"[Leonard Cohen] “Well, on Prozac, I thought I had attained some kind of higher plateau because my interest in women had dissolved.” He laughs. “Then I realized it was just a side effect. That stuff crushes your libido.”

[Leonard Cohen] “… So one day, a few years ago, I was in a car, on my way to the airport. I was really, really low, on many medications, and pulled over, I reached behind to my valise, took out the pills, and threw out all the drugs I had. I said, ‘These things really don’t even begin to confront my predicament.” I figured, If I am going to go down I would rather go down with my eyes wide open.”"
Leonard Cohen at the interview at the blog.

hmm. Sometimes if you don't laugh about something you cry. Maybe he cannot cry anymore.

Maybe this was another reason he wrote "Hallelujah"?

What ever inspires this dude to write, is good with me, we are fortunate to have such a singer/writer living in our midst, imho.

Good stuff. In the end Cohen seems to realize that depression is a choice. It seems cruel, but compared to the "treatments," it's not. http://www.depressionisachoice.com/

This reminds me a lot of another musician I know somewhat (he's a friend of two friends of mine), Yoshiki.

While he's never shared too much about what meds he's been on on the med-go-round aside from stating in one interview that a psych gave him "horse tranquilizers" after his best friend died to "prevent me from hurting myself," and that another psych actually told him, immediately after his friend died, "I know how you feel," and started trying to talk over him with his/her own impressions of a suicide survivor (his father had died of suicide, and his best friend had, at the time, just died of accidental self-inflicted death)

I think this turned him off of mental health treatment for a long time, and turned him further toward alcohol and some things that I will not mention here because I don't want to start rumors :)

That said, honestly, I can't blame him for that choice, since, as destructive as alcohol abuse and/or street drugs may be, if the other choice is a lifetime regimen of daily antipsychotics + antidepressants, I myself think that "self-medicating" the bad days is a better choice, if only that at least the "self-medicating" person is usually fully aware of the effects of the substances and understands that they aren't going to permanently fix the sadness or anger or whatever.

(That and hell, even alcohol, as devastating as it is to the brain, isn't as damaging as the antipsychotics can be AND its damage is much more readily recognized as alcohol and stopped rather than "you need more booze!!!". Same for most street drugs: if you burn out on ecstasy or cocaine, for example, it's recognized the drug is your problem, if you burn out the same way on antidepressants, you're just told to up the dose or switched to another one.)

At least he's got the advantage of money and distraction as well as having a creative outlet to pour his emotions into, where so many people have none of these. :(

I think the best thing we can do for creatives who are depressed/anxious is that: give them the ability, financially and otherwise, to express themselves and when needed, distract themselves. That's better than handing out pills, in my opinion.

Sally,
Very interesting site. Thank you.

One of the most helpful places I ever spent time in used an addiction model in depression tx. They did interventions with the more suicidal patients, in which the family members put paid to that faithful old lie "They'll be better off without me." People would come out of those meetings totally stunned. They never had a clue their loved ones wouldn't be relieved by their absence.

I have found it helpful to think of my depression as an addiction. It sure is familiar. It does get to feel like an old family retainer after a while. Now that I'm feeling better, thanks to my thyroid finally being treated, I'm finding it more and more plausible to believe that on my dark days I'm basically falling into a familiar routine. I have been pondering how I can rewrite my neural pathways so they don't lead straight to suicidal depression. There's a labyrinth behind my place of employment and I walk it on the days I work. It makes a nice, rearranging break in the day before going home. I often wonder if it isn't literally rewiring me as I walk it.

I'll be reading this site with interest. Thank you. Hope all's well with you. I always find your postings of interest.
Sherry

A.B. Curtiss has some interesting ideas on her website about a helpful way to view depression. It appears that she promotes a hyper-aggressive form of cognitive therapy in which sheer willpower is used to redirect one's depressive thoughts into healthier directions.

However, I think that many on this website will be unhappy with her statement that "Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain." (www.depressionisachoice.com/interview.html)

Many here would argue that that means that we have to disregard all of her other opinions.

Too bad.

Sherry,

Thanks for the compassion. Depression as addiction is an interesting idea. As in, while most addicts don't choose addiction, beating it something one must generally choose to do.

Dguller,

You are transferring your rigidity to the rest of us and I fear to your "patients." Just because one agrees with one facet of someone's thoughts, doesn't mean they must or indeed are likely to agree with every single idea the other person ever had. You demonstrated the same logical error in the Healey thread. Being tolerant of you is rarely easy but all of us here try. Please consider that it might be your perspective that is wrong when dealing with your "patients." Scary that you have patients.

Still, it looks like you didn't finish the paragraph where Curtiss alater states:

"Thoughts cause the chemically-based physiological reality of salivation and thoughts can uncause it. Thoughts cause the chemically-based physiological reality of depression and thoughts can uncause it." www.depressionisachoice.com/interview.html

We've gone round and round on this chicken egg matter before and others here have been so patient with you.

I like this bit from another article she has posted:

"Horwitz begins by stating boldly that many so-called mental disorders according to our current symptom-based system of classification, are not really mental disorders at all, but normal responses to social stress, relationship problems, work or other problems in living, or social deviance that may be in some cases, culturally supported."http://www.depressionisachoice.com/essays/creating.htm

guller,
Any reason you need to make the defensive (or is it offensive--maybe both) comment:
"Many here would argue that that means that we have to disregard all of her other opinions."

