DEPRESSION ~ POST 0001 ~ JHAPATTA

I would like to say that I am back by popular demand, but I am just back.  I finally have something I am ready to write about, albeit under the new title, although I am still Sixty-six and Counting. (old title).

I have been speechless. 

If you go back and read the last few posts, it is obvious that I have for a long time struggled to string two words together.  Gobsmacked, mostly. Politics has become strange, CNN has changed.  Everything has changed and too fast to digest enough to consider writing.  I have buried myself in books and occupied myself with paint and brushes, finding my voice in pictures rather. To my surprise, my voice is that of a writer and my pictures are imperfect because I cannot adequately express my story.  Added to that, my mood keeps changing, which changes the picture.

I have not jumped, but lunged, as if into a wave, too big to surf, feeling as though I was drowning most of the time.  I obviously was not drowning.  But, lunge I did; I have always landed back on the beach, bedraggled and sometimes bleeding, for the onslaught (of modern life) is relentless.

Lunging is my thing. It sounds better in Hindi. Jhapatta - "Ja'pat-taah.  

My familial advisor says that I catastrophize things.  She is right. I do.  But from my perspective, life feels catastrophic.  It is extremely difficult for me to look at that wave coming at me while I am merely taking a summer stroll on the beach and not think of it as a tsunami.  It is, at best, a wave that has the potential to become a tsunami and I respond to it as such.

I am alive and writing this because the Lord Almighty loves me and grants me the angels of the day to help me navigate this perceived dangerous business of living out loud while trying to remain invisible, yet attempting to be useful, and all the while not screaming.

To my new readers, welcome.  I write long and hard, No short stories. Nothing soft and fluffy.  

This is all about depression. I think.  It might include some other stuff eventually, but for now, it is about depression.

General 

Social media, being what it is, throws out the idea that pharmaceutical companies are out to get us all on medication in order to make tons of money and suggest that these companies are somehow in cahoots with "the governments" or a malevolent third force in order to make us all zombies which they may control or enslave. 

There is also a general feeling that medication for depression is overprescribed because doctors just write out scripts to get you to keep coming back so they can make a ton of money.   

The spiritual argument is let go and let God.  

While it is true, the pharmaceutical companies make money from the drugs they develop and market, I sincerely believe that they deserve to make money and that they have done society a great service, which it needs, and as long as they are willing and able, we should thank our lucky stars.  

Society will not become zombies because of drugs for depression because, for a start, not everyone can afford said drugs.   Each country handles its depressed patients differently. Some countries have guidelines that require you to go stark staring mad before doctors will/may (I am not sure which) give you the drugs you need. 

This comes about as a result of national health services who have budgets that require your total collapse before giving you the medication that will help you over the raging river that your life has become for whatever reason. You have either started to scream without ceasing or you have destroyed your habitat or something equally devastating to the neighbours and friends and society in general.

And, and, and, I firmly believe that being denied drugs necessary for your mental health leads to extreme acts, (not screaming or destroying habitat) which may not occur if such bodies were made to feel more comfortable in their skins. I also believe that young people are under extreme pressures in this modern world and they are not coping very well.  They sometimes turn to the street for medication and that road leads to destruction and eventually death or prison or both.

While I work, I draw pictures and listen to CNN as opposed to watching it.  Said CNN recently mentioned the opioid crisis, almost in passing, as a filler, between Trumpertising, in America, in the same fashion they reported the Irish voting for abortion.   It may be the nature of reporting, but neither story ventured a guess as to the cause of the opioid crisis or the new need for legal abortions. There was great sympathy for the girls who find themselves in a very "lonely place " when they seek abortions or suffer the judgment for having taken such a step. They never mentioned the opioid addict. They were only reporting on the crisis and the need to control prescriptions or supply. Clearly, there is a cause or as Malcolm Gladwell will tell you, many causes.  

I would suggest that both are caused by one thing.  The need to love and be loved.  And, for those of us with understanding, as the great sages put it, meaning spiritual education-understanding, it is the disconnect from the Divine that creates discomfort in general and causes major havoc in those of us with a dysfunctional biology and/or background, (multitudes of causes there), that leaves us lonely, isolated and desperate. And, judged.

