If you are considering medical treatment for depression I hope that my experience can help you make a decision that could reverse the downward spiral of your life. Bear in mind that relief does not come without a costly trade-off. Think of this as a public service announcement.
In the spring of 1984, my sullen outlook began to ferment. My melodramatic mood swings strained every personal relationship and eventually cost me a priceless friend and soul mate. I owe a great deal to those who have stuck by me through the tempest.
Last summer, several close friends insisted that I investigate anti-depressants. My previous exposure to mood-altering medication was nothing short of terrifying. Seven years ago my former primary care physician wanted me to experiment with Prozac. Although I only took four doses, the side effects were immediate and horrific; the drug radically reduced or eliminated the possibility of orgasm. I never recovered fully from exposure to this earlier version of the popular panacea. Even today, orgasms can be maddeningly elusive.
With the assistance of a competent, supportive doctor, I had to conquer my fears and go through the drug trials to find the proper compromise between the alleviation of symptoms and the manifestation of side effects. After a number of brief periods with various drugs that either didn't work or left me unable to ejaculate, I finally found some relief with Wellbutrin. Initial side effects included headaches, mild nausea, and last but not least, delayed orgasm. As if the standard sexual dysfunction were not bad enough, another noteworthy drawback to this medication, which lasts for months, is a sensation that bladder control is deteriorating.
If you boys out there go to your doctors for chemical treatment of depression, brace yourself for the panic that will flutter under your ribcage when you are denied access to ecstasy. You are encouraged but misled by a healthy erection; thirty minutes later you are still leading yourself in circles around the entire point of your masturbatory ritual. If the primitive negotiator inside could only have one more release, the only release, this release in your hand but still just...out...of reach, you could silence the crazed, desperate single-mindedness keeping you awake at 1:30 AM. You convince yourself that the sleep you are losing is sacrificed because you have something to prove. If you are unable to climax tonight, will you ever climax again? You find yourself coated in a light sweat, as you wander the aisles of K Mart wrestling with the urge to buy the electric massager you think you need to literally shake the orgasms out of your uncooperative anatomy. Nothing helps, regardless of the cost or novelty; the required connections appear to be permanently severed.
As of last summer, I became one of the lucky ones. With the freedom of the Internet as my guide, I had the good fortune to stumble across the process to rebuild the bridges to self-gratification. Just when I believed that I knew myself completely, I have found shocking new twists in my psyche that have, until now, slept quietly in the darkest, filthiest corners of my brain. This awareness has led me to a new hobby. In order to spare you the lurid details, you may read more about the orgasmic solution to my dilemma but only if you click here.
The other positive news is that Wellbutrin actually works. Our entire lives are one long complex series of illusions. You see red and I see red, but how do we know if the way you see red and the way I see red are the same experience. As long as each red experience is consistent within each individual, your red may be my blue. Every impulse from every sense stacks one illusion on top of another. The perceptions formulated from those collective illusions vary from individual to individual. My illusion of an elevated mood, as it compares to three decades filtered through a chronic depression, seems like a trip to DisneyWorld. The illusion of happiness and the illusion of the illusion of happiness, however, are not the same thing.
Not to minimize my escape from rage, despair, and hopelessness, but a more formidable challenge waits in the form of an insidious complacency. Any life changes that I must make in order to be genuinely happy now have no sense of urgency. Without motivation to fix problems I catch myself clinging to the safety of routine buffered by a false, pill-induced sense of well being.
Instead of assuming that the rest of my life would be spent waiting to die, I must now figure out how to live. Every response to every stimulus must be rethought. I'm sure that dozens of past acquaintances would have preferred to know the new mellower me, but at the time, mellow wasn't on the menu. How do you nurture satisfactory friendships when you are convinced that you have no future?
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