Medication and Emotion

I started Wellbutrin last Wednesday. I intended to write about it before I got derailed, but I suppose it's better a little late than never.

I felt intensely nervous before my first appointment with the psychiatrist, partly because my experience with the guy who prescribed me Adderall pretty much consisted of "How's it going with the drugs? Good? Here's another prescription. That'll be 65 dollars." I was worried that my new doctor would be as brusque and clinical, and my depression is so much more of a tender subject than my mild ADHD.

Fortunately, he was kind and asked lots of questions, talking to me for about 45 minutes before writing me a prescription. He didn't seem to mind that I'd done a little research ahead of time and he addressed my concerns calmly. Which was definitely a relief.

That said, my feelings about this whole drug thing are a lot more complicated than nervousness over how my doctor will behave. I've been working and working and working to overcome this mood issue for years. It's a struggle that's just a part of my daily reality, that's built into my routines and my self care and my relationships. It's hard to imagine my life without it, or even just with it alleviated a little.

The whole process seems so strange. My doctor explained that after two weeks or so I should physically start to feel better, that my energy will improve and it'll be easier to do things. Then after about a month, my mood should be better, the drug will be in my system and in effect. It's just odd to think of the way I feel emotionally as a symptom that a daily pill can address. It feels like something that's a part of me, and altering it with something I can just swallow is a bit disconcerting.

I'm also terrified to get my hopes up over what's going to happen here. I know that pills are not a complete fix for anything, and I don't really know how I'm going to respond to them. The idea that my friends and sister have given me that it'll be "easier to be okay" sounds unbelievably appealing, but I'm a little afraid to let myself hope. What if it doesn't work? What, then, will I be left with? I know myself and that I'd just move on and try something else, but I've delayed this option for so long, held it in my mind as a fallback, that I know it'll be really hard if it doesn't help me.

I suppose it's ultimately a question of venturing into an unknown. I've always chafed particularly at the beginnings of journeys, the feeling of uncertainty and the knowledge that I'm a novice, as green and fragile as can be. I think one of my biggest challenges as a human being is to embrace that feeling and learn to love not knowing. Moving forward and trying things even though they're scary is a part of that. So onward and upward, and I'll keep y'all filled in on how things progress.

Energy Exchange

I had really great, actually satisfying sex the other night. (The purpose of this post is not to brag, I swear!)

I got to do lots of fun things with my newly frequent play friend, like brief blow jobs in the back room of a Brooklyn speakeasy and rooftop fucking and bottoming like a good girl, and that was certainly part of it. I mean, I love getting to do the things that reallllly get me off. Of course.

One of the things that's been happening often, though, especially as I get better at expressing and asking for what I want, is that I get so excited it's really hard for me to come. Once I'm flying that high, it takes a bit of a push to bring me over the top so I can find my orgasm(s). I still love it even without the Big O, but it's nice to have the body satisfaction and endorphin release and all of that.

Well, this weekend, I was well into that state. I had a vibrator on my clit and my friend was doing naughty and scary (and therefore hot) things to me with this little claw thingie he's got and I was dangling off a roof over a fire escape and it was just very exciting. And I simply could not get myself to come.

But then we moved, and he positioned himself so I could look at his face. As soon as I could look into his eyes and feel him watching me, feel his excitement and see him feeling mine, as soon as I opened myself up to him on a more energetic level, everything suddenly hit home and I finally came.

I think that sometimes when someone's doing things to give me pleasure, be it going down on me or fucking me with hands or dick or just helping me use a vibrator, I close myself off in an attempt to concentrate and come. I hold my breath (a bad habit I'm trying to break). I close my eyes.

It's easy for me to be energetically connected when I'm doing things for someone, tuning into their body and enjoying their pleasure, but it's much harder when I'm receiving. But of course, everything feels so much better, so much more exciting and fulfilling when I let the connection happen and let my pleasure be attached to it. For someone as independent and (sometimes) emotionally skittish as I am, it's a challenge to be open, to relax into that, but one that's clearly worth embracing.

Depression, Memory, and Art

You know, it's funny, my memories from times when I've been depressed are very fuzzy. I don't remember what it's like very specifically. I have journal entries and I can go back and read them now that I am well and say "Wow, I was really depressed," but I don't remember the details of what that feels like. I can only read them on the page.

When I'm no longer able to speak or to write, that's when I draw or paint or play with collages. I'm so verbal, when I can function at all my feelings come out in my words. I write here in the blog or in the journal I carry around with me at all times. I have a journal beside my bed. I write a column. I love to have long, involved conversations with people I both agree and disagree with.

