The Wheel and the Meteor

Posted on January 26, 2005 in Psychotropics

While I was tied by my ivs to my bed in the hospital, I pored over a recent Time Magazine which talked about “the Biology of Joy”. Snorting oxygen through a hose, I read about how we can chemically alter our minds so we can be continually happy. In many places, the focus of the articles urged us to chase a very different goal from the expectations that had been predicted to me by those who first treated my depression back in 1994.

No one ever told me that Prozac would make me happy. That wasn’t its job. The press and the counterpress have both insisted the opposite. I have been given more than one article, read more than one blog which has suggested an insidious plot to make us into grinning, rubber-necked dolls. It’s obvious that not a single one of these ever underwent therapy for the depression they claimed they had or else, were one of those folks who hold preciously to their sadness. Here is what I actually was told, what actually happened:

My brain had started to secrete inadequate amounts of serotonin. At least that was the working hypothesis of my psychiatrist and my therapists at the time. It’s a very common factor in depression. Serotonin isn’t a joy drug: it helps the brain function in the middle realms. I had been depressed for a long time. I believe the illness first struck me in the second grade because I remember happy moments before that time. Over the years, I developed a way of coping against the forced routine and attacks by my parents and peers. These are bad enough to weather without a screwed up chemistry. Imagine having to backpack over the Sierras for years and years with only enough food to survive. After some time, you would just lie down and want to sleep. Depression is like that. You don’t have enough of the chemicals to allow your brain to walk upright.

On top of this, I endured a litany of advice which told me that it was all because I was a slacker or a control freak. The Catholic Church taught me that there was a sin called Sloth or “laziness”, so I learned that I was evil. I was expected to make the highest grades, conform to the school routine, make my peers like me.

I like to tell people that there are two things which make us unhappy: first are the things we do to ourselves. Second are those which happen to us. Back in the 80s, there were several “self-help” books and programs which preached a strange cure for sadness. I saw them wreck many good people who I realize now struggled with major depression or bipolar disorder. One of these organizations, Lifespring (along with EST and Ekanar) taught its members that everything that happened to you was your own fault. If your boss mistreated you, it was your fault. If you went for a stroll in the park and a rapist pulled you behind a tree, it was your fault. If a meteor fell from the sky and amputated your toes, it was your fault.

These programs developed a twisted rationale for each of these. You were entirely responsible for your feelings. The watchword in pop-psychology circles was “self-fullfilling prophecies”. Pop psychotherapists tried to browbeat you out of your beliefs. Rolfing, “rebirthing” and other tortures practiced in the name of mental health turned into the fad of the day. Like all pseudoscientists, they claimed to follow scientific principles. In truth, they just slapped suffering people around. They became a tool for those who enjoy inflicting misery on others: bosses, owners, journalists, spouses, salesmen, and political activists on both the Right and the Left.

I tell friends who suffer from depression to distinguish between the meteor and the spinning wheels inside our heads. To apply the model to my last weekend’s experience: the bronchitis that hit me was the meteor, the unpredicted event. It just slammed into me, brought me down. There are those who would put a guilt trip on me, claiming that I had either slashed at myself through bad diet, etc. until this happened to me or insisting it was wholly psychomatic. To the latter, I give the trays filled with sputum that I coughed up and all the used kleenex. To the former, I just give the finger. A few might call this all the work of a demon which feeds the spinning wheels. If I listened to these people, I could have run myself into a worse condition. “Oh what is the use? I am just killing myself. Perhaps it is not worth my while to continue.” But I did continue. I listened to my doctors and nurses: I got well.

The genetics of my depression, likewise, are of the meteor. They came down through my biological heritage and smote me.

I have this disease which not only makes me sad, but it keeps me sad.

In my early therapy, I learned that ups and downs were normal. Prozac would not make me blissfully happy at all times. I would still have bad times, lousy days, ugly moods. But they would pass. At the same time, I underwent training to learn how to ride out the moods. The watchword became “Don’t make it worse.” To some degree, the moods just happen, you see: the body runs a little low and pushes us into a rest cycle. What anti-depressants do (unlike bromides and amphetamines which were actual mania-producing pills) is set down a floor so that you don’t fall into the Slough of Despond.

That’s all anyone can expect. Yet there are those who cling to the cults of the 80s, insisting that somehow we who use these medications are addicts. I have seen them suggest that we are zombies, enthralled to the Drug Companies, always willing to do their bidding. As a leftist who ardently opposes all war, I find this insistance hilarious. As a socialist who champions civil liberties, I find it absurd. As a human being who possesses free will, I find it out and out wrong-headed, spiteful, and ignorant.

From the beginning, I learned not to expect Prozac or — now — Effexor to be a panacea. I would continue to have problems. I would not suffer a radical personality change. My political and religious views would remain largely intact. And so it has been these last eleven years. I am still Joel Sax. The drug companies have not inserted a chip directing me to salute whenever George W. Bush passes or allow the enactments of bad government to pass uncriticized. I have not turned into a conservative or a sheep. I remind you that when this war came down, many of you normal people accepted the unproven claims that there were WMDs in Iraq. Almost alone among you, I and a few others, stood our ground and insisted on scientific proof, collaborated by sources outside the Bush war machine.

In the end, we proved to be the sane ones.

On the morning of my release, I watched an episode of The Jerry Springer Show in which one of a pair of women went absolutely ballistic. She fought against her boyfriend, tried to break his grasp and go after the other woman who, for her part, kept berating her. The audience cried “Let her go! Let her go!” They wanted to see the fight. As one who comes out and admits that he suffers from mental illness, I often hear that these represent the mainstream. In some of the blogs I visit, I see the same theme repeated. How they love to watch fights. Have a scientist claim that the earth is heating up? Pull out the corporate lacky to shout him down.

Going by classic definitions of what constitutes grounds for commitment, both the woman and the audience on the Springer show should be locked up: they are a danger to their selves and to others. They don’t resolve problems but create larger ones. Those of us who recognize that we are sick — and probably many of those who have voluntarily committed themselves — can take solace in this: we had the smarts to see that we needed help.