My Brave Face

Reading this book has prompted me to examine more intently a particular time in my life and reflect upon the similarities I now behold. Not that melancholia ever ventures far, though sometimes, briefly, it may lie dormant.
In the book, William Styron's daughter Alexandra recounts her father's battle with depression and how he eventually seemed to succumb to it. In this book, William Styron himself addressed his first attempt to come to terms with the depression. I've read William Styron's book more than once, but most particularly around the time when I underwent electroconvulsive therapy. I thought then that William Styron hadn't suffered enough to have been driven to a state desperate enough to contemplate taking his own life. Having read more, and gained more insight into his behavior, though, I think perhaps he had. Alcohol served as his drug of choice before he delved into doctor-prescribed treatments.
Alexandra Styron tells of her father having to cope with a severe descent into depression 15 years after the first flirtation with the thin line between madness and whatever isn't madness. I find myself now 18 years past the ECT, and I wonder if circumstances aren't threatening to come full circle. A priest once told me that wars come along about every 20 years, at least before W., and ECT is a bomb intended to incapacitate the enemy when one fights against himself.
Alexandra Styron's book also says studies have revealed that most major depressive episodes occur during the spring. My most comprehensive breakdown straddled the seasons, between winter and spring, just as I straddled the metaphorical line on one side of which lay the promise of life grounded and to the other an abyss of unknown proportions.
I commiserated with William Styron through his book. Right around the time of its publication, I also began to seek a pharmacological remedy. About 20 years later, I struggle to find a way forward within the chemical universe or to find a way out. Perhaps this place. Perhaps not.
The search for a remedy has consumed much of my adult life, and even sub-adult life, at least those moments when I wasn't resigned to the notion that no remedy existed. The quest began in high school, when I first sought a therapist's assistance, but the self-medication began in middle school, with the alcohol and marijuana.
With cognitive therapy alone offering no respite, eventually I came to a point at which I considered medication to be helpful, my life held together by chemical bonds. But now my mainstay, Effexor, doesn't really work anymore. Coming off of it, though, can be worse than staying on, and worse than depression alone, and that's where I find myself. Trying to wade through quicksand, with a lead weight in my stomach and a fire hose squirting around inside my skull. The withdrawal drives some people back to the medication itself, the vicious cycle in which one finds the cure has induced an infirmity of its own that holds an equally tight grip.
I try to conceal the pain, especially from the children, and turn to words to convey what essentially defies description, except for the apparent minority who have undergone similar experiences. The kids don't need anything else to worry about, or anything at all. I won't accept, though, any kind of stigma attached to depression. My brave face stems either from a desire to spare the feelings of those ill-equipped to handle the infirmity.
Now, though, perhaps a new avenue of research holds promise. Therein lies one of depression's dilemmas, the perpetual hope-disappointment cycle. The prospect that this treatment will cure what ails me or you. As John Hiatt says, "It's always somewhere else, you're gonna fix yourself...but you can't get away from the nagging dark." The Devil's greatest trick is making you think he doesn't exist. Maybe depression's greatest trick involves making those in its grips think a way out exists.
So, while depressives can be realists, which some people think might bring about the melancholia in the first place, they too employ tactics that fly in the face of experience. The survival mechanism, believing that something better could lie in wait. And what if it isn't just a mind game? If the next cure is the cure? How would someone who has lived a life of depression and so much time in search of the cure react to a cure's existence? Maybe I'll find out.
To that end, the avenues of research that recently have opened differ from the standard treatments of the past 30-odd years. A consensus seems to exist among psychiatric researchers that we need a better treatment. Ketamine and scopolamine, which work on the glutamate system, have become subjects of clinical trials. Their methods of action in particular appear to intrigue those involved with the research, especially because they differ starkly from Prozac and its ilk.
The promise of an effective treatment also frustrates, which people with any number of maladies experience. They work great, but you can't get them. Only those involved in the trials themselves, which, after all, do hold a risk/reward aspect. You might feel great, and the additional appendage you have spawned might not even bother you. Drugs are good. Health-care providers, however, already use ketamine and scopolamine, for anesthesia and motion sickness, respectively. Different treatment regimens likely would exist for say, car sickness and depression, but the safety profile has been established to some extent. Shouldn't people who already suffer from potentially life-threatening maladies be able to accept the risk for the potential reward? So, researchers, let's get moving. I await the next big disappointment. Except maybe, just maybe....And, if nothing else, the promise of something better will have consumed another undetermined number of years, bringing me one step closer to being a survivor.

Strange Bedfellows

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Credit for this quote widely goes to Charles Dudley Warner, a writer and friend of Mark Twain, who himself never said anything pithy.
In keeping with the spirit of strange bedfellows, what about Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum? This, according to his website:

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990 at the age of 32, and from 1995 to 2007, served in the US Senate. In 2000, he was elected by his peers to the position of Senate Republican Conference Chairman.


Eventually, he got walloped in a Senate re-election bid. Mr. Santorum fancies himself "A Champion of Traditional American Values." That's actually the title of a PDF you can download on his site. He advocates fiscal sanity and wrote a book called "It Takes a Family." To that end, he and his wife have seven kids. The youngest, Isabella, 3 years old, is in the hospital with something called Trisomy 18, a genetic abnormality tha can cause developmental and cardiac problems. Apparently about 90% of children with this problem die before birth or result in a stillbirth. For those who survive, fewer than 1% reach age 10. A horrible situation for a little girl and her family.
The difficulties the Santorums face and his recently elevated profile bring to mind another incident involving one of their children. Their son, whom they called Gabriel, died at 20 weeks gestation in 1996. Again, tragic. And under such a circumstance, parents could have unusual reactions. But they took the dead fetus home and allowed their other children to hold it. Before that, the couple apparently spent the night in a hospital bed with the dead baby. He's against embryonic-stem-cell research but finds it acceptable to sleep with the dead baby. Truly a strange bedfellow. People of faith, if you were to poke around the Internet, seemingly find inspiration in the Santorum family's embrace of the fetus and willingness to channel its grief in such a fashion. Wouldn't anyone not caught up in religious zealotry find it troubling, not to mention sleep-disruptive, to have a fetus in bed? If he were really pro-life, perhaps Mr. Santorum would support stem-cell research, which has the potential to save other lives.
Aside from which, you, as an adult, bringing a dead child home to your other children are either forcing them to retreat further into your religion to rationalize such behavior or fucking them up forever. Or both.
This guy is running for the Republican nomination? Seriously?

***

Speaking of people running for the Republican nomination (again, seriously?). Newt Gingrich, Mr. Conservative, the one who trumpets himself as the true standard bearer. One of his ex-wives recently did a television interview in which she said Newt wanted to, basically, fuck another woman but not necessarily separate. She called it an open marriage. and Newt isn't unique in that respect.
That was his second wife. He currently is married to #3. I might be wrong, but that kind of track record doesn't seem fitting for one who campaigns on such a platform. When the CNN guy, John King, hosted a subsequent debate and asked him about the open-marriage issue, Newt responded quite testily that he was appalled the moderator would broach such a subject during a presidential debate. Indignant self-righteousness, that's the way to go. Bully the guy because you're so far off-base you have no cogent argument to provide. With his campaign platform relying on conservative values, people do have a right to question whether he advocates, at least for himself, a guilt-free piece on the side. Even more amazing is that at least three women have been willing to fuck him.