Click here for part 1.

NOTE:  I knew this would be a difficult one to write about because I don’t remember too much happening after my parents visited me.  I decided to throw in some passages from Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon.  As far as I know, I’m only doing it for this post.  Also, this post will show you just how awful my brain can get.  The second half is probably my darkest writing yet.

——

Depression interacts with personality.  Some people are brave in the face of depression (during it and afterward) and some are weak.  Since personality too has a random edge and a bewildering chemistry, one can write everything off to genetics, but that is too easy.  “There is no such thing as a mood gene,” says Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.  “It’s just shorthand for very complex gene-environment interactions.”  If everyone has the capacity for some measure of depression under some circumstances, everyone also has the capacity to fight depression to some degree under some circumstances.  Often, the fight takes the form of seeking out the treatments that will be most effective in the battle.  It involves finding help while you are still strong enough to do so.  It involves making the most of the life you have between your most severe episodes.  Some horrendously symptom ridden people are able to achieve real success in life; and some people are utterly destroyed by the mildest forms of the illness.

——

As I expected, my father shot a barrage of questions at me.  I answered all of them.  Many of his questions were the same, and I didn’t hesitate to point that out.  They were the basic questions any concerned parent or friend would have asked, so none of them were important to remember.  Not much smiling.  Sometimes total silence.  End of visit.  I hugged my dad and my tearful mom.

As they were walking toward the Nurse’s station to sign out, an old lady I had never seen before started sobbing and begging her doctor that she should be discharged.  She didn’t need to…

Brain:  To be here, yeah, yeah, we know that shit already.  Leave that out from now on. 

My father tried to ignore the crying lady.  My mother just stared at my father’s back. 

Brain:  Why are they passing up such a good show?  Look at her liver spots!  Man, she looks like an oatmeal raisin cookie.  I wonder if she’s the Pillsbury Dough Boy’s mother.   

The crying lady fell on her knees and started begging for her discharge.  After a few seconds, she moved on to cigarettes.  She wanted only one.  Just one more.  She put her hands together.  A nurse stood beside the doctor, ready to help if trouble starts.   

My parents walked to the exit/entrance.  I didn’t follow.  I didn’t even watch them leave.  I didn’t want to.  Did they turn around and wave before walking out?

Ignoring the beggar, I went to our room and put my new copy of The Noonday Demon in my book bag and carried my old copy to the activity room.  Gray was sitting in the meeting area and filling out some papers.

Brain:  Must be his will.  Hey, maybe you’ll inherit all of his meds.

I sat next to Gray and told him about this wonderful book. 

The Noonday Demon is a memoir about Andrew Solomon’s journey through his own personal hell.  He explains the history of his depression, his sex life, his treatments, and his relationships with his family and friends.  But that’s just the tip.  He also fills the book with the history of depression, suicide, and the politics behind it and how it can fuck everything up.

I told Gray that one of my very good friends gave me a copy of Noonday during my mental entrapment.  My friend thought that maybe it would help me.  It didn’t. But it did turn out to be the best book about depression I have read so far.  Solomon has figured out how to explain depression in metaphors that bring out a clear view of what mental torture looks and feels like.  It’s hard for me to explain depression to anyone who hasn’t been through it.  Now I simply tell them to read The Noonday Demon. 

I also told Gray that Noonday wasn’t one of those inspirational rainbows and kittens books where the cover depicts the author smiling and standing in a sunbeam that’s shining from the clear, blue sky.  Noonday’s cover is bleak: a small, framed black and white drawing of a nude man staring up to a sky that is as black and empty as his situation.  There’s a crescent moon, but now stars to provide comfort.  The naked man looks as if he’s about to give up looking for his lost soul.  Andrew makes no promises in this book.

Solomon also paints a realistic picture of his thoughts and ethics of suicide.  But you will have to read that for yourself. 

Gray looked very interested in reading the book.  My explanation must have been enough for him to give it a chance.  I finally handed him my copy and told him that he can borrow it until his discharge.  I knew he wasn’t going to read it.  I have a history of recommending things that rarely ever interests anyone.  And when they do look interested, it’s insincere.

Brain:  Huh, it’s almost like no one gives a shit about your interests.  Imagine that.

