Last Word: Depression is a Medical Illness Which Can Kill You. It Almost Killed Me

I face a brick wall. It is two inches from my nose. I cannot see around it. I cannot see over it. My life has stopped.

While I have scaled many obstacles in my life, confidence and strength have deserted me. Thinking is difficult. And I am so weary. Sleeping twelve hours a day does nothing to alleviate this. As a younger man, I had always been able to fight off these feelings. Yet in my late 40s, the emotional strength to do this has vanished.

I desperately try to recapture that sense of optimism which I used to break through similar walls in the past. But I cannot. Why? Because I am depressed. Clinically depressed.

This isn’t the “blues.” I’m not feeling “down.” This is medical depression — a disease of the body. Not an illness of the spirit. It saps my strength. I resign my position as a bigshot corporate consultant.  All I have the strength to do is stay in my apartment and struggle with the storm waves of unrelenting despair.

Often I think: if life hurts this much, why not end it permanently? Suicide begins to seem a rational option. Looking back, I can remember the very worst day, the absolute bottom:

I have gone into the kitchen to try and do something productive. In this case, I attempt to organize a dozen bottles of wine on a high shelf.  One bottle slips from my hand and shatters on the floor. Red wine. A large, dark pool stains the white tile of the kitchen floor. It was a calamity. What to do?  The solution is beyond my grasp.

Me. A man who has had a successful life, now living in a beautiful apartment I had bought in Northwest. Me. A senior vice president of a huge bank by the time I was thirty-eight. Me, a consultant who had sat in boardrooms in New York and  advised  banks.

I sink to the floor and weep for what seems an hour. This can’t go on. If it does, I will kill myself.  I consult a psychologist. After a few months he insists I consult a psycho-pharmacologist. This is a psychiatrist who is a medical doctor and only treats depression with medication. Finding the right “drug cocktail” is both an art and a science. He is good at this. I begin taking the pills.

Over the next months I start to feel better. Better than I can remember feeling since I was a kid, before anxiety and depression periodically descended on me. The pharmaceuticals save my life because constant depression is a medical illness which must be treated by a physician.

No longer do I have the terrifying mood swings which had disrupted my life. Despair is now held in check. My mood and my life have become stable. This gives me the energy to   re-write a novel I first wrote as a younger man. I achieve my life’s dream: my novel is published in hardback by a major New York publisher.

On the title page of my novel I give to my psychopharmacologist, I write: “to the genius who created the drug cocktail which got me off the floor and allowed me to rediscover the poet within, which I thought was gone forever.”