Monday, March 5, 2018

Kinder and Gentler








This posting seems inevitable and misguided, but that's just my routine negative thoughts speaking. 

The same negative thoughts that brought me to the desire -- the imperative -- to end what was going on in my head.  Fortunately I asked and received help, which sometimes felt like being in jail.
 My fellow patients, however, did not seem crazy at all. 

Many were just like me. 

I'm writing this as a blog post with the knowledge that next to no one ever reads this. Why? 
Because the stigma and shame depression has to be calmed. I feel better.

 Here's what happened:

Things became stressful in  2008. I had been depressed since  could remember and had concealed it fairly well. Then came the death of my father and a sister, open heart surgery to repair a floppy mitral valve, and throat cancer.

To top this all off I was laid off as science editor of the New Haven Register after 30 years of work.

Unfortunately for me, I loved that job. It was interesting, challenging and satisfying.  Writing about medicine and science did not seem like work -- and thus became an easily worn identity. At the  time I frequently brought a negative attitude to work.

More than a negative attitude.  I was looking at the world through lenses colored by difficult parents, shaky genes, and a problematic environment. Depression started when I was a child.

Depression has remained a vague and under-researched condition. The word has a 19th Century feel. One word that describes a variety of disorders that have similar symptoms, like "the croup."  Depression can make a person eat too much or too little; sleep too much or too little; talk too much or too little; etc.

No one deserves to be laid off after 30 years, not even a sarcastic, ironic know-it-all.  Collected unemployment, taught at Quinnipiac University, paid back unemployment, wrote a bit for the New Haven Independent, and ended up in the straits of volunteers.

I got booted from New Haven Reads.  I am not aware of this happening to anyone else. I wrote the following limerick and another person left it faced up on her desk:

Unemployment's a terrible curse
and it's only going to get worse.
I don't have a future to bandage or suture
so I guess I'll just wait for a hearse.


Maybe it was a "cry for help."  The person then in  charge of New Haven Reads asked I was OK. I said no one was OK. She asked if I was receiving psychiatric help. I said everyone there could use psychiatric help.  I subsequently received an email informing me that I was not a "good fit" with the program.

With nothing to do but ruminate, nothing I wanted to do, depression worsened and I became increasingly irritable. Friends did not see this because I saved it all for my wife, who began to talk about selling the house and moving out.

My whole fetid world was thrown into chaos and my brain began to produce waves of intolerable panic.  Panic that could not be controlled or confined. Panic that made me feel like what I imagine a trapped mouse feels.

Panic became unbearable and I concluded that it must be stopped. Looking out of a window on a sunny fall day I decided that I either had to start consuming heroic amounts of alcohol. Or stop my brain with a shotgun blast.

 Why did I not choose drinking? That has all sorts of societal and medical ramifications. That blowing my brains out seemed like a better solution now seems darkly funny.  Sort of.

I drove to a nearby mall where I recall having gone to a sporting goods store that sold rifles, pistols and shotguns. No panic at all. I had the serenity of someone who has solved a problem. The calmness that comes from knowing a solution, an easy solution, to what seems like the end of the world.  

A still-healthy part of my mind directed me to a store, which had gone out of business. I drove home and called one of my sisters and told her what I was planing.  She suggested  --strongly -- that I go to a hospital.

I reluctantly admitted myself and then spent a month at Yale Psychiatric Hospital on a floor I could not leave surrounded by equally, and sometimes more screwy, patients.  Several were there to detox from alcohol,  synthetic or actual opiates, prescription drugs, and who knows what else.

Others were like I had been. No one on the floor mentioned suicide. Maybe that was beside the point, or perhaps there was no reason, already locked up in a loony bin.

If I could think of anything original to write about life in a mental hospital I would.

During my stay I met with psychiatrists who suggested that electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) might help me.  ECT, which, by the way, does not include electric shocks, had been suggested to me before. Now it seemed like the time.

ECT does not magically transform most patients in a single treatment. But as I was treated, I did feel the undertow of depression begin to fade.

Modern ECT (No grimacing, thrashing, broken bones, shackles, or amnesia) has helped many people, most of whom are not eager to share the experience.
Dick Cavett,  Kitty DuKakis, David Foster Wallace and Dr. Sherwin Nuland, are a few who did not mind sharing.

I'm hoping depression has lost its grip and does not return.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to be gentler and kinder to myself and others, including my wife.