Alternatives

Bruce Holland Rogers nails the experience of being depressed in his essay “Alternatives” [July 2014]. I say this as someone who has survived more than six decades of severe clinical depression, medicated and not, with therapy and without — and also as someone who has planned and carried out a suicide attempt that would have succeeded if someone hadn’t found me by accident.

It is hard to describe the humiliation of waking up in a hospital after so much anguished planning and realizing that, to the list of my failings, I could add “failed suicide.” Recovery was a painful, embarrassing, messy process, and it was two years before I regained control over my life with medication and therapy.

I caution Rogers and others: if the medications you are taking to battle depression make you feel that your behaviors are “not you,” then you haven’t yet found the correct combination. When I was finally on the right drugs at the right dosages, I felt that I had become myself again, the functioning person I had once been. The drugs have not turned me into a happy man; they have simply cleared my head so that I can be happy.

The drugs I take could become less effective over time or prove to have terrible side effects or become unavailable (as in, no longer covered by my insurance), but at least I know what depression feels like, and I can recognize it if it comes back and treat it, or die trying.