I'm looking back at my journal, and there's a period from April to August of last year where I barely wrote anything. What I did write is abysmal: "I wish just something wouldn't be so hard. It seems like I struggle with everything lately. School, friendships, my parents...I want to be able to rest for a while. I want things to be easy and to be able to truly have fun and be relaxed and easy just for a little while. Maybe then I'll be able to make it through all of this..."

I don't know how much of my personality comes through in this blog, but I'm just not like that. I want things to be challenging. I thrive when I'm pushed. That up there is me altered.

And I know at that time I was drawing and making collages, which I almost never do. I don't think I have any talent, although I'm sure I could cultivate it. But I usually just have my words. They are my art. At that point, though, I couldn't express myself that way anymore. I'd lost the ability to describe my feelings so I just had to represent them.

I think that's why my memories are so funny from those time periods. Normally, I remember things in words, in stories. Of course I forget things when I'm depressed, because I do become so non-verbal. I lose my systems of expression and therefore of remembering.

It's crazy, the total effects it has on my life. It's been over a year now, since I was depressed like that. A year and a half. I'm lucky, in that I can be a functioning person without anti-depressants. Now, I have no idea if that will change in the future. I know that if I get into a really major episode I could need them to get out. I've tried to set up support systems for myself so that I can have them gotten for me if I get that bad.

I definitely do things to try and keep my brain chemicals level, though. I exercise, I have to be sure I eat enough or I'm vulnerable to a mood change. And I sometimes take medication for ADHD, which actually usually has a positive effect on my mood. The writing does help me to constructively deal with things as they come up so that they don't have a long term negative effect on my well-being.

I know I've been writing a lot about depression and mental health. I had a spurt of productivity and thinking after I went to that Active Minds meeting. I've also become much more comfortable with the idea that I have depression, and so I want to talk about it and find others like me. I want to make connections and build support. This blog is part of that for me.

"Mental Illness" and Mad Pride

Okay, I just discovered the Mad Movement.

I read the article the New York Times wrote on the movement in May and was fairly inspired, but for various reasons involving school finals and my time-consuming relationships, I didn't look into it that much.

Silly me.

The Mad Movement seems just as diverse as any other movement these days, but I really like what's at the heart of their cause. They want to make mental illness, in all its incarnations, something people aren't ashamed of. Something they're, in fact, proud of.

They see madness as simply another way of thinking, another way of interacting with the world. There can be benefits, they say, to extremes of experience or unusual perceptions of reality. People should be proud of their uniqueness. To find out more, check out MindFreedom International, The Icarus Project, and Liz Spikol's blog.

Remember how I said I was going to post more about my feelings on mental illness? Here it is.

I don't like the term "mental illness." I recognize that it has some use in acknowledging the chemical components of things including depression and bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. I can see how people want to call them illnesses because they need to be taken seriously and treated. They're not just character flaws or quirks. Yes.

But they're not like bronchitis or a common cold. They can't be cured with antibiotics and they're not going to go away on their own. Maybe they're like viruses: herpes, which flares up every now and then or AIDs, which is always kind of there and you have to treat it or you'll die. I see the analogy, but I think the term "illness" is too suggestive of some outside source or influence that's coming in and mucking up the body.

"Mental illnesses" are internal. Yeah, it's a body malfunctioning, but it's malfunctioning because it just does. There's no little microscopic whatever causing it. The malfunction is, in a way, an integral part of the human being housing it.

My depression is a part of my personality. It's integral to how I deal with things. What I feel is who I am, and to call that an illness offends me. I am not an illness.

I like the term I found on MindFreedom's website. They called it "Creative Maladjustment" after a Martin Luther King, Jr. speech. I'm down with that. Yeah, I'm maladjusted, but it sometimes lets me feel things more deeply than other people. This can give me insight that other people miss out on. That's pretty cool. I know that some of the same brain systems which lead me to get depressed (and to have ADHD) are also the ones that allow me to be empathetic, and well spoken, and productive.

So, uh, from now on I've got a creative maladjustment, not a mental illness. Okay?

Side Note: The NYT article was in the Fashion and Style section? What?

Active Minds and Psych Students

I went to a meeting last night for a new group on campus called Active Minds. Apparently it's a new chapter of a national organization, and their stated purpose is to "promote mental health awareness, break down the stigma surrounding mental illness, create programs that raise awareness, and facilitate discussions surrounding mental health issues."

I went because I have depression. I have it in the classic sense where I'm more or less fine most of the time but I have major depressive episodes that last around four to six months every 1-3 years. It mostly doesn't affect my daily life until I'm having an episode, and I've gotten better at preventing them and recognizing the beginnings of episodes so I can get help through them. I choose not to take medication at this point.

