My father called it “being down in the dumps;” the way out was to pull your socks up and count your blessings. Winston Churchill, dogged by “the black dog” all his life, drank to drown his blues. Dodie Smith, the English dramatist, recommended noble deeds and hot baths as the best mood stabilizers; when D.H. Lawrence felt glum, he “left off and made marmalade.” “The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation,” said George Bernard Shaw. Andrew Solomon put his miserable leisure to good use by writing a 1768-page depression handbook, The Noonday Demon. “Depression,” he says, “is something to do.”
The passion that is for some of us depression has been variously described as “a frenzy of paralysis,” “an active anguish,” “a psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to healthy life.” A healthy person sees the glass half full; the depressive, who has the misfortune to see the world as it really is, sees the glass slipping from her hand.
In my case, trying to find a way out of my depression has been a lifelong preoccupation. No counting of my blessings has ever served to banish it. I cleaned my house, relentlessly, after reading that physical exercise unleashed endorphins. I self-medicated, read self-help books such as How to Live Well in the Afterlife. I tried geographical cures, hot baths, making marmalade, having babies. I especially tried crying.
” Concentrations of manganese have been found in the brains of chronic depressives after their death,” I read, in an article on the health benefits of a good boohoo. “The lacrimal gland concentrates and removes manganese. Crying, therefore, may stave off depression.”
When even crying failed to cheer me, I made an appointment to see a shrink. I had to face the fact: life wasn’t for everyone. I planned to request a physician-assisted suicide to help me over the bumps.
As I sat waiting in her office I noticed a poster on the wall – a dark rain cloud contrasted with a sunflower bursting from a Prozac pill. “Feel better than good,” the ad enthused. Another showed a mother and child skipping together across a flawless stretch of sand. Beneath the grainy photo, a note scrawled in crayon, “Thanks, Paxil. I got my mommy back.”
That was thirty years ago, the beginning of my on-off love-hate affair with antidepressant drugs. They have helped me through the sinkholes, but ultimately my depression sees them as competition, and doesn’t play to lose.
A couple of years ago, when I had gone through a phase of feeling happy, though unlike“ myself,” I quit taking Paxil. I got “myself” back, with a vengeance. First there were dizzy spells, surges that started out small but quickly gained momentum, spiralling outward to blast like a colourless fireworks display inside my skull (the pharmaceutical cartels call it “discontinuation syndrome”), followed by days of electrical shock sensations that zapped me between the ears. There was no dark rain cloud even, but a gray drizzle of emptiness, a bleaker shade of black. And just as I was about to go back to bed and put a pillow over my face, I got a phone call from a chronically depressed friend in Toronto. The end, she said, was finally in sight.
Her psychotherapist had received a fax from a University of Toronto research team: they needed a suitable candidate on whom to perform experimental surgery for treatment-resistant depression. The procedure, called deep brain stimulation (which usually came with a price tag of $40,000), involved planting a stimulator, “a Depression Switch,” near the brain’s centre and zapping in electrical impulses from a pacemaker implanted near the heart. The operation would
carry some risk, my friend explained (it was, after all, brain surgery, involving a brutal intrusion with only a local anesthetic), and it might not work. “I recommended you,” she said. “What have you got to lose?”
“You go first, you deserve to,” I insisted. Noble of me, I thought, seeing as they were only looking for one suitable guinea pig to lobotomize.
The truth is, I didn’t want to limit my options. If the Depression Switch included an on-off function I might have considered having one installed. But there are days when I like to curl up like a frozen prawn; I don’t want to banish the blues forever from my brain. Just sometimes. So I can enjoy a good funeral, for instance, without getting depressed about not being the centre of attention. So I can laugh at my misfortunes, and cry if life gets better than good. But most of all I don’t want to stop seeing the world – for what it really is.
