Solomon

"At the end of August, I had an attack of kidney stones, an ailment that had visited me once before. I called my doctor, who promised to notify the hospital and to expedite my passage through the emergency room. When I got to the hospital, however, no one seemed to have received any notice. The pain of kidney stones is excruciating, and as I sat waiting, it was as though someone, having dipped my central nervous column in acid, was now peeling the nerves to their raw core. Although I described the pain I was in several times to several attendants, no one did anything. And then something seemed to snap in me. Standing in the middle of my cubicle in the New York Hospital emergency room, I began to scream.

They put a shot of morphine into my arm. The pain abated. Soon enough, it returned: When I left the hospital, I was afraid all the time. Either the pain or the painkillers had completely undermined my mind. I knew that the stones might still be moving around and that I could relapse. I was frightened of being alone. I went with a friend to my apartment, collected a few things, and moved out. It was a vagabond week; I migrated from friend to friend. These people mostly had to go to work during the day, and I would stay in their houses, avoiding the street, careful never to go too far from the phone. I was still taking prophylactic painkillers and I felt a little crazy...My father apologized for what I called his uncaring behavior and tried to explain that he had only meant to communicate his relief that I had a nonfatal disease. He said he had believed my relative stoicism on the phone. I entered a hysteria of which I cannot now make any sense. I refused to speak to him or to tell him where I had gone. From time to time, I would call and leave a message on his machine: “I hate you and I wish you were dead” was how they usually began. Sleeping pills got me through the nights. I had one small relapse and went back up to the hospital; it was nothing serious, but it scared me to death. In retrospect, I can say that that was the week I went bananas'.

I began eating irregularly because I seldom felt hungry. My analyst said that it was still depression, and I felt tired of that word and tired of the analyst. I said that I was not crazy but was afraid I could become crazy and did she think I was going to end up on antidepressants, and she told me that avoiding medication was courageous and that we could work everything through. That conversation was the last one I initiated; those were my last feelings for a long time.

Major depression has a number of defining factors—mostly having to do with withdrawal, though agitated or atypical depression may have an intense negativity rather than a flattened passivity—and is usually fairly easy to recognize; it deranges sleep, appetites, and energy. It tends to increase sensitivity to rejection...the rules all change. Everything that had been written in English is now in Chinese; everything that went fast is now slow; sleep is for clarity while wakefulness is a sequence of unconnected, senseless images. Your senses slowly abandon you in depression''. 

Andrew Solomon