——

Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medications.  “Still?” people ask.  “But you seem fine!”  To which I invariably reply that I seem find because I am fine, and that I am fine in part because of medications.  “So how long do you expect to go on taking this stuff?” people ask.   When I say that I will be on medication indefinitely, people who have dealt calmly and sympathetically with the news of suicide attempts, catatonia, missed years of work, significant loss of body weight, and so on stare at me with alarm.  “But it’s really bad to be on medicine that way,” they say.  “Surely now you are strong enough to be able to phase out some of these drugs!”  If you say to them that this is like phasing the carburetor out of your car or the buttresses out of Notre Damn, they laugh.  “So maybe you’ll stay on a really low maintenance dose?” they ask.  You explain that the level of medication you take was chosen because it normalizes the systems that can go haywire, and that a low does of medication would be like removing half of your carburetor.  You add that you have experienced almost no side effects from the medication you are talking, and that there is no evidence of negative effects of long-term medication.  You say that you really don’t want to get sick again.  But wellness is still, in this area, associated not with achieving control of your problem, but with discontinuation of medication: “Well, I sure hope you get off sometime soon,” they say.

——

My doctor’s understudy, who was born from another country (the reason I point this out is because it will be one of the subjects in a future ward post), finally came to do his rounds.  I told him that I was getting little sleep, and I haven’t been able to sleep well for as long as I can remember.  He decided to take me off of alprazolam (xanax) and put me on trazodone.

Brain:  Xanax: a perfect palindrome for the depressed.

The understudy told me that trazodone causes erections in some people, and if I get an erection that lasts for more than 4 hours, I should go see the nurse. 

Brain:  Yeah, the nurse will take care of it, meeeooow.

I was stricken with a terrible headache for the rest of the afternoon.  I told one of the nurses for some pain reliever and an icepack.  I think my body was trying to tell me to get some caffeine in my system.

Brain:  Gee, how did you figure that?  Was it because I kept yelling GIVE ME CAFFIEN YOU PRICK!  I was craving it so badly that I had to do something to get your fucking attention!

I decided to lay down until supper.  When I entered our room, I was surprised by what I saw.  Gray was sitting on his bed and reading Noonday.  He wasn’t far into it, but he was reading it.  He told me that the book was interesting.  He read a passage that he said explained what he felt to a T.  A mixture of happiness and pain flowed through my head.  But I wondered how long he would read it.  I know many people who’ll pick up a book only to put it down after a few pages due to distractions or boredom. 

Gray left me in peace.  After pulling the window shades down, I lay in my bed with the icepack on the sorest spot of my head.  I closed my eyes.  For once, I had no thoughts. 

——

Large depression is the stuff of breakdowns.  If one imagines a soul of iron that weathers with grief and rusts with mild depression, then major depression is the startling collapse of a whole structure.  There are two models for depression: the dimensional and the categorical.  The dimensional posits that depression sites on a continuum with sadness and represents an extreme version of something everyone has felt and known.  The categorical describes depression as an illness totally separate from other emotions, much as a stomach virus is totally different from acid indigestion.  Both are true.  You go along the gradual path or the sudden trigger of emotion and then you get to a place that is genuinely different.  It takes time for a rusting iron-framed building to collapse, but the rust is ceaselessly powdering the solid, thinning it, eviscerating it.  The collapse, no matter how abrupt it may feel, is the cumulative consequence of decay.  It is nonetheless a highly dramatic and visibly different event.  It is a long time from the first rain to the point when rust has eaten through an iron girder.  Sometimes the rusting is at such key points that the collapse seems total, but more often it is partial: this section collapses, knocks that section, shifts the balances in a dramatic way.

——

I still had a slight headache by supper time, but it was small enough for me to enjoy the rest of the evening.  I ate with the oldies again (no caffeine).  The old woman who cried earlier was sitting with us.  I’ll call her Annoying, because that’s what she was: an annoying pile of wrinkled flesh with too much makeup on.

Brain:  Yeesh, Rick Baker doesn’t even use that much makeup.

I didn’t have much of a good time eating because I felt uncomfortable being around this old Avon bag.  She was loud and telling jokes that only she laughed at.  She spoke so highly of herself and about everything she’s good at.  Being around Annoying embarrassed me. I ate in silence, hoping she wouldn’t turn her attention towards me.  The oldies didn’t seem to have much of a problem with her, but they did look as if they knew that she wasn’t all there.  After finishing my meal, I got up, returned my tray, went to the other activity room. 