Some of us are actually grown up enough to sort out wheat from chaff, to figure out what fits our situation and what doesn't, to take what works for us and leave the rest.

Maybe you'll get there some day, too.

Oh, my day isn't complete without being indirectly insulted by dguller! Thanks, Sally, for putting my thoughts into words and clarifying what Curtiss is all about. I was impressed with Curtiss's website overall but think a better statement might be "depression manifests as a chemical imbalance" or something similar in order to counter mainstream psychiatry's ridiculous claim that mental illness arises biochemically spontaneously and thus has to be treated biochemically. And of course we don't have to agree 100% with a person in order to value that person's work! I happen not to agree with MindFreedom International on banning electroshock but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate and admire all their other fabulous work.

I am happy to see that the consensus on this website has always been not to reject the totality of someone's body of work if they hold some opinions that are false and/or despicable.

I'll keep that in mind the next time a clinician involved in some controversy is utilized as evidence to reject his entire body of work, and as ammunication to reject his entire profession in general.

Oh, and I only brought up Dr. Healy in response to truthman30's remarks about how monstrous and despicable anyone who supported ECT as a valid treatment must be, which contradicted his belief that Dr. Healy is a hero. It was duly noted how many of you rushed to correct his error and to set him straight about his inconsistency.

Again, I only posted the quote about chemical imbalances because it seemed to me that whenever a psychiatrist, for example, mentions mental illness being due to a chemical imbalance in the brain, they are heaped with scorn and ridicule here, their work is declared fraudulent in its entirety, they are declared a whore of the drug industry and imbued with personality defects galore. (Of course, not by everyone here.)

And yet, when someone that is liked here makes a similar statement, there is the absence of such a reaction, and all kinds of qualifiers are added to make her support of a chemical imbalance theory palatable (e.g. it is due to thoughts as antecedent conditions, and is not spontaneous, as if anyone thought the chemical imbalance occurred spontaneously!).

Anyway, that struck me as interesting.

For the record, I think the chemical imbalance theory as popularly promoted is likely wrong. An excellent critique of it that I recently read is the book "Blaming The Brain" (1998) by Eliot Valenstein, a neurophysiologist. He nicely goes over the history of psychotropic drug development, the role of drug companies and over-eager psychiatrists in promoting the theory in the face of contradictory evidence, the role of insurance companies and patient organizations, and so on.

Altogether, a great read that I highly recommend.

One more thing.

I didn't mention anyone in particular in my post.

Why did the people who responded think I was referring to them?

dguller said: "And yet, when someone that is liked here makes a similar statement, there is the absence of such a reaction, and all kinds of qualifiers are added to make her support of a chemical imbalance theory palatable (e.g. it is due to thoughts as antecedent conditions, and is not spontaneous, as if anyone thought the chemical imbalance occurred spontaneously!)."

Nobody added any qualifiers to her work. We didn't have to. Sally helpfully posted more of Curtiss's material to give some context. That one statement, standing alone, is just wrong.

And why are you incredulous that anybody might think chemical imbalances occur spontaneously? Every psychiatrist I've ever spoken to (and there have been dozens) believe brain chemicals screw up, bingo, you're bipolar, schizoaffective, whatever.

You know, dguller, your comments have some merit and there's definitely room for you on this website. Could you just try not to come off as so arrogant and patronizing, please?

By the way, your first two paragraphs in your longer post are completely contradictory. Was this a failed attempt at sarcasm or pointed commentary?

Francesca:

I appreciate your kind remarks welcoming me as potentially contributing something useful to this website. I will do my best not to be "so arrogant and patronizing", if that is how my posts are perceived. Rereading some of them, I can certainly see how I can come across that way sometimes. However, I am afraid that for some people, anything other than a wholehearted agreement with their viewpoint will be perceived as retraumatizing them by psychiatric arrogance.

Moving on, my first two paragraphs were intended to be examples of BOTH sarcasm AND pointed commentary. If my sarcasm failed, then I'll have to try harder next time. :)

Regarding spontaneous chemical imbalance, I have never heard or read a psychiatrist say that the alleged chemical imbalance was not preceded by any other causes and just happened out of the blue. Typically, some combination of an underlying vulnerability due to genetics and early childhood experiences, for example, and some biopsychosocial stressor, are postulated as the antecedent causes. The chemical imbalance was supposed to be part of the final neurobiological pathway that subsequently manifests the symptoms of mental illness. That's the theory anyway.

Anyway, if you're agreeing with some form of the chemical imbalance theory, with adequate caveats, then that is certainly surprising to me, because I thought that you rejected in its entirety the idea that mental illness is due to any kind of chemical imbalance in the brain. But, perhaps I just misunderstood your previous position on the matter, or confused you with someone else.

guller,
"Why did the people who responded think I was referring to them?"

I didn't. Just to set the record straight. I was talking about people in general at FS, as I thought you were.

As for your other comments, I guess you've never heard of the concept of context. The context you set with your attitude is one of contempt and arrogance. That's why few people are interested in cutting you any slack. You reap what you sow, doc, you reap what you sow.

well, it's obvious a fight is brewing in this thread so i am sadly going to close this thread now.