Chatting With Depression

I like to have short talks with Depression when it is hanging around. We’ve been together for a while so chats are easy.

I can say, “It’s a tough day,” and Depression will usually answer, “I know, but tomorrow will be better.” I capitalize Depression when I’m talking about the one that hangs out with me occasionally.

Often Depression will tell me about others she visits. (I describe her as a she because I prefer that; call yours whatever you wish. Just be respectful. She is when she knows you understand her, or him, or it.)

My Depression knows I want to hear about others who have found the right medications and, when necessary, the correct psychotherapy to go along with it. If they have not, they suffer needlessly in most cases, and Depression’s cousins, named depression, are with them.

The depression family needs to work on its names; I know they are confusing but maybe they will change one day. In the meantime, they have to deal with us, either as “friends” when their name is capitalized or “not friends” when it isn’t.

My Depression and I became buddies when modern antidepressants were invented, in the 1980s I think. Before then I had relied on good psychotherapy but it had its limits. If severe depression moved in, therapy wasn’t enough. It always helped but it couldn’t compete against that awful mood at its worst.

I tried a couple of new antidepressants when they came out, but they had too many side effects. Nonetheless I felt better. I knew something else would come along. And one did; it was Prozac. My dear friend Paddy Bowman likes to tell people, “I knew Bebe before Prozac and after it. After is better.”

Talk about miracle drugs! Prozac made me feel the way I was born to feel. That gave depression enough of a break that I could get to know her better, and she became Depression.

For her, it was a graduation. Most depressions have to start with people who say things like, “I don’t’ like medicine.” Or they may say, “I don’t want to go to doctors.”

If depressions do their best there, and try really hard, they finally get to have a capitalized name and work with people like me who struggled to find help and did. It is a huge accomplishment for them.

And I do know there are people who don’t have depression. They may have other moods that cause them problems, like anxiety or fear. The problems are many, but so are the solutions if people will only look. And anxiety can become Anxiety, etc. And then there are the rare people who were born without troublesome moods. Hooray for them! Talk about good genes.

Back to Prozac. Other people have told me it doesn’t work for them, nor does Effexor. Both of those help me immensely, but each person has a certain chemistry and she or he has to discover which medication will work. I take my medications one at a time, and right now I’m in my Effexor phase.

A warning here for anyone who hasn’t found the correct medicine: you may have to try several before you find the one or more that help. No one said it was easy, but living with depression is far, far worse than having Depression you can talk to.

Another warning: many doctors tend to recommend the antidepressant most recently recommended to them by a visiting drug salesperson. If you see lots of signs about that drug around the office, or lots of signs about other antidepressants, change doctors.

That is a warning it hurts to give. I typically recommend psychiatrists but some of them do the same thing. If you live in a large enough city, ask around for recommendations for a doctor who understands antidepressants. If you do not succeed, prepare to fight with your doctor and do that if you need to. You deserve medication that works.

Now for the part of this post that is hardest to write. I will tell you about depression that could not be stopped, a depression that almost did me in. I call it “killer depression” because I made several suicide attempts when I had it.

I’ll begin with the easiest part. It wasn’t the depression family at work here. I had a benign brain tumor, a meningioma. It was in the left frontal part of my brain, which is where emotions like depression live.

For a long time, I thought that my antidepressants no longer worked. I became sicker and sicker. No psychiatrist could tell me why I wanted to end my life. And I saw several psychiatrists.

Finally I found a psychiatrist who had a good idea about what was going on. He ordered an MRI of my brain in early 2002, when I was in the mental health section of a Mobile, Ala. hospital.

A neurologist who read the scan came into my room to tell me I had a brain tumor. I was terrified by that news but he told me not to worry. It could not possibly have caused the depression that was ruining my life. Not possibly.

I pulled myself together and tried to keep living, but I also tried again and again to kill myself. My blessing was that, as I got crazier, and I got very crazy, my attempts were just as nutty.

Four years later, I was in another psychiatric hospital, this time in Las Vegas. The psychiatrist who was taking care of me then was, and I put this as kindly as possible, incompetent. It never occurred to him to order a brain MRI.

I had disintegrated so badly that he diagnosed me with dementia. Imagine that. Imagine being demented.

I had all the symptoms. I could not put a sentence together. I could not think through a sentence. I could not sit up. I was incontinent. I was hungry and I was dirty.

I was dying.

And I would have died if a neurologist, this time a good one, had not visited me. He said he looked at me and knew I needed a neurosurgeon. He transferred me to a “real” hospital where the tumor was removed.

I woke up as myself. I had my mind and my humor back. It was a miracle, but it should never have happened.

I had to learn to walk again and I had to learn every thing I could about the years I “missed” when I was so ill. I had to try to recreate the life that had slipped by.

But I was Bebe again. I could go back into talks with Depression as I worked my way through what had happened to me.

I will write about this and other problems with my two benign brain tumors again. My second one was removed last year. There were problems with that one, too, but I was not surprised by it.

I do not want you to be surprised if your depression or your anxiety or other emotions that cause you huge problems are not the moods themselves. But start with the moods. Do as I did. Follow each avenue, beginning with doctors. Take medications, even if you have to experiment until you find the right one.

If all else fails, do research on illnesses or disorders that can cause symptoms like yours. Then go to the doctors who treat those.

I have to say that you will probably find that you have a mood disorder. You will survive it and you will survive it happily if you do the things you should.

And I hope that you will not have a major illness. You cannot imagine how much I hope that.