The highschoolers were playing a card game.  Not acknowledging who the players were or what card game they played, I just watched.  No I didn’t.  I pretended to watch.  My head was no longer hurting.  My brain was filled with thoughts again.  Thoughts about my hatred for some people.

I’ve hated certain people all my life.  I hated my sister who made fun of me as a child (we’re fine now.  Having a son really matured her).  I hated many students in school to the point of not caring if they died.  And I’m currently going through a massive hatred for many celebrities and politician (in other words, the best American culture has to offer). 

My hatred can be extreme.  Some of you may consider the next few paragraphs shocking.  But I have a feeling that many caring and wonderful people go through there own searing hatreds for others, including you readers.

While I was in high school, there was a girl in my grade that wasn’t nice.  She was a popular who looked down at anyone who wasn’t also popular.  She hated nerds.  I was a nerd.  She looked at us nerds like we were insects. 

One morning, there was news all over the school: the popular died in a car crash.  I was indifferent when I heard this.  Shrugged and moved on.  Eventually I started to become happy with what many would consider terrible thoughts:  Good.  I’m glad she’s dead.  She treated so many people like shit.

The hallways were quiet for a couple of days after the crash.  For once, there were more lockers slamming than students talking.  I was like a girl in a detergent ad, skipping through the flowers and enjoying the silence.

Brain:  Seeing you dressed in drag, rolling all over flowers…DON’T EVER PUT THAT IMAGE IN MY HEAD AGAIN!

Why?  Why was I like that?  Why was I that cruel?  Even though she was an utter cunt to some, did that mean that she deserved to die?  Of course not.  BUT, I am still glad she’s dead.  And I know I’m not alone when it comes to the death of a person someone hates (George Carlin, anyone?).

It’s so easy for us to hate, which is why hatred is usually irrational.  An asshole you see on television may actually be very thoughtful and caring when you see them in person. 

Hatred usually comes from anger, jealousy, and annoyances. 

Brain:  Ugh, are you done yet?  Will someone yell cut already?  Throw this fucker off the stage!  Get the hook!  Drop a spotlight on his head! Booooo! 

I tend to get angry at people who have it very easy and take it for granted.  I get jealous of people who are treated like royalty for not accomplishing anything worthwhile.  I get annoyed by people who become successes with very little trouble, while other people try their hardest and never even get a first chance.

And I once hated many…

Brain:  OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE!!

…many who are now my good friends, including some online contacts.  My face was constantly shoved with so many success stories that it made me sick.  But when I started to read some of these people’s personal stories, my attitude would sometimes change and guilt would overflow.  When I found out that a few of my successful online contacts had blogs with many wonderful stories showing no ounce of greed and self-praise, I felt so bad that I had to contact some of them and tell them how much I respect them for sharing their moments and for being good human beings. 

Hatred is complicated, I think.  I’ll never be able to handle some of my own and understand any of it.  That’s why my hatred for Annoying puzzles me.  As far as I know, she did nothing wrong.  She has a mental disorder.  She’s just a victim like all of the other patients.  She couldn’t help it.  She doesn’t deserve being hated.

But I still hated her.  My hatred towards Annoying would eventually strike me down without warning on my sixth day in the ward.  It would strike me down hard.

——

Some people suffer mild depression and are totally disabled by it; others suffer severe depression and make something of their lives anyway.  “Some people can function through anything,” says David McDowell, who works on substance abuse at Columbia.  “That doesn’t mean they’re having less pain.”  The absolute measurements are difficult.  “Unfortunately,” Deborah Christie, a child psychologist at University College London, observes “there’s no such thing as a suicide-ometer or a pain-ometer or a sad-ometer.  We can’t measure in objective terms how sick people are or what their symptoms are.  You can only listen to what people say and accept that that’s how it feels to them.”  There is an interaction between illness and personality; some people can tolerate symptoms that would destroy others; some people can tolerate hardly anything.  Some people seem to give in to their depression; others seem to battle it.  Since depression is highly demotivating, it takes a certain survivor impulse to keep going through the depression, not to cave in to it.  A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you.  Sustain that you have hope.

——

That night, while I lay in bed, my thoughts were at rapid speed.  My thoughts usually kept me up for most of the evening.  But not that night.  Trazodone helped me set those thoughts aside.  Sleep.

Brain:  Huh? Oh, are you done with your little hate speech now?  Hey, did you get a stiffy?

Me:  No.

Click here for the next day.