I was hoping that this group would be a forum for students with "mental illnesses" to come forward and denounce the stigma surrounding them. You know, a community of like-minded individuals. Crazy-minded individuals if you will.

It wasn't.

So far as I could see, there were two kinds of people in the fairly packed room at the first meeting. There were students like me who probably had "mental illnesses" themselves and had come for similar reasons to mine. When we went around the room, they seemed fairly shy and had a variety of majors. Then there were the psychology students. Now, I'm not suggesting that psych students don't have "mental illnesses," but at least some of them clearly thought they didn't.

The psych majors were there because they were interested in decreasing the stigma of "mental illness" in order for "mentally ill" people to be able to get help and get "cured" more easily. A lot of them talked about having friends who had mental problems and how bad and painful this was, and a big concern was how to get people around "mentally ill" folks to help them effectively.

It was all about making the "mentally ill" folks better. Fixing us. The girl who was running the meeting said at one point that she wanted people to "understand mental illness as a disease that's curable."

The thing is that "mental illnesses" are not curable. They're treatable. There's a huge difference. You can treat a "mental illness" with medication or talk therapy or any number of other methods, but by definition it will always be there to deal with in one way or another. Never "cured."

There's also a huge difference between helping someone and fixing them. I, as a "mentally ill" person do sometimes need more help than others to get through my everyday life. I very, very much appreciate this help when it's given and I need the support structures that the mental health community provides. I need those structures to be accessible, and making that happen does help me.

What I don't need is to be fixed. This is just a part of who I am, and I think I deserve respect. Maybe in spite of the "illness" and maybe even in some ways because of it. And that's what I was looking for when I went to a meeting to destigmatize "mental illness," some kind of respect for people with different (Active?) minds. An actual lack of stigma. You're not going to destigmatize something by trying to fix it until it's gone. That's still devaluing it.

But the thing is, the only people at this meeting who spoke up were the psych students. I didn't hear a peep from anyone saying they had a "mental illness," or what that was like, or what they might need. And sure, I didn't speak up either because I figured out pretty quickly that this wasn't the group I was looking for. It was clear as soon as they prissily said "This won't be a support group, it's just a group to run events to lessen stigma."

It wasn't a welcoming atmosphere to admit that you were "mentally ill." Isn't it funny that a meeting purporting to destigmatize "mental illness" silenced the "mentally ill"?

Note: You may have noticed I have put "mental illness" in quotations throughout the post. I really dislike this term and will discuss it in more depth in an upcoming post.

Personality Disorders

Because I am simultaneously overly intellectual and always looking for ways to put off doing my homework, I was looking at the DSM-IV, the psychological diagnostic manual, today. I was reading about personality disorders, the kinds of disorders that involve consistent and pervasive "maladaptive" behaviors, just to see what it is that doctors think makes a person crazy.

Now, I'm not a big fan of mental health "diagnosis." I think we know so little about the human brain and even less about the human psyche and to try and make a definitive diagnosis is foolish and often harmful. It's too easy for those kinds of things to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Despite the potential for diagnosis to help in treating psychological symptoms (note I say symptoms not illnesses), I have a real problem with it.

That said, there are ten types of personality disorders; what they are isn't particularly important for my point. The interesting thing, though, is that as I was reading them, I realized that I'd seen at least one Law and Order episode that dealt with each. Or read a book where the main character was or had to heavily interact with someone who behaved as the diagnostic manual was describing.

We are fascinated with mental illness. We glorify people who have these "disorders" because we find them more interesting than those who don't. We want to hear about the latest crazy thing that someone did. We read books about people whose mothers were bipolar or whose father was antisocial. All literature, almost, is about the strange and unusual.

I wonder what effect this has on our mental health community. We are constantly trying to "treat" people who behave in "maladaptive" ways even as we like them better than people who don't. I don't know, it's a strange paradox. I don't know that I can make any conclusions about it, but it's strange nonetheless.

Random Reaction to Class: Penis Envy

So I know that Freudian theory is pretty much out of fashion these days, and it's considered archaic and "nobody pays any attention to it anymore," but of course we're still studying it in school. It's the background for anything to do with any kind of psychological theory, and as such I think what it said still has an effect on what we think.

That said, I absolutely hate the idea of penis envy. I do not have penis envy. Penis envy makes me angry. "Oh, no, boys have a penis and I don't have a penis, so I am Lacking and I am sad!" Um, no.

I HAVE a vagina, and a clitoris, and lips, and moisture. I HAVE multiple orgasms and as they say in the Vagina Monologues "twice, twice, TWICE the number of nerve endings in the penis." I HAVE genitals of my own. I don't need a penis. Hell, I think a lot of guys have pussy envy.

That is all.