Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

So after nearly 2 weeks of SSRI’s, how is it going? Better. I’m not out of the woods yet, but better. To begin with it was a little like being hit over the head with a frying pan. Like I was knocked out, I kind of shut down. I started sleeping a lot. I’ve had a couple of good days when the lights suddenly switched on again, but mostly it’s still darkness. Time has warped, leaving me feeling tired, hollow and lifeless. That’s how it goes, though. I was expecting it, and as the drugs start to work, it’s time to start the next step. To change how I’m thinking. The drugs treat an aspect of the illness, but they’re not enough on their own.

How does the black dog affect your thinking? Well, imagine something good in your life. Maybe your job, your family. Perhaps your blog. Now allow yourself to start feeling negatively about it, allow doubts to come in and take over. Suddenly you think you’re rubbish at your job, and you can’t even see the point of it. Suddenly you think you’re a bad father, mother, daughter, son. Suddenly your writing seems childish and painfully angst-ridden. Feeling a bit depressed? Of course you are, so you cast around for something different to think about. Something that will make you feel better. But you have no control of your thinking. You can’t stop the doubts and the negativity and slowly but surely you destroy everything in your life. Everything you care about; relationships, friends, career, sport all of it gets tainted and you can’t imagine feeling any different. This is when you start casting around again for new things. Untainted things. This is where you start coming up with the hair-brained schemes. Then you start knocking those down too. This goes on and on, putting you in a tailspin with no end until you treat the illness or it goes away of it’s own accord.

Sounds nasty doesn’t it. Anti Depressants slow the process, and allow you more control your thoughts, but you’re stuck in a habit now. So part of the process has to be breaking the habit of depressive thinking. It’s very difficult to do, but with practice you can start to notice patterns in your own trains of thought. Once the train is in motion it’s difficult to stop, so the trick is to notice it happening as quickly as possible and head it off. Derail the train. Of course it will come back again and again, and you have to derail it again and again, but you begin to create a new habit which breaks the cycle and releases you from the black dog.

This process is part of a therapy called CBT. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Some people naturally develop more control of their thinking as they grow up than others. These people tend not to allow free-wheeling thinking as much as others and are less susceptible to depression. That freewheeling, un-constrained thinking has often been linked to creative personality traits and it has been suggested as a reason creative personality types seem to be more likely to suffer from depression and bi-polar disorders.

Sometimes I get really sick of working with computers and start to daydream about what else I could do for a living. I call it looking for lumberjack schools because a few years ago I came up with the idea of going to Canada and being a lumberjack. Playing with chainsaws and all the smoked salmon you can eat. Sweet. It struck me as a funny example of that kind of (not very healthy) daydreaming. Here’s a list of the things I’ve considered in the past few days.

• Plumber
• Electrician
• Architect
• Psychotherapist
• Truck Driver

and my personal favourite, which I actually looked into for at least an hour on google…… Helicopter pilot. For $US 50K and in 6 months you can be a commercial helicopter pilot apparently. I even had a look at the medical requirements, and so long as you’ve not been at the SSRI’s for several months, and you’re pretty healthy, you’re sweet. I could even live up here in the mountains and fly people on heliskiing adventures. It’s perfect for me - I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before. Obviously I should dedicate my life to flying helicopters.

Stop right there. Obviously it’s a hair-brained scheme and I should really just get my head down and get some work done, but it’s hard to concentrate right now. Even the simplest tasks are proving hard to complete. I’m looking forward to the parting of the mist when I can actually do some real work again. A couple more weeks and computers will start to make sense again.

I should have done this a month ago. The signs were there, the sleep disturbance, the hair-brained schemes, the inability to concentrate or make decisions, excessive consumption of alcohol and cigarettes, anxious irritability and loss of interest in…. well, everything. Stop messing about, I need SSRI’s.

I found a doctor here in chamonix, did some research and translation and then went to my appointment to explain what I needed. I didn’t know what to expect. There’s still a stigma attached to using antidepressants to treat depression. Surely you should be able to cope with life without needing drugs? Even I feel it sometimes, and I should know better. The doctor was great, and understood that I wasn’t looking for a diagnosis, just a prescription. So after a fairly long absence, SSRI’s are again a part of my life. Good.

What? I imagine hearing words of dissent….. “Ya big gayo. How come you can’t just self-medicate with booze, fags, cannabis, cocaine and coffee like any normal, self respecting depressive nut-job?”

Good point. Antidepressants are a bit safe and boring aren’t they? But the fact is; they work. Unlike self-medication. Here’s how;

In the brain, messages are passed between two nerve cells via synapses (small gaps between the cells). The sending cell releases neurotransmitters (of which serotonin is one). The serotonin is then recognized by receptors on the surface of the recipient cell, which is stimulated and relays the signal. Usually, 10% of the serotonin is lost in this process and 90% is taken back into the sending cell in a process called re-uptake. Some theories link depression to a lack of stimulation of the recipient neuron at a synapse, so SSRI’s inhibit the re-uptake of serotonin. As a result, the serotonin stays in the synapses longer than it normally would, stimulating the receptor cells again and again.

mmmmmm, I can just feel my barren, serotonin starved neurons bathing and becoming bloated, firing back up into life like the hot embers of a fire with a load of kindling chucked on it. Actually, that’s not quite the case. These things take a while to work. A few weeks at least. In the mean time there are a few mild side effects likeoccasional dizziness, nausea and some very deep mood dips I’ll have to put up with - but in a couple of weeks I’ll be right as rain, and able to concentrate other battles.