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All they really need is Jesus, not some drug
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I hope, very strongly, that no one in your most precious circle of family and friends ever is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Your advice may, unfortunately, hasten their death.

I can say, completely and with equivocation, my mother would be dead if she were NOT taking the drugs her psychiatrist prescribes.

Unfortunately, as in so many situations, the smallest number of cases make up the overwhelming majority of news. This is the squeaky wheel getting the grease. For each whacked out person on meds who does something to get him or herself into the news, there are hundreds, if not thousands of people who are able to continue living productive lives BECAUSE of the meds.

And no, I don’t work for the pharmaceutical industry, but my mom is alive and mostly well because of the meds. I’m not sure Jesus would have been able to assist with her psychotic break the last couple of times she went off her meds. JMO.

dmz: You are so right. Those who scoff at pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatric disorders have no idea what depressive disorders are really like.

All: I am a diagnosed depressive (Major Depressive Disorder, aka Chronic Depression). My problem is not spiritual, as I am quite happy as a Catholic; in fact, I’m a happy person, period. I can be happy because my brain chemistry is something close to normal when I’m on the stuff. I “have Jesus”, and yet I still have to take Paxil.

Before I started taking Paxil, I was incapable of normal, appropriate emotional responses. I had three emotional gears: Ecstatic (and sociopathic), Morbid (and near-comatose), and Numb. I lived for almost forty years without drug therapy, and I never killed or raped anybody during that time, thank God, but you could ask my wife about what I was like when the Fog came down. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of during those years, and hurt myself and others in ways most people cannot imagine. I was cruel, amoral, and out of control. I hated myself and felt that there was no point to anything. Only the the concern of my loved ones, the prayers of the saints, and the Divine Mercy kept me from ending up in jail or dead.

Now? I can live a normal life, and it’s because a medical doctor prescribed a drug that keeps the Fog at bay. Paxil does not make a person happy; it simply enables some people to be happy when it’s normal to be happy, and to be sad at appropriate times instead of suicidal. Critics can call it witch doctoring, placebo effect, or whatever they like; I call Paxil a mercy, and am glad that I lived long enough to see a day when drug therapy for clinical depressive disorders is available. My mother and her late mother had depression as well — it’s thought to be a congenital disease. My grandmother’s only therapy was extreme holy-roller Christianity; she was a sharecropper’s wife raising eleven children in Mississippi during the Great Depression, and the only Jesus she could believe in during her down cycles was the Wild-Eyed Crazy Jesus, like something out of a Flannery O’Connor story. As for my poor mom, all they could do for her in the late 1960s/early 1970s was run a few zillion volts through her head and prop her up with tranks. The fact that my grandmother was a great lady (and my mom still is) without having had recourse to the Happy Pills is a testament to their strength of character and the sustaining power of the Great Comforter.

Today, we nutjobs have options, thank God. All I have to do is take a couple of little pills every day and I can live a normal, happy life. If some people think that taking Paxil makes me weak or deluded, then that’s fine with me. I’m nobody’s victim and deserve no special consideration due to my scrambled brain. All I ask is that people know what they are talking about before they go spouting off their opinion.

Thanks for writing that post, dmz. It meant a lot.