Now having said that: being disconnected from the Divine is a reason for discomfort, I do not mean to say those holy humans are free of their biology.  Holy humans with an indefinable dysfunction may find it easier to manage without drugs than those who are totally disconnected from the Divine.  Many do.  I am not one of them.  Although I am totally engaged in the pursuit of the Divine, I take prescribed medication for what has now been formally diagnosed as chronic depression. I require both since I cannot allow myself to become a dead man walking, without hope, waiting only to cease to be.  And I am not catastrophizing.  This is what depression is.

About two years ago, if not longer, I began to think I had the beginnings of Alzheimer's disease.  I was forgetting big and small things.  I rocked up at hairdressers on time, a day late.  I completely forgot the nail bar a few times too many to be a good customer.  I would watch a movie, being a mad movie lover, and completely forget it.  I would take it out again. The girl at the Video shop would say, "You have watched this one."  I would say, "I probably didn't get round to it."  I would take out between four and six movies at a time.  I would watch it again and feel, if anything, that I had perhaps watched the trailer because some scenes were familiar.  Other things also, too many to document, but a lot of stuff.

I made false attempts to see a neurosurgeon, but I lived where the one I would have to see had some negative reports and I didn't make it past that halt in the process, except to see a natural energy healer, who did great and wonderful things with me.  She kept the wolf from the door, month to month.   I had gone off antidepressants and felt good about that, spiritually speaking, but when the wave piled up and crashed about me I almost drowned and landed up on the beach bedraggled and bleeding.

I hung onto the sleeping pills and the tranquilisers because the wave always came.  I would then need to stop shaking and to sleep.  I did not work so I could sleep whenever necessary.  I limited myself to taking these when and if I had to.  Not having a job never meant that I did nothing.  I always find work for my hands.  While doing that work, which of no consequence here, I became ill.  I thought I had asthma.  I couldn't breathe.  I took my tranquilisers.  I sucked on an asthma pump because I told my doctor I had asthma.  Long story, short, I landed up in a hospital with bronchial pneumonia and after a long time, I got out briefly for Christmas and then landed up in ICU where I now had pneumonia and I still couldn't breathe.  My doctor would not let me go home because his machines would not give me a pass.

"I've been off my antidepressants for ages, but keeping me here is making me depressed," I said.

The doctor swung round.

"What were you on?"

I told him.  He prescribed said pill and the next day his machines were happy to let me leave.

I moved on.  Waves came and went.  I bled and healed and bled and healed, but my memory got worse.  Finally, having moved to Cape Town, I thought I had better see someone.  My lovely doctor sent me to a Geriatrician, apologising for the title.  As if I would care about such a thing.  

Off I went.  I had to turn 67 and just about go crazy with worry to get to see a doctor who could accurately diagnose my mental health and give me medication that is enabling me to live without fear of waves.  I don't have Alzheimer's disease, but I am chronically depressed.  The doctor asked me if I wanted therapy.

"No. I'm therapied out," I said.

"It tends to help," she said.

"It doesn't," I said.

I just get to tell stories and pay someone to listen to them.  I wasn't interested.  

The medication rocked my head. I had every fight I had not fought in my sleep. I dreamed out loud, woke myself shouting, knocked over everything on the bedside table and wondered each morning how I would get through the day.  My hands shook. I couldn't stop them without a tranquilser.

"Power through," the lovely doctor said.  I powered through.  I take instructions well.  

My body went into a coma state while my mind went walkabout.  I realised that I was being allowed to completely rest my body while my mind sifted through the rubble.  Eventually, the dreams stopped. That particular fight was over. I found it curious that I had to fight that particular fight because in my waking life I would not dream of shouting at that person, ever.  My subconscious mind did not agree with my intellect. I have not dreamed mad dreams for a while now.  This is my third month.

Every now and so often I feel my body screaming inside, but like a wave, it subsides.  I no longer need sleeping tablets, but I still take my tranquilisers when I need them, and I often need them.  

I started therapy today.  

Love and Light