it remains as still as the big rocks we keep digging up on the farm. I'm not sad. I'm not blue. I'm just "not." It takes a strong stimulus to click me out of it -- something like the dogs barking, someone at the door, or an emergent need to go to the bathroom.
Music, thank God, can break through. I've often told my close friends, if I'm lying in the hospital, and they're trying to decide whether or not to let me die, hook me up to an EEG and play music. If there's no brain activity, let me go, cause if I can't respond to music, I'm gone. Music, somehow, provides a link, maybe through stimulating endorphans, I don't know. That would be interesting to check out. Of course, another rather awkward thing happens to me when I listen to music. I become more and more incapable of maintaining conversation. Once the music is turned on, my mind tunes to it, and it becomes totally intent on following every musical riff of every instrument that is playing. My body subconsciously moves in total and complete time to the different beat of every different instrument. I begin to twitch like a live wire. It's not something I can control very easily, and at this age, I don't really want to control it anymore. I love the feeling of being taken away that it brings. Something melodic like John Mayer's Stop This Train will take me so far away from where I am that when the music stops, for a moment I don't know where I am. So it's not particularly a good thing for me at work. Especially when you work in a hospital.
There is one other strange thing that happens in these states. I find if my laptop is in the area, open and ready to go, I may actually begin writing something -- something that at first may be weird, fragmented, and make no sense whatsoever. But eventually something will come from it -- a song, a poem, an article, an idea. It's because I'm so old and learned to type when I was 12. Typing is a totally automatic thing for me, something I rarely have to think about.
So what do I do with all of this? A brain that doesn't work right? I know my process. Everybody should know their process. It is very important in everything you do. I put music on pretty quickly in the day. My laptop is always ready, and I've given myself permission to write whatever I want whenever I want to. And of course, I keep several dogs. Even if they can't find something to bark at (one of their favorite pass times), they will, from time to time, come into my office to check on me and visit, Jack slipping his long, sleek nose under my hand to force me to pet him. Time to wake up, Mom.
2 comments:
You are certainly in the company of alot of famous people,but I am sure you are aware of that already. Say 40years ago the term or diagnosis of Clinical depression didnt exist,oh it did exist but it just wasnt called that just as Alzheimers years ago had not been named. I have no words of wisdom for your condition for I am sure you have opened most of the doors that could help you. I am curious tho,exactly what weird things did you do when you were on Prozac? If I am not mistaken there have been alot of serious adverse reactions to Prozac and such other medications.
You know, I'm an old woman, and couldn't remember every ill-advised action if I tried. It was mostly just typical manic-type behavior, ie, spending too much, being impulsive, and stuff like that. I don't think you should be given drugs like that without having available counseling because you become a stranger in a strange land, and with no one to guide you or counsel you, you can make mistakes, which are easy enough to make anyway when you're comfortable in your own skin.
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