Reading About Depression

I read Emmanuel Carrère's ‘There are no words for the horror’: the story of my madness in The Guardian, a memoir of his bipolar life, and found myself relating to certain passages. Relating as in having been there and thought this only happened to me.

That’s the hallmark of depression: you can’t believe that one day you’ll get better. Well-meaning friends say: “You’ll be fine, you’ll see.” But you only look at them with dismay and even start to resent them: they’re so wide of the mark. It’s so clear they haven’t got a clue. When you’re in a depression you think that you’ll never come out of it, that you won’t come out alive, that the only way out is suicide. If you don’t kill yourself, however, sooner or later you will come out of it, and then once you’re out of it you cross over into the camp of the well-meaning friends and can no longer imagine this state of intolerable and seemingly endless distress.

I had my telephonic counseling session today. I told the counselor about the negative cancer test. He  asked if I was happy with the news. I told him I might be happy but it does give me time to work on paying my debts. Writing this I see why in prison my moods did not wildly vary  - I assumed I would die out there. Then I found a purpose that kept me too busy to go down any rabbit holes.

...But what I still didn’t know during my first psychiatric consultations is that, in the definition of bipolar disorder, the pole opposite the dive into depression isn’t necessarily a state of spectacular euphoria and disinhibition that leads to social suicide and often to suicide itself, but just as frequently what psychiatrists call hypomania, which means in plain language that you act like a fool, but not to the same extent.

Played the fool? Me? Oh, yeah, in an epic way. I ought to be taken out to the woods and shot for being such a fool. 

You’re bipolar type 2: agitated without necessarily being euphoric, but sometimes also seductive, flirtatious, very sexual, outwardly very much alive, but inclined to make the type of decisions you regret the most, while being dead sure that they’re right and that you’ll never go back on them. Then after that you’re dead sure of the very opposite, you realise that you’ve done the worst thing possible, you try to fix it and do something even worse. You think one thing and then its opposite, you do one thing and then its opposite, in frightening succession. But the worst is that if you’re like me and are used to analysing yourself, once the diagnosis has been reached and the mood swings identified, you gain hindsight – only this hindsight is of little use. Or if it is, it’s just to see that no matter what you think, say or do, you can’t trust yourself because there are two of you in the same person, and those two are enemies.

I have never been diagnosed as bipolar. The prison psychologist thought I was not. But I did have the constant voices in my head, always arguing - that is until the most hateful, the most repelled by being alive finally beat down the wanting to have one more go at the war he called his life. He won because the police finally caught up with the events he had set in motion and he called it the hand of fate. He would have killed me except my wife told me one of her sons had threatened suicide and I had enough sense to stop looking for ways to die in pretrial detention. That was when I understood what I had done to myself. That was when I had what may have been a complete breakdown. 

Reading the whole tells me what I thankfully missed. All. I did was destroy my life and decide my future is waiting on my COPD to put me in the ground once and for all time.

Reading the article I see the lessons I have been trying to get across here: depression requires treatment.

Do read the whole of the article.

sch 5/26/22