Jaded

At one point I thought that the best a man can do with his life is to help others. Alleviate their burden, their pain, their entrapment or oppression. I guess maybe I still to believe that, but today as I walked up the sidewalk on a street in a city in a country with a culture that disgusts me with her arrogance and ignorance. The arrogance of modernity. I had been riding the bus, going over a conversation I'd had with my psychologist about "anti-depressants" and considering that he called me "noncompliant" with my medications (in refusing increases; explaining that I'm about to stop taking them after 60 days of torment in side effects: trembling, random crying, anxiety, sleeplessness and no improvement in mood or anxiety).

The truth is, no one every measured my seratonin levels, and there was never any other assessment that I should need an SSRI than a doctor wrote among other things "NOS Mood Disorder" when I was perfunctorially ushered through my clinical presentation to suit his American DSM-oriented clinical diagnoses. No one has ever tested my seratonin levels, my norepinephrine levels, dopamine levels because it is not, to my knowledge, a common practice -- if even practical or possible in a non-invasive test.  I speculate that these drugs are prescribed en masse to patients reporting symptoms that are, in my view, a part of human experience common, natural, and a part of modern life even if not pleasant.  The side effects of citalopram are worse than living with the diagnosis.  Don't get me wrong, some tonics and medicines work and work well, but the one-size-fits-most anti-depressant prescription for anxiety, depression, premature ejaculation, and whatever else is not only unscientific but wrong.

I thought to myself that in the future they'll look back and consider the widespread prescription and consumption of compounds to manipulate monoamine (seratonin, norepinephrine, dopamine) levels, endorsed by the FDA, and promoted by the pharmaceutical and parallel medicine industries, as perversely absurd, horrendous and ignorant. Psych hospitals and the military contributed to the formatting and content of the premier DSM in 1952, and "depression" first appeared as a diagnosis as a "mood disorder" in the 1980 DSM-III.  In the future, they will read about us with amazement and a cringe.

When we learned to control electricity (modern man's fire), we tried sending watts through brains.  Hey, it did -something- at least.  "You have an excess of black bile, sir.  Melancholia.  I recommend bleeding, blistering, emesis and diarrheation, and if you don't feel better after any of those treatments we'll look into some trepanation."  The 1940s and 1950s had doctors performing tens of thousands of leukotomies (lobotomies) until Thorazine came around and, in relative terms, was an improvement.  These are extremes, I'm aware, and aren't directly related to treatments for modern DSM mood disorder depression forms.  What is absolutely true, though, is that medicine is a practice, an art, and the trends in medicine are guided by trial and error.

After World War II, millions could have been clinically diagnosed as depressed.  Should they all have been given aripiprazole, citalopram, quetiapine, fluoxetine?  No.  Am I "noncompliant"?  Yes.  Am I wrong?  You can't convince me so without more data.  It isn't a problem to me.  In fact, the medicines aren't providing me with any solution, and I could say they're presenting me with problems instead.

As I walked up the sidewalk I reminded myself that most men think of their lives, their opinions, their values in absolutes.  There isn't a regard for what man is doing as a species, as a collective; what a man is a part of in terms of a country, a political party, an ethos, a culture in the time frame of thousands upon tens of thousands isn't regarded when he reads the newspaper or talks to his fellows.  I am "the consummate outsider" and I just can't manage to feel a part of something here and now.  My oppressor, my adversary, the personification for bad to me is, unlike many of my compatriots, my own people.  If not Americans, because there are much more vile cultures that are more or equally as ignorant and arrogant as Americans, then modern man.

The redux of my internal dialogue on my walk back from the bus was that sadly I should do what will provide me the most comfort.  Success, happiness, can be manufactured perhaps in providing the finest textiles, dining, living quarters, and cultivating spiritual experience for myself to suit myself.  I'm unsure if I need to satisfy some instinct to reproduce, beyond sating a sexual apetitite as it comes and goes.  If that is a necessity, or a necessary compromise, then the same happiness must then be manufactured for my family, those in my care.  I'm unsure about that, and it's not so important.

I remember being 20 and realizing that contrast was real in life.  Being homeless and cold, dirty and hungry made me see that having a modest job, room to rent, shower, soap, and a sandwich a day were beautiful -- more beautiful than seeing the greatest of man's monuments, the most profound novel, the most moving cinematic experience.  Contrast is real.  Coming in from the cold and wet to sit by a fire after a shower and clean, dry, fitting clothing, diving into cool water in oppressive heat, these reliefs are happiness.  If not, then I don't know what happiness is.  It makes life seem rather cheap, and that is scary I guess.  It's problematic for me because I don't see the point in monkeying around for these creature comforts unless I'm subject to living without them.  Why play the game at all?  Sleep or death is not painful, and if the experience of pain outweighs, or exceeds the reliefs -- and it does for me -- life itself seems a losing game.

So, by the time I got to my door I decided that I had to believe that some divinity, some great author will provide the relief again in measure for the pain, that there is a reason beyond the material and monkey, and that I will get up a play even if I don't think there is a way to win.  My greater grief is in feeling alone, being regarded as sick in my thinking because I don't agree or am unsure of the things in life that everyone else speaks so surely of.  They kill for these beliefs, or kill on the belief that others beliefs are true.  It's confusing, and I get confused, and I wish I met someone else who was confused.  Then, perhaps I would feel a little less alone, a little less depressed, a little less anxious.