Desperately Seeking: A Cure For Depression

UNHAPPINESS, depression, "low mood" (as psychiatrists like to noncommittally describe it, when shying away from diagnosis) ~ all this is half the story of my life.

I say half the story, because depression tends to be an episodic thing.

In recent years, however, it has been pretty much constant.

Drug addiction, of course, must be a major factor in this. I realize the drugs have boxed me in. i want to break free ~ but cannot. (This is what addiction is: not just having a habit, but being unable to break it.)

My life, if you can call it that, is barely an existence, played out amongst the accumulated flotsam of years of near-inactivity.

Heroin makes me feel slightly better. From the very start my heroin use was self-medication for pain, physical, mental and spiritual. for a while it appeared to be working very well. My confidence went up. Mood swings and depression seemed a thing of the past. I noticed very early on, though, that heroin tends to block out natural happiness better than it does sadness. (How typical.)

But heroin use and the achievement of life goals make uneasy bedfellows. Heroin dulls ambition and tends to lead to inactivity. When I gave up constantly raising money to feed the habit and relied instead on methadone, a gaping hole was left in my life. Despite all my best intentions I have not been able to fill it.

My mental health was already shaky when I was living with a woman I met on the street who became a good friend, but frankly had clinically paranoid traits that did my own stability no good at all.

My only way of escaping her was to run away and live, not literally on the streets, but in an abandoned industrial building that had originally been co-squatted by my begging friends. Now it was empty. Just me and thousands of echoey square feet and rats and pigeons for company. the sound effects when it rained were amazing. it was like Fingal's Cave.



At night, ferrals cats and foxes ventured into the building. I once woke up and left the stockcupboard I was sleeping in to find a man I had never met before smoking heroin in my hall!

It wasn't even a case of no locks on the doors, which were heavily barred and boarded inside and out, but one window (thankfully not visible from the street and hidden behind thick bushes) was wide open to anyone curious and persistent enough who wished to come in.

So apart from the wild animals and uninvited junkies, at nights I started seeing weird visions and ghosts. I believed these were "spiritual emanations". When I moved into emergency bed & breakfast hostel accommodation shared with crackheads I found myself smoking "white"more and more often and my mental health plunged into paranoid psychosis. i believed the neighbours were watching me on TV via hidden cameras and laughing. I heard gunmen outside my door waiting for me to fall asleep so they could rob my stash. i saw sinister faces in my crumpled clothes that were scattered everywhere.

I managed to reduce the crack to once a week and the paranoia receded, but I was still depressed with constant suicidal "ideation" and no will to live at all. I didn't really want to kill myself, what I really wanted was an accident (or an overdose, though with my enormous opiate tolerance there seemed fat chance of that) ~ or merely to curl up and die.

The last time I tried an antidepressant (mirtazapine (Zispin/Remeron) I became agitated and so "high" that the last time I stayed awake for four days on end. Trotting up the road in the early hours, I knew which was my house because it emanated lightning. After a week of this "improvement" I came crashing down lower than I had been in a very long time.

I felt sick, physically and mentally. Alcohol made me feel better, so I attributed the sickness to DTs. I had sinister hallucinations. One day, a dead body appeared in the bathroom mirror. I was convinced that in a Frankensteinian way it was "alive" and about to open its eyes. When I glanced away it was still there when I looked back. It stayed there for five minutes, totally doing my head in.

Physically I was so weak and shaky I had to hold on to the walls. I got thrown out of a shop for being "drunk" ~} when actually the alcohol I was trying to buy, as I said, was the only thing that cut through the horrible haze that was drowning me.

Mentally I hit such rock bottom I couldn't handle the thought of polluting myself with heroin a single day more. When I did score a £10 bag, I opened it and stared at it for the best part of two hours, without the will to use any more.

The crisis went on for a month, until my druggieworker pointed out it was the pills making me ill. Unbelievably I hadn't considered this, and didn't realize that in unusual cases, antidepressants can increase depression, morbidly so, in sensitive individuals.

So I stopped taking the mirtazapine and felt better ~} though not 100% well ~ within days. The depression went on, though in a less extreme form.

A full year ago I decided I needed a proper assessment and diagnosis of whatever "condition" plagues me. At best I might actually commence a programme of recovery. At worst, it might at least mark a new start. I have had trouble with antidepressants before, but shied away from confessing the symptoms, that seemed a little too "bipolar" in flavour for comfort.

