The Rites Of Spring

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine told me that I’d been acting crabby and seemed down. I’m fine, I said. Last week, another friend told me that I seemed a bit shaky. I’m fine, I said. Yesterday, another friend saw me walking to work and told me that I looked beaten-up. I’m not feeling so great, I said. A few hours later, I e-mailed my boss and told him I was depressed—nothing bad or life threatening. Just the usual dysphoria I get hit with late in the spring year whether I need it or not. It clears soon enough. As this go-round will.

The standard response in our society these days would be: Dawdy, you need to see your doctor and take an anti-depressant. When I was younger I would’ve gone crawling to my psych doc and he would’ve switched me from one anti-depressant to another or upped the dose on my current one. The sad thing was that that approach never bore fruit, and led to me being on 80 mgs. of Prozac a day at one point (it almost killed me but that’s another story).

So what am I doing about this here in 2006? Not calling up my doc and asking for an anti-depressant, which I can then take for months and months and years and years because that’s what America expects of us these days. We have to feel ship-shape at all times or our nation won’t meet its productivity goals. But those same anti-depressants never prevent future bouts of depression, and they have all sorts of ugly side-effects for me and my co-pay will be about $100 a month—money I don’t have. So what exactly would be my incentive to spend $1,200 a year on meds that don’t work much better for me than a standard mood-stabilizer (Lamictal, in my case)—and give me headaches, make my heart race and render me impotent? My incentive is zero.

My current recipe is to continue taking Lamictal—it has mild anti-depressant qualities—and supplement that with 1 mg. of Ativan a day when I feel it is necessary. It’s been necessary lately and I’m OK with that for now. (I don’t take the Ativan every day, for those of you who care.) If things don’t cycle out of this fairly minor depression in a few weeks, then I’ll talk to my doc and we can evaluate the situation. Hope I don’t have to go there. Probably won’t.