I Am Not Depressed

As we sat down to dinner this evening I noticed Xavier was wearing an apron. “Why are you wearing that?” I asked. He mumbled something which I didn’t catch and then replied, quite unlike a four year old, with a heavy heart and a flat tone “I don’t want to wear this bloody apron.” My first thought and in fact my reply was, that is the correct use of the adjective, and I held onto my laughter, although I’m sure some escaped through my eyes. Since dinner we’ve consulted a thesaurus to find some other words that can be substituted in, with all the feeling and minus the offence. He’s particularly tickled by ‘blasted’ and ‘darn’ and we’ve agreed to mutually remind each other of the alternatives should we ever forget.

I’ve been reflecting a little on whether things are working out between me and Quetiapine (Seroquel, Ketipinor). It’s a tranquilising psychiatric medication used to manage psychosis by blocking the receptors in the brain that dopamine acts on. My tablets are designed to be slow release, giving me relatively steady blood levels of the medicine throughout the day. This is why it’s important I take them on an empty stomach; food would speed up its absorption into my bloodstream.

So first I’m just going to take the symptoms I’ve been experiencing through depression and examine each one in turn – noting how things are now, compared with how they have been in the recent past.

Anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found to be pleasurable, is what characterises depression the most. The numbness severs through everything, even my relationship with my wife and son, the two greatest joys in my life. The magical morning sunlight, my eager dogs, the sound of music on the radio; everything disappears into a blind spot. Now things are different, I can project the love and affection I have for my family, colours have come back into the world and everything around me is buzzing with life. I have a grasp on happiness again, although it is different to before – sort of a tethered happiness, not the vivid winged happiness I’ve known in the past. It is practical.

Feelings of grief and guilt, my two close companions during depression, keep me ruminating irrationally on past failures, conflicts and inadequacies leading me to a place of hopelessness and intense stress. This is when, combined with the anhedonia, life stops making sense and becomes something I stop fighting for – something I’m actually desperate to be relieved of. I’m grateful that these dark feelings have lifted and it has become easier to rationalise my thoughts and memories, and manage the internal stresses. Horrid thoughts still pop into my head and I get quite anxious, but they don’t imprison me as they did before; I am not the scratched record.

Psychomotor retardation is a slowing of thought and movement so that both can feel desperately heavy and cumbersome. Making simple decisions became difficult, as did other tasks that required a degree of concentration. I shuffled about, sloth like in darkened rooms, or more often than not – remained in my bed pinned down by my heavy limbs and the stress of my own debilitating thoughts. I slowed to the point of sleep – if fortune was kind enough to afford me the peace of sleep. I have to distinguish now between that feeling, which I’m glad to say has passed, and the sluggish feeling I experience because of the Quetiapine. Sure, I feel sleepy and physically tired a lot of the time and have brief bursts of activity and energy – but it isn’t the same as the depression.

So on balance my relationship with Quetiapine seems to be working out, except for the way it makes me feel physically. Now that my mind has returned to me I find it is keen to make plans and push on with work, but my body feels like it’s holding me back. This is a deep furrow for negative thinking to prosper and therefore something I continually need to keep in perspective. I must not let this physical slowness dishearten me – and I do have a knack for seeing the negatives. It has been interesting for me to get this all down on paper – things are more positive than I had realised. If Quetiapine is prepared to give me something of my energy back, then this relationship could well work out.