Personally, I think I am just one of those people who is over- rather than under-sensitive to such medication. But what the doctor might make of my odd experiences, I dread to imagine.

In the second half of last year I thought I was getting better. Then there was all the hassle of troublemakers moving in next door. I started waking in the early hours feeling very peeved indeed. The troublemakers moved out but the mood got no better. So I am "clinically" depressed again.

The difference this time is that I am determined to clamber out of this state. I just don't know how to.

My council tax situation reached a point where I it HAD to be sorted to keep bailiffs from the door. I have found myself using and drinking more. On methadone without gear I feel so enervated It can take hours simply to muster up the will to push myself into the shower. And I tell myself I absolutely have to do this. I was so filthy and unkempt before, I am sure there are rotting haystacks more hygeinic than I was.

So I go through life on a mixture of autopilot and exhausted trudging. My sleep is all over the place. I cannot bear the thought of antidepressants that might literally drive me crazy.

I am in counselling ~} though I missed the last two sessions. I just could not face going.

I am seeing the nutnut nurse every week now.

I have an appointment with the headshrinker in two weeks' time. What on earth he will make of the mental mess that is my life, I dread to think...

I console myself that there are far worse cases out there than mine. Most of those people, though, tend to be ravingly psychotic and have the dubious luxury of not knowing they are ill.

I am going back to NA meetings. Narcotics Anonymous appeals because it is by addicts for addicts. Nobody is telling you what to do. They just work the programme the same as everyone else.

I decided I have to stop drinking alcohol and cut out heroin altogether. I just wish something better than methadone could be available. Many addicts say they feel flat and dull on the "juice". I just want to curl up and die. If a medication leaves you feeling that bad then surely some alternative must be available. If private doctors can prescribe time release morphine pills that are less toxic and less addictive than methadone (simple fact) ~ what on earth is stopping the NHS?

So the rudiments of a programme are already in place.

But why can't I get a grip on my own mood? Why the constant irritation, sulkiness and brooding?

I break out of it. I do things. But it comes back and wallops me. Every time.

What else can I do?

I used to assume my methadone lows were "I want gear" sulks. It was actually the mental health nurse who pointed out this is probably the underlying depression making manifest. I am starting to think she might be right.

One consolation of all this depression ~ I don't usually lose my ability to write. (So long as I can muster volition to put pen to paper.) This is how I managed to keep a blog going so long. This is why I would like to pursue a literary career. If only I could make a living by writing I could get off the nasty state benefits that are as much a trap as a help.

All in all I just don't know what to do except what I'm doing already.

(Minus the using.)

My best hope for recovery seems to be the NA programme. this is so rigorous I am sure lots of "normal" people who work all week and hit the pubs and bars each weekend would have trouble sticking to a programme of total abstinence. That means no illicit drugs... not even spliffs (no problem for me: I'm hardly tempted by a herbal cigarette that brings on a cross between alzheimers and paranoid schizophrenia ~ complete with the "voices" within five tokes) ... and no drinking either.

NA say NO DRUGS AT ALL. But only "just for today"...

The logical solution to my problems would appear to be: run away from all the places I've used and spend a long time in isolation in deep countryside. In a way this is most appealing. But it's the complete opposite of the NA way. If I can get clean and stay clean in the same places I once used in ~ then I know I've really done it.

What puts me off rehab is that all you learn and all you do is in a great comfy bubble. Then you're out, full of these ideas, back in the same nasty wide world. Statistically, most people relapse. It's no coinicidence that so many rehab facilities in Britain are dotted along the South Coast... and that the south coast has the biggest heroin problem in Britain.

Nothing, no level of shame or other people's disappointment has ever stopped me using in the past: so why would it stop me again? No. I feel I gotta tackle this from deep down and out. And rehab is a business that keeps people in work. Drug businesses, I have noticed, breed complacency and one size fits all type programmes. That's why I'm saying I will make my own programme. The NA programme might well be part of that programme. But my programme will be my OWN.

How on earth I am going to do any of this clean thing I have no idea. I feel so dreadful most days without gear it's about all I can do to go through the most rudimentary motions of living. Let alone running to and from NA meets across London.

But there we go: sufficient for the day are the cares thereof.

Just for today.

God grant me the Serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the Courage to change the things I can ~
and the Wisdom to know the difference.