Gradually and then suddenly- we prozac nation

Today I am going to write about depression.

The illness very often ignored and not treated seriously.

I feel like it is changing lately but still it is a long way to go.

And it must be gone.

Because well... depression is kind of a mental cancer.

Simplifying, the civilisation illness which comes from inside of you

and starts to kill your own mind like cancer kills the body.

Lately I read the famous

"Prozac nation" by Elizabeth Wurtzel and saw the movie based on it.

The invention of prozac and other drugs which regulates

the level of serotonin was a big turn in depression treatment

and the hope for many people.

Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent.

This thought stays strongly in all of us

and this is why this is so difficult for the protagonist Lizzy

to accept that she is feeling better thanks to Prozac.

She tries to commit suicide when she is feeling better

not when her depression is at its peak.

She is feeling like depression is everything she had.

It was kind of her escape, her drug, her shelter when she was feeling blue.

And now?

Thanks to medicine she lost everything,

she is a different human. Not herself anymore. 

Does her personality even exist without a depression?

And the reason is the pill.

Anti-deps become like a drug 

not because they make you an addict,

but because they change you.

People must learn the new way of living and thinking.

All the reason lies in the fact

that usually before deciding to start pharmacotherapy

depressed live long years with their illness.

As said in the movie "The sun also rises" (about a bankruptcy though)

it happens gradually and then suddenly.

And at this "suddenly" point people ask for help.

But then there is all these "gradually" to cure.

And this is the most difficult step.

In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. 

Dr. Sterling was right about that. 

I loved it because I thought it was all I had. 

I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. 

I thought so little of myself, 

felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, 

that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.

Anti-deps really have effect.

Right now I am more like in the neurosis state

because of many bad happenings in my life.

But it is completely different from this dark wave

which appeared without any reason,

which attacked me since my teenage age

and then hit by stimulus during my Japan stay.

The worst is this feeling of being a nuisance or a mistake.

Unable to love. At the same time dramatically looking for love and acceptance.

I feel like a defective model, 

like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked 

and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.

This is feeling of tiredness.

Exhaustion by smallest things.

You know you've completely descended into madness 

when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.

Depression is the state between life and death.

It is the worst.

Depression is a lot like that: slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearale. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getter older, about turning eight or about turning twelve or turning fifteeen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

And then one pill is going to change it?

It is not a happiness pill- said my psychiatrist

and I know he is right.

There is all this "gradually" to fight

and I am afraid of it.

Sometimes I feel like some people

are just suicide type by their nature.

Probably because of different brain wave in temporal lobe.

Some people have a tendency to fall in it.

I remember a beautiful description in 

Hermann Hesse's "Steppenwolf".

Suicides are not people who really commit suicide.

Some of them never do it.

Some of committing it just do it by one impulse and they are not suicide by personality.

Suicides are those who live years and years inside the idea of suicide.

On the edge of live. Edge of rock.

Suicide is the constant hope for them.

Because they know one day they can choose it.

They turn it into the philosophy of life. Always open gate.

I can try how far I can go because I know this gate waits for me.

Anne Sexton wrote beautifully about it

at the same time being a suicide herself.

Years of therapy ended in a suicide.

She just entered this always open gate.

Somebody would ask why. There is no answer.

Suicides do not ask why. They feel senseless even when

they "have nothing against life."

But suicides have a special language. 

Like carpenters they want to know which tools. 

They never ask why build. 

And the state continues.

Can pills be taken forever? And what then?

Or maybe as Sexton says it is only a diet from death.

Before it hits one day.

and yet she waits for me, year after year, 

to so delicately undo an old wound, 

to empty my breath from its bad prison. 

I'm becoming something of a chemical 

mixture. 

that's it! 

My supply 

of tablets 

has got to last for years and years. 

I like them more than I like me. 

It`s a kind of marriage. 

Can this really end?

How sad it to depend all your mental balance,

happiness, everything on the pill.

Now I'm borrowed. 

Now I'm numb. 

Will the time to give it back come?

I can guess that the way to overcome it

is depending on people you love.

Someone who would come to you.

And help you to regain your passion and goals.

Let's continue this post with a song

which Lizzy from "Prozac nation" loved

and wished for herself to come true.

Bruce Springsteen – For You

The story about girl trying to commit suicide

but there is a guy who come to be her ambulance

as her "pulse is getting weak".

Lizzy was dramatically looking for him, unable to find.

I came for you, for you, I came for you

But you did not need my urgency

I came for you, for you, I came for you

But your life was one long emergency

And your cloud line urges me

And my electric surges free

It is not that easy I guess.

There is all "gradually" to overcome 

when "suddenly" is already gone.

Lizzy tried to to fight with "suddenly" by love

what was impossible, but how about "gradually"?

Probably it is just easier when you know

there is someone all this "gradually"

is even worth fighting for.

But the fight you must take is only yours.

This fight is probably all about

accepting different nature of clouds

when using Joni Mitchell's metaphor.

Rows and flows of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons everywhere

I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun

They rain and snow on everyone

So many things I would have done

But clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It's cloud illusions I recall

I really don't know clouds at all

(Both sides now)