Hello darkness, my old friend
My friend cipherpunk is fighting with the Black Dog at the moment, and I wish him luck with it; as he observed, depression seems to go hand-in-hand with high stress levels, and given my recent experience with this I am inclined to agree. There have been several points in my life when I was severely depressed, enough so that I agreed to go on antidepressants. The results, to say the least, were extremely mixed.
The first SSRI my doctor prescribed for me was desipramine. It turned me into a turnip and required a trip to the emergency room.
The second SSRI was nortryptiline. It didn't seem to improve my state of mind, and it made me ravenously hungry. I quit taking it because it quite obviously wasn't doing me any good and was making my life worse.
The third SSRI was Prozac, which my doctor gave me during the year my marriage was disintegrating, because I was starting to have angina attacks and was barely functional. It worked...but it seemed to do so by turning me into a robot. All my emotions, positive, negative, and otherwise, drained out and I became a mechanism carrying out the required tasks of being a father and an accountant. Things came to a head for me at my father's burial service that December, when all my family was crying around me, and I felt nothing. I remember thinking, "This is wrong. This is my father they're burying. Why don't I feel anything?" and I think it was at that moment I decided I had to get off the Prozac, because I didn't like this lack of emotion and sensation. I consultd with my doctor, and she agreed it was probably best to stop. The next couple of years were tough (and Wells Fargo's emotional counselors were worse than useless), but thanks to my then-girlfriend the oceanographer, I pulled through it.
So I completely understand his reluctance to do the brain drugs. He's done a lot more research on them than I have, and I respect that, and if he says he's better off on Placebo* or on Scotch & cigars, I figure he knows what the hell he's talking about, and the rest of us need to let him do what he thinks he needs to do.
*Have you asked your doctor if Placebo is right for you?
The first SSRI my doctor prescribed for me was desipramine. It turned me into a turnip and required a trip to the emergency room.
The second SSRI was nortryptiline. It didn't seem to improve my state of mind, and it made me ravenously hungry. I quit taking it because it quite obviously wasn't doing me any good and was making my life worse.
The third SSRI was Prozac, which my doctor gave me during the year my marriage was disintegrating, because I was starting to have angina attacks and was barely functional. It worked...but it seemed to do so by turning me into a robot. All my emotions, positive, negative, and otherwise, drained out and I became a mechanism carrying out the required tasks of being a father and an accountant. Things came to a head for me at my father's burial service that December, when all my family was crying around me, and I felt nothing. I remember thinking, "This is wrong. This is my father they're burying. Why don't I feel anything?" and I think it was at that moment I decided I had to get off the Prozac, because I didn't like this lack of emotion and sensation. I consultd with my doctor, and she agreed it was probably best to stop. The next couple of years were tough (and Wells Fargo's emotional counselors were worse than useless), but thanks to my then-girlfriend the oceanographer, I pulled through it.
So I completely understand his reluctance to do the brain drugs. He's done a lot more research on them than I have, and I respect that, and if he says he's better off on Placebo* or on Scotch & cigars, I figure he knows what the hell he's talking about, and the rest of us need to let him do what he thinks he needs to do.
*Have you asked your doctor if Placebo is right for you?