Because my parents were alcoholics, I was very opposed to the idea of medication.\u00a0 Even when I finally had a good experience of how an anti-depressant could work, I continued to try to get off it.\u00a0 Every time it was a disaster.\u00a0 My guiding spirits said \u201cmedication is neither good nor bad.\u00a0 Your life needs to be workable.\u201d\u00a0 I have finally accepted that I will probably have to take my current dose of 3 medications for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n
Before I got on medication, I was part of \u201cJourney Into Courage\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0 It was a tremendous boost for my emotional health.\u00a0 A project with a group of women, who I had come to love, telling our truth from the stage, was a wonderful healing experience.\u00a0 After touring for four years, Bess decided to make a documentary about how we created the performance piece and what it meant in our lives.\u00a0 The showing of the documentary was the end of our performances.\u00a0 I suddenly plunged into a bad depression.<\/p>\n (Here\u2019s where Spirit enters the story)\u00a0 I don\u2019t usually read the newspaper, but I had a copy of the section of some Vermont paper which had us right on the front.\u00a0 Needing to distract myself from how bad I felt, I started reading it all the way through.\u00a0 There was an Ann Landers column (or maybe it was Dear Abby) in which someone asked her to remind readers that National Depression Screening Day was coming up in October.\u00a0 I called the 800 number and was told that the nearest to me were in Concord NH and Norwich VT.\u00a0 I came to the designated place in Norwich, filled out a questionnaire \u2014\u00a0 I had a little trouble with things like \u201cHave your sleeping habits changed in the last six weeks?\u201d\u00a0 No, I\u2019ve always had trouble sleeping.\u00a0 But I filled it out, and went for my private session with a psychologist.\u00a0 I expected to be told \u201cWhat you have is moderate depression.\u00a0 You should probably try medication.\u201d\u00a0 What he actually said was \u201cYou\u2019re in our fourth category.\u00a0 You\u2019re in a severe depression.\u00a0 You should get on medication immediately.\u201d\u00a0 I was dumbfounded.\u00a0 I walked out thinking \u201cIf this is severe depression, I\u2019ve been severely depressed my whole life.\u201d\u00a0 That gave my self-esteem such a boost that I was undepressed for a month.\u00a0 But then I began to go downhill.\u00a0 My therapist in Montpelier was a psychologist, but she asked around and gave me the name of someone at Dartmouth-Hitchcock.<\/p>\n I went to that psychiatrist and she prescribed Paxil.\u00a0 I started taking it but began to be more and more terrified.\u00a0 When I asked the doctor, she said \u201cIt will get better.\u201d\u00a0 But it didn\u2019t.\u00a0 I was experiencing terror through the roof.\u00a0 On the fifth day I started hallucinating in the grocery store.\u00a0 So I quit taking it.\u00a0 Some friends who heard me on the phone with the doctor said I didn\u2019t sound scared.\u00a0 Well of course I was reporting on my condition from my objective scientist \u2014 sort of like the test pilot who\u2019s saying altitude such and such, speed such and such, in a calm voice while his plane is plummeting toward the ground.\u00a0 That awful experience led to the summer from hell in 1996<\/a>.\u00a0 I was prescribed a tranquillizer, but then of course became depressed again.<\/p>\n My friend Eleanor, who is an expert in emotional problems, said she thought my therapist in Montpelier wasn\u2019t able to\u00a0 help me, and she recommended I see Dr. Cynthia Rankin, a specialist in mood disorders.\u00a0 The first day I walked into Dr. Rankin\u2019s office, she took one look at me and said \u201cI want you on medication IMMEDIATELY.\u201d\u00a0 She thought I was a bit too \u201ctender\u201d for her usual psychiatrist, so she found Char for me.\u00a0 Char was a Nurse Practitioner who specialized in getting women on the right antidepressant.\u00a0 Over the last year I had tried Zoloft, but it just put me to sleep.\u00a0 I tried something else and realized I was too scared to take it for five days.\u00a0 I thought \u201csomeone\u2019s going to have to talk to me for the first three weeks or I\u2019ll never be able to get on anything.\u201d\u00a0 God bless Char, she did talk to me on the phone everyday for the first three weeks.\u00a0 When I told her about the Paxil episode, she said \u201cYou wanted to be un-depressed so badly you kept on taking it, even though it was making you so terrified.\u201d\u00a0 What a relief.\u00a0 Most people asked why I hadn\u2019t stopped taking it sooner.\u00a0 She put me on Imipramine, she said it was the \u201cgold standard\u201d that it had been around so long they knew all about it. I think it took seven weeks before I started to feel better.\u00a0 But when I really began to feel better, I was amazed.\u00a0 Life was so EASY.\u00a0 I had never felt like this before.<\/p>\n Because I had stopped typing my journal into the computer in 1995, that time in my life wasn\u2019t available.\u00a0 At one point I decided to read through the hand-written journals.\u00a0 I was blown away to find that the doctor at Dartmouth-Hitchcock had diagnosed me as \u201cPost-traumatic Stress before the age of three.\u201d\u00a0 At the time I didn\u2019t believe her.\u00a0 Though my parents were alcoholic, they had never been violent.\u00a0 It was much later that I began to understand the nature of trauma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Because my parents were alcoholics, I was very opposed to the idea of medication.\u00a0 Even when I finally had a good experience of how an anti-depressant could work, I continued to try to get off it.\u00a0 Every time it was … Continue reading