How Not to Cure Treatment-Resistant Depression

Turn 57. Draw the shades. Go back to bed.

Tuck the quilt tight under your chin. Cocoon yourself in thoughts of the many joys of your life. Feel sad.

Put a hand to your chest, where the sadness pools, and try to catch the drops of joy: two sons, now grown men; a husband who has loved you longer than he has not known you; friends who sometimes listen; the novel you’ve been working on for 10—no, wait, 11—years finally being published; sunlight poking through the edges. Feel your heart pulse in your fingertips. Tick, tick, tick.

Feel incredibly sad.

Get up and find your purse, your wallet, the zipper pouch, and pull out a carefully folded slip of paper with a phone number that your gynecologist gave you last year but you never called because this psychiatrist is not on your insurance plan, but now you desperately need a new plan. Thirty years of sporadically popping pills to try and stop the racing thoughts and erase the sadness, biofeedback and neuro-feedback, therapy and meditation, energy work, more therapy, more work. None of this worked.

New plan: Make an appointment with the expensive psychiatrist who does not accept your insurance and talk for 45 minutes. Tell him you’re tired of the work it takes to keep the depression at a functional level. Tell him about the wonderfulness of your life: your family, your novel, the sunshine. Cry. Tell him you are tired of working so damn hard, feeling so sad. Believe him when he says nobody should have to live this way. You don’t have to live this way.

Tick, tick.

Take the prescription for a pharmaceutical opiate that heroin addicts use because it’s better to be dependent than addicted, although you don’t understand the difference even though the doctor explained it to you. Twice.

Go to a pharmacy where they don’t know you because you have had so many prescriptions filled at the CVS close to your house. The pharmacist only gives you 25 pills instead of the full 30 prescribed, which seems more like an admonishment than a precaution against abuse, and tells you to come back in three weeks for the remaining five pills. Mark the exact date in your calendar.

Place a white speck, an eighth of the prescribed pill, under your tongue. Do this every day for four days and feel a little floaty, a little lighter. Try a quarter pill. Feel like you might float away. Your heart rate slows down. It’s rather nice.

Dream that you are in a room of pillows, sinking into the softness. You cannot get up. You cannot breathe. Sit up straight.

Grab your husband’s shoulder and shake him awake. Gasp for air while ordering him to take you to the emergency room—now. Remember the doctor’s warning: there’s a slight, very slight, chance of your chest tightening in your sleep, of not being able to get enough air into your lungs, but that rarely happens and only when the dosage is much higher and combined with alcohol. That won’t happen. Don’t worry. But now, it’s happening.

Go to the ER and breathe easier when the cardiogram, X-rays, and blood tests are normal. Diagnosis: panic attack. You’ve had panic attacks before and this felt more like a mini heart attack, but the tests all confirm you are perfectly normal—which is good, right?—so you go home.

Tap the pills into the toilet, watch the white specks evaporate in the bowl of frothy blue water. Flush. Think of how many times you’ve done this during the past 30 years. A kind of gentleness guides the sadness into a different space in your chest. Gather the sadness like a child who has touched a sticker bush because the small yellow flowers looked bright and shiny in the sunlight. She couldn’t resist plucking one. Just one.

Go through withdrawal for the next week: headaches, nausea, muscle weakness, lots of lying in bed. Think of all the joys of your life. Be grateful. Know this gratitude will last for a few months. It will alleviate the sadness.

Tick.

(Note: I wrote this post three years ago. Since then, I've had success micro-dosing other potentially addictive drugs for specific periods of time.)