[content warning: misery]
In a few days time, I’ll take the last anti-depressant pill that I’ll ever take. That’s the plan. After 18 years, I have little knowledge of what I’m like as an adult without that chemical intervention, but what I do know is terrifying. I’ve dipped my toe in that cold water a handful of times, each time recoiling after several months because of suffering that wasn’t merely debilitating but outright cognitively intolerable. The difference is that this time I’m going into it very intentionally, gradually, with no expectation that it will be OK, as opposed to whimsically abandoning my medicine in the wake of a positive circumstantial happenstance (such as falling in love – bleurgh!). This time I’ve written notes to my future self, which will be lifelines when I’ve lost my grip on reality. One of my notes simply says: WRITE.
So I’m starting now, before I go over the edge. I predict from experience that in some months’ time I’ll be looking back on these weeks where I experienced sorrow, anger, frustration and being a twat to people, and miss the richness of that humanity. At some point my emotions will be simplified into a binary distinction: fear and hope, with hope shrinking to a tiny, bright speck on the horizon and fear loitering as a heavy black cloud over everything else, billowing all over my inside surfaces, following me into every chamber of my mind to poison my memories and beliefs.
Why would I embark on this dark plunge just in time for the coming of winter? I don’t know…there’s a harmony to it. My usually-bleak January will be one of the bleakest ever, but who knows, I might discover a new self with the coming of spring and its healing powers.
I’m doing this publicly because I hope some people will find it useful or fascinating to observe my misery, and also because I want to feel held accountable for my intention to WRITE. I have been known to scribble occasional humorous poems about dr*gs, consciousness and suffering…
So let’s see where this goes!
Photo by Amazilia Photography – Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Iceland – May 2023
Post script… while exploring my options in WordPress before hitting the ‘publish’ button, I clicked on the ‘AI assistant’ option which can “check for mistakes and verify the tone of your post before publishing”. How could I resist? This is what it came up with.
As someone who’s childishly excited by Large Language Model driven text generation, I felt an emotional thrill as I saw this response appear before my eyes. (I wonder whether I’ll remain capable of experiencing this thrill over the coming months? In my experience my curiosity is one of the last pillars to fall, along with my dark sense of humour.) To witness an inanimate system display nuanced comprehension skills on something I wrote is a strange new feeling – especially when it’s something personal which I wrote through gritted teeth and just threw out there into the world. I’m definitely going to be doing some fun experiments to test the limits of this tool with creative writing.
Anyway, addressing the WordPress bot’s suggestion that I add more information, I should make it quite clear, if I haven’t already, that I highly disrecommend quitting antidepressants suddenly or without telling anyone that’s what you’re doing. It’s especially important with Venlafaxine to taper off gradually, because its half life is so short and its withdrawal effects can be particularly severe (and weird).
It’s also my opinion that if you start antidepressants your doctor should help you form a plan to get off them. When I was first trying to persuade those around me that antidepressants were the right thing for me, I claimed that they would be like footholds to help me get out of a deep well. It was a persuasive metaphor, but all it really meant was that I hoped I’d get better. I had not the slightest plan beyond being medicated, or a vision of what a better me would mean besides feeling less pain. Over the years I began to recite the platitude that “antidepressants are like insulin for a diabetic person”, and when I said it people nodded and didn’t argue, and I also nodded firmly and sympathetically when others said it to me about their own antidepressant use. But I no longer believe it’s a helpful analogy. I’m starting to strongly believe that nobody needs to expect to be depressive forever. We’ve been sold the notion that depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it makes sense at least in so far as the medication makes depressed people less depressed. But even if it is an accurate description of a depressed brain, the chemical imbalance theory doesn’t get to the root of the problem.
I believed for years that I was just one of the unlucky ones, that I had popped out with a genetic disadvantage which I had to accept. (This was slightly more progressive and enlightened than what I might have believed, which was that depression was a sin and that God would be cross with me for not being more grateful.) If you asked me now what I think depression is, I’d call it a maladaptation. Our bodies have the ability to depress themselves, and this can be useful, but for reasons which often may involve early damage as well as how different our modern lives are from the environments in which we evolved, many of us get stuck in ongoing states of suppression and worry.
These are my opinions based on personal experience and what I’ve read. I felt prompted by the WordPress bot to give advice, but the best thing I can really do is document my progress as I go forward. I’ve always wanted to be useful, and by twists of fate, it turns out that my special area of expertise is in being miserable. “If nothing else, I can at least serve as a bad example”, is what it says on a fridge magnet I had.
I was 11 or 12 when one of my teachers took me aside to talk about a self-assessment I’d written about how I was doing at school. “It’s very witty and amusing”, she said, “but I’m concerned that you say you’re depressed”. I can’t remember what I’d written, and I wish I could say that it was the same piece of work where I’d written the title in big bubble writing, and because each letter took so long to write I accidentally wrote ‘ASSMENT’. But that was a completely different time.
The memory springs to mind now, because I’m aware of how important it must have been then and still is, for me to make people laugh about my suffering. If I start to utter a theory about it, I’m taking us a bit further away from the truth. So please take my blog posts as the ramblings that they are, and add as much or as little salt as you like.
To conclude, here is the WordPress AI assistant’s latest ASSMENT of my updated essay, which incorporates a reference to itself, encourages the author to elaborate upon several points, and reiterates its recommendation that I recommend seeking professional recommendations.
occasional Rebecculation speculations 