Wednesday, April 21, 2004
I've been open about my struggle with depression since beginning treatment in 1999, but guarded until recently about the physical & economic toll it has exacted during that same period. Physically, I have lost teeth, had a detached retina that required two surgeries with no guarantee it won't happen again, remaining hair has turned gray, an enlarged prostate. Making the monthly rent payment was often an all-consuming effort; not until the middle of last year did these efforts finally reach the point of futility. Looking back, I don't understand how I made it that far. But the on-going financial crises constantly sidetracked actual rehabilitation, which requires periods of low stress that medications cannot provide.
"Rehabilitation" for the kind of depression I have (which also has a mildly manic component) is mainly about recognizing the onset symptoms & developing coping strategies. But to really know the symptoms, one has to get some sense of how often the body cycles into depressive periods, & how deep these depressions can go naturally when they are not aggravated or brought on more frequently by external pressures & anxieties. Product claims for anti-depressants made by the drug producers gloss over a number of points. One is that a drug that makes you more "yourself" also makes you less yourself in some way. Another is that chronic, periodic depression is not the same as a "blue" period needing short term treatment. Yet another is that no one is exactly sure how these drugs work, or how well, or even why. Which is why the advertisements hedge on the actual connection to brain chemistry. At best, these medications only alleviate a condition. In my case, Zoloft helped for awhile & then itself became a problem.
The most obvious outward evidence of how badly depression affected me is that I disappeared almost completely from the WFMU airwaves for two years, wrote very little poetry & published hardly at all outside of my own webpages, & completely withdrew from contact with several old, close friends who deserved better from me. Drawing from that, it's not difficult to imagine how screwed up everything else was becoming. Of course, on top of all this, I've been as deeply disturbed by terrorist attacks & the Iraq War as any other thoughtful, feeling person.
Over a year before the December '03 breakdown I'd begun reconnecting & repairing relationships (I confess to wrecking a significant one), doing more creative work, pushing myself toward becoming a public artist again, even socializing on occasion. So there already was an ascent hiding behind the descent. I was putting myself on "rehab" time, which is not the clock most people live by. This eventually, inevitably, brought me into conflict with my landlord a few months ago, when I committed myself absolutely to a long term strategy of rehabilitation. I have no intention of gyping this man out of what I owe him, But I also know that I was going to be dead on Christmas night if my therapist had not picked up the hints I was giving her & intervened the way she did - having me removed from my apartment by a social worker & a Rahway police officer & delivered to the Trinitas Psychiatric Inpatient Unit. I made a deal long ago with my therapist that I would somehow tip her off if I moved past suicidal ideation into an actual plan with a method & date, which had never happened before. She cares about me & respects artists. I trust her. My landlord was demanding his rent money while I was engaged in a life or death struggle. That's like asking a man holding on to the edge of a cliff with both hands to reach into his back pocket for his wallet. There's a choice one has to make in a situation like that. I was given less than one month (it could have been less than a week) to have rental assistance approved, find an apartment, transfer & finalize all the paperwork, come up with most of the security payment, & move out of an apartment I'd occupied for over ten years, all with few resources to make the actual move, & on the absolute minimum of budgets. & to cope with this without having a serious emotional relapse. All the while knowing I would pay this wealthy man every cent owed him anyway, after going through this hell, if I managed to survive.
It's something like a miracle just that I'm sitting here, alive, in a new apartment, listening to classical music as I write this. With my literary & radio archives, plus many books, & much of the fine art given me, & shelving, & even my Christmas decorations still at my former residence. Do I really need them? The landlord can have them if he's willing to store them at his Poconos house.
All my former landlord I have in common, aside from that apartment, is that we're both Scorpios - with all that implies, & the same age. As for the virtue of Scorpio loyalty, one can never be certain of how one earns it.
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
"Rehabilitation" for the kind of depression I have (which also has a mildly manic component) is mainly about recognizing the onset symptoms & developing coping strategies. But to really know the symptoms, one has to get some sense of how often the body cycles into depressive periods, & how deep these depressions can go naturally when they are not aggravated or brought on more frequently by external pressures & anxieties. Product claims for anti-depressants made by the drug producers gloss over a number of points. One is that a drug that makes you more "yourself" also makes you less yourself in some way. Another is that chronic, periodic depression is not the same as a "blue" period needing short term treatment. Yet another is that no one is exactly sure how these drugs work, or how well, or even why. Which is why the advertisements hedge on the actual connection to brain chemistry. At best, these medications only alleviate a condition. In my case, Zoloft helped for awhile & then itself became a problem.
The most obvious outward evidence of how badly depression affected me is that I disappeared almost completely from the WFMU airwaves for two years, wrote very little poetry & published hardly at all outside of my own webpages, & completely withdrew from contact with several old, close friends who deserved better from me. Drawing from that, it's not difficult to imagine how screwed up everything else was becoming. Of course, on top of all this, I've been as deeply disturbed by terrorist attacks & the Iraq War as any other thoughtful, feeling person.
Over a year before the December '03 breakdown I'd begun reconnecting & repairing relationships (I confess to wrecking a significant one), doing more creative work, pushing myself toward becoming a public artist again, even socializing on occasion. So there already was an ascent hiding behind the descent. I was putting myself on "rehab" time, which is not the clock most people live by. This eventually, inevitably, brought me into conflict with my landlord a few months ago, when I committed myself absolutely to a long term strategy of rehabilitation. I have no intention of gyping this man out of what I owe him, But I also know that I was going to be dead on Christmas night if my therapist had not picked up the hints I was giving her & intervened the way she did - having me removed from my apartment by a social worker & a Rahway police officer & delivered to the Trinitas Psychiatric Inpatient Unit. I made a deal long ago with my therapist that I would somehow tip her off if I moved past suicidal ideation into an actual plan with a method & date, which had never happened before. She cares about me & respects artists. I trust her. My landlord was demanding his rent money while I was engaged in a life or death struggle. That's like asking a man holding on to the edge of a cliff with both hands to reach into his back pocket for his wallet. There's a choice one has to make in a situation like that. I was given less than one month (it could have been less than a week) to have rental assistance approved, find an apartment, transfer & finalize all the paperwork, come up with most of the security payment, & move out of an apartment I'd occupied for over ten years, all with few resources to make the actual move, & on the absolute minimum of budgets. & to cope with this without having a serious emotional relapse. All the while knowing I would pay this wealthy man every cent owed him anyway, after going through this hell, if I managed to survive.
It's something like a miracle just that I'm sitting here, alive, in a new apartment, listening to classical music as I write this. With my literary & radio archives, plus many books, & much of the fine art given me, & shelving, & even my Christmas decorations still at my former residence. Do I really need them? The landlord can have them if he's willing to store them at his Poconos house.
All my former landlord I have in common, aside from that apartment, is that we're both Scorpios - with all that implies, & the same age. As for the virtue of Scorpio loyalty, one can never be certain of how one earns it.
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