Better Living Through Chemistry: Notes from Chemically Induced Depression Part 3 of 6 (Having to Think Slowly)
This pervasive, grinding ennui exhausted me.
It also challenged most of what I thought I knew about clinical depression, which I had studied while getting an undergraduate Psychology degree. I’d read about the exhaustion, the feelings of pointlessness, but had always conflated that with what I had personally experienced as feeling down, blue, bummed, hurt, let down, disappointed, fearful—yet my current state bore no semblance to any emotion I’d faced. To any emotion whatsoever.
Rather as I moved limply through the hours of my waking day, I felt nothing at all. As if emotion had been severed from me—all desire, all displeasure, and every shade of feeling in between. Read More
Better Living Through Chemistry: Notes from Chemically Induced Depression Part 2 of 4 (The Choices We Make)
So, life hands my new wife and me a choice between three options, each involving some chance of me dying sooner rather than later and in some more or less gruesome way:
- either develop ever worsening double vision and stroking out in the next decade;
- or give myself brain cancer to get rid of a benign tumor;
- or have someone cut a 6 square inch flap of my skull out with a small saw, poke his fingers and sharp metal instruments between my cerebrum and cerebellum, cut out 2 cm diameter chunk of flesh out, and hope that doesn’t turn my new wife into the star of a Lifetime channel movie—woman finally meets the man she wants to marry, marries, gives birth to their son, and then finds herself a single mother and widow, all within two years.
The odds on that last one were stacked heavily in our favor with 98% chance I’d avoid becoming a sad movie cliché.
Better Living Through Chemistry: Notes from Chemically Induced Depression Part 1 of 4 (1978 vs. 2005)
Owing to an odd confluence of events and circumstances, I recently spent roughly 4 days with chemically induced depression.
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Self-Publishing Part 11: the Book Hunt/a Quick Note
Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness A quick note to everyone who has been following Going it Mostly Alone; owing to a couple of coinciding health issues, neither serious on their own, but seriously unpleasant together, I’ve spent much of the past 5 days in bed, recovering, occasionally pushing my fingers over to […]