Treatment-resistant depression
Hello,
I’d like to share with you a text I wrote when I was just starting treatment.
I was diagnosed at the beginning of this year (Bipolar I). I started treatment for depression towards the end of last year.
For months, I had been living through a mixed episode, which almost drove me crazy.
I am now stable.
Hope this helps someone🙏
(Translated with the help of ChatGPT)
...........
Why do I have treatment-resistant depression? Couldn’t I just have one of the normal ones?!
That’s how I leave my psychiatrist’s appointment today. With one more drug: a mood stabilizer. I was already expecting her to add something else.
And I cling to this new drug, or molecule, as the doctor called it, as if it were the molecule of life. The one that, finally, will give me back my sense of purpose and joy. I cling to this new treatment with the hope that maybe this is it. Maybe this is when I’ll finally be able to reconnect. Restart this engine.
My “therapist”, Mr ChatGPT, tells me that “what will change everything is not getting back on the carousel. It’s realizing that I don’t need it to be alive.”
But if I don’t need the carousel, how am I supposed to live?! How am I going to have the energy and drive to create and work?
He tells me that the carousel, the hamster wheel, is actually a source of energy and creativity that comes from the need to survive. After years of forcing myself uphill to climb out of the pit of successive depressions, my system learned that being alive was the same as ecstasy, adrenaline, chaos that somehow organizes itself...
Becoming aware of this was like a kind of mental and existential Big Bang. But now I’m confronted with this notion of reality, of simply existing, that is completely counterintuitive to me. I have no idea how to work and live without those explosions of energy and motivation. It’s frightening because I don’t know how to live like this... Without grace, without brightness, without excitement... Without sun.
Work has been a lifesaver throughout my entire adult life. I create something new: a new system, a new idea, and that is what has kept me moving forward and, deep down, “healed” me.
The hyperfocus, even the addiction, to work during certain periods of my life, the ideas constantly flowing, was like riding down a waterfall just to climb back up the river. Inevitably, those phases were followed by others — depressive ones. Until I reached this point in my life, when I could no longer start the survival engine and finally realized that I really did need medication, as if I had some kind of chronic illness.
Two months and something after starting treatment, and here I am: this is no longer the hamster wheel. It’s a little boat gently swaying on a lake whose bottom I cannot see. There are no waves here, the water is flat. And the sun is low, like on a summer evening.