Why Now?
Why start this blog now? I’ve been clinically depressed for ten years. I’m sure I’ve been depressed longer than that, but I’ve been medicated (off and on, but mostly on) for a decade. First Zoloft, then Lexapro, now Celexa.
A simple reason for beginning now? I’ve become more comfortable blogging. I have a personal blog with general information about my life. There are other reasons, though. I’m in a successful relationship. Most aspects of my life are going well, in a general sense. For most of my life I was unhappy in an overwhelming way. Now that I’m generally happy, it provides a startling contrast to my inner distress. I’m more convinced than ever that what is wrong with me is physical. Medical. Not simply in my head, at least not in the sense in which that phrase is usually employed. More than ever I realize that I’m not an unhappy or miserable person. I’m a happy person with a darkness constantly hanging over me. People often refer to depression as a dark cloud. It’s a cliche, but I identify with it more than ever now because I feel as if I can almost see through the cloudiness. I can recognize it as something separate from me.
I’ve decreased my medication. I’ve done this on my own, which I know is dangerous. I’d been taking 40 mg of Celexa (citalopram) for years, and it’d become a routine. I didn’t think much about taking the medicine. It was a habit. I’ve tried recently to become healthier in other aspects of my life, and I’ve spent more time questioning everything I put into my body, so it only made sense that the medication would become a more prominent thought. This is not the entire reason for decreasing my medication. I’ve also decreased it in order to lose weight. In the last several years I’ve gained quite a bit of weight. I’d asked doctors if the antidepressants were to blame and was told over and over again that they were not. If a doctor admitted that weight gain was a side effect, he or she was quick to say, “but only a few pounds…and even then it’s only temporary.” However, I know better. For months I ate healthy foods. I walked or ran at least four times a week. I did not drink soda or alcohol. I didn’t lose a single pound. I thought it was just part of getting older…approaching 30. The first week I decreased my dose of Celexa from 40 mg to 20 mg, I lost five pounds. I lost this weight immediately, and without changing anything else I was doing.
It seems vain to care so much about weight, to focus on it to the possible detriment of my own mental health. Wouldn’t I rather be 30 or 40 pounds overweight and happy than thin and miserable? I wish it were that simple. I’m not saying that someone can not be 30 or 40 pounds overweight AND happy, but I don’t know if I can. Weight has been a lifelong struggle for me. I was anorexic during my high school years and bulimic for a short time in college. It feels horrible to be so overweight. I think about it constantly. I wonder what people think when they look at me. No, I’m not obese, but it feels that way to me sometimes. I hesitate to see people I haven’t seen in years because I know their first thoughts will be, “Wow, she has really let herself go.” I remember the way I looked at overweight people years ago. I felt superior and prided myself on my self-control. I can’t bear thinking of other people looking at me that way, vain as it may be.
I recently watched a documentary series about children on antidepressants. The focus was on all the unknowns surrounding these medications, specifically in regard to children. There are three- and four-year-olds on these medications. Their brains are not even completely formed yet. Parents blindly trust doctors. Children grow up taking these medications, and then more medications for side effects from original medications. It’s scary to think about the possible long-term side effects of these drugs. I was not a very young child when I began taking medication, but I was sixteen years old. Still young. I resisted taking medication because I was convinced it would alter my personality, turn me into some kind of Stepford child. I thought it would rob me of my creativity. Eventually I had to be bribed, threatened, and cajoled into taking medication. I’m glad my parents, mostly my mother, forced me to take it. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d not begun taking medication. However, it does me that I’m somewhat without a reference point. I don’t know what’s normal for myself. I don’t know what I’d be like without medication. I don’t know how necessary it is now. I don’t know where to draw the lines. Do I have a naturally irritable and easily frustrated personality, or is that depression? Does the medication take my naturally irritable and easily frustrated personality and mask or alleviate some of the irritability and frustration? Or am I meant to be less irritable and less easily frustrated, but depression gets in the way of that? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone knows. Also, I know that depression alters my perception…of the world, of life, of myself. This means I might not ever be able to know the answers to any of these questions. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to try, though.
I’m currently reading Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self, by Peter D. Kramer. It explores some of the questions I have about the relationships between my personality and my medication. It doesn’t provide answers, but it does provide some historical information about antidepressants. It does provide historical reasons for certain treatments and methods of drug development and popularity, which is interesting. It’s a bit too scientific to be just an easy kind of sociological read, but it’s not scientific enough (or I just don’t have the appropriate scientific background) for it to be a textbook-like read. I’m plowing through it, though.
Maybe instead of “Why now?” I should ask myself, “Why–at all?” I have all these thoughts in my head, and I need to get them down. I spend most of my time in front of a computer and I can type faster than I can write. Also, I’d love to have the kind of blog about depression that I’d like to have stumbled upon myself. I’m not a doctor. I’m not a professional. I’m just someone who’s lived with depression for most of my life. This is just my story.
