HAPPY PILLS: LIVING WITH THE GREAT DEPRESSION

 "...a double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible...."

David Foster Wallace on chronic depression

I was raised by parents who believed that the only real depression was The Great Depression. So they refused to believe it when I was diagnosed in my mid-20s as being a suicidal manic-depressive and hospitalized for several

months in the late 1960s. Before that there was a breakdown and I ended up in the emergency room. Even though I was a man who had not lived at home for several years, someone called my mother and she came to the hospital after midnight with my little brother John in tow. John was 10 or 11 years old. More than 40 years later he vividly remembered seeing me in a hospital bed, shot full of Demerol and unable to stop weeping. We were there all night. Why was he there? Who the hell knows? What was my mother thinking? What did he think? In one of my final telephone chats with John a couple of years ago (within a few days he died in a motorcycle accident) I asked about that night. "It freaked me out. You were my big brother." What did he think was going on? Why was I there? "You were addicted to drugs. Mom said you were addicted to drugs." And if anyone else asked? "They said you were addicted to drugs."

I was not ever addicted to drugs. 

I am sure the way my parents saw it drug addiction was preferable to mental illness, easier to explain, especially in those days. Drug addiction was a cause and effect problem. You take drugs, you become addicted, you go to the hospital and come out cured. If the cure doesn't work you can do it again. Easy to understand. Logical. And what with all the hippies and pot and LSD and long hair and God knows what else around in those days, no wonder. Drug addiction was easy.

But mental illness was difficult. It was a what-if problem. What if manic-depression was a cause and effect problem too? Even worse, what if they were the cause and I was the effect? I know that was their fear. I know it is what my mother feared most. She would never cooperate with my doctors because she was sure they would pin my problems on her. "They were just looking for someone to blame," she said. And while my parents were to blame for lots of things (just like all parents are), my manic-depression was not one of them. It had a mysterious cause and a disturbing effect. That was the trouble. They wouldn't - or couldn't - see it that way. Manic-depression? Oh, come on. What does that even mean? Who needs a hospital? Or a psychiatrist? Their cure for it was easy: "Get over it." They didn't understand that I couldn't simply get over it. I wanted to. I tried. I really tried and I had been trying for a long time. "Try harder." That's what they said. I wanted to, but I couldn't. Those months in the hospital saved my life. When I told them that, their answer was: "From what?" 

When they said that I realized I always would be a man they refused to know. So I went away to become a man they couldn't know. And I did. I am sure they were puzzled about why I went so far away and stayed so long. It's how I saved myself. But I never told them that. Why would I?

I was born into the wrong family. At least it was the wrong family for a diagnosed manic-depressive (bipolar these days). But it wasn't just me. When I was in the first grade my father spent most of a year unemployed and lying on the sofa in the living room of our duplex. He was there when I left for school (first grade). He was there when I came home. Luckily the school was directly across the street. When I told him years later that depression sometimes gets between a person and doing anything at all and that maybe that was what was going on that year on the sofa, he said he never had been depressed in his life. My mother insisted she never had either, even as she struggled through the thick, heavy muddle of her life. Both of them came from families laced with misery and suicide, alcoholism and anger, people pretending they were strong even they weren't, refusing the possibility of help, pretending they could try harder and get over it. Always pretending.

For a while I thought that might change.

My mother died in 2006. A couple of years before that she had surgery to remove a benign tumor that was wrapping around her optic nerve and threatening to blind her. Either she could not stand the thought of blindness or she wanted to die and decided to try suicide by surgeon. Or some of both. She went ahead with it. She survived and did not go blind. However a stroke in the recovery room left her comatose, physically incapacitated and nearly unable to speak for the remainder of her life. It also left her totally dependent on my father. It was the worst possible outcome she could have imagined. 

He looked after her from the day she went home from the hospital. Most people believe he lovingly cared for her in those final couple of years. I believe he had her right where he wanted her. My father was a tyrant. He had good intentions. He always did. But well-intentioned tyranny is still tyranny. Care was not always something he did for her; sometimes it was something he did to her. He took control of her condition and her life. It started with the happy pills.
 
People who have brain surgery usually suffer from depression afterward. They are prescribed antidepressants to help them as they heal. I talked to my mother's brain surgeon about it when I visited her at the hospital after the surgery. I also cautioned him that the belief in my family was that there is no such thing as depression and that he would have to make sure she received the antidepressants. And that she took them. He assured me he would.

After she was home, I asked my father about them. He said he threw them away. "She wouldn't want any happy pills," he said. I tried to explain about brain surgery and depression. I tried to explain that there were no happy pills - "No such thing" - but antidepressants would help her feel better. He wasn't buying it. "I won't do that to her," he said.

"Do what?" I wanted to know. "Help her feel better? Help her get better?"

What did he say (after telling me it was none of my business)? "Not like that." There would be no antidepressants and there never would be the recovery - including speech - she should have made. There would be only the loving tyranny of his care for the rest of her life in a world where the only depression was The Great Depression, no happy pills were allowed and there was no escape.

They both are dead now, buried side by side in a church graveyard in North Carolina. My brother John, who lived nearly to the last day of his life believing I had been a drug addict, is there too. Whatever trauma he suffered from seeing his big brother weeping without stopping in that emergency room - and his troubled life was a traumatized life, often self-inflicted - is reduced to ashes and sharing my mother's grave. I love them all. But there are times I wish I - the living medicated manic-depressive they lost the chance to know - could go and stand over them and shout at the top of my voice. "I exist! Depression exists! Happy pills do not!" But wouldn't it be wonderful if they did? I would happily become an addict. I know I am not the only one.

I am still here.