As I came into my teenage years I was eaten alive by depression. At the time I thought my issue was that life as a teenager just sucked. And it pretty much did for me. I didn’t understand that the chemistry of my brain was at war with itself. There were too many other factors at which I could point a rational finger. Home life. High school life. Girlfriend troubles. Uncertainty about what I wanted to do for a career. Then I was 21 years old with a baby on the way and no job. Then I was 23 years old and divorced while trying to eat and stay current on child support at the same time.

I’d say that I was dealt a difficult hand, but I know that my life is the sum of the decisions I make. For a while there, I was doubling down on bad decision after bad decision. I was goaded into marrying a woman that I didn’t really know. I didn’t push back against her fixation to have a baby we could not support. Dumb and dumber.

In my mid-to-late 20s, the “clinical” fell away from my clinical depression, as it often does as we get older. You can’t completely shake it, but you can outgrow near-constant suicidal thoughts. The brain stabilizes.

About that time I also tried a new anti-depressant called Paxil at the urging of my doctor. Holy shit! The doctor told me it would take two weeks to work but it only took three days before the fog lifted. Do you know the Seinfeld joke about how when your ear suddenly pops it’s a gift from God? “You thought you could hear fine and then Pop! Now you can hear a little better!” That was Paxil. My brain cleared so suddenly and dramatically that it illustrated in no uncertain terms how fucked up I had been; I could quantify the friction that depression adds to daily life to make things X% more difficult. Under the spell of Paxil I actually wanted to go to bed at 10 p.m. I woke up instantly at 7 a.m., rested and with clarity. I focused better at work.

It was a fucking miracle.

Then the headache started and it did not stop. Four months later I was near tears at the pain throbbing in the top of my skull every waking minute. I stopped taking Paxil and two months later the headache was gone. Of course, depression was back. Once again, I absorbed it. It was a set of leg weights I never took off. Just the way things are.

Last February I talked to my doc about my insomnia. I begged him for something that could keep me down at night when a third of a bottle of Scotch and two sleeping pills failed me. He suggested that maybe we try an anti-depressant instead.

“I tried that. It gave me a migraine that made me want to cut off my own head.”

“You tried what?” he asked.

“Paxil.”

“Dude.” Doc Jennings blinked at me. “They haven’t even manufactured Paxil for ten years. There’s a shitload of other anti-depressants on the market. We just have to find the one that works for you.”

He wrote me a prescription. Then a different prescription. Then a different prescription. Then a different prescription. Every medication either didn’t work or had side effects that were worse than depression. The experiment ended with a botched withdrawal from Celexa when I was in a cabin in the woods by myself with a gun and some really dark, dark thoughts. That was a terrifying ordeal.

Once again I was back to where I started. “Live with it.”

My Beautiful Wife works for a psychiatric hospital. She attends a lot of trade shows and has to go to a lot of rubber chicken dinners where doctors and pharma reps are the keynote speaker.

She was at a symposium where a pharma rep presented a brand new anti-depressant to the physicians. Brintellix. “Brintellix,” the pharma rep said, “has greater effectiveness against symptoms of depression and considerably fewer side effects. There’s only one problem. We’re not sure how it works.”

The doctors laughed.

“No,” said the rep. “I’m not kidding. We really don’t understand how it works. It just does.”

At the urging of MBW, I made an appointment and asked my doctor for a Brintellix prescription.

He flinched. “Who told you about Brintellix?”

“My wife. She works in mental health.”

“Oh yeah,” said Doc Jennings. “Okay. You freaked me out a little. The first time I heard about it was yesterday when the rep was here. I’d rather not prescribe it for you Shawn.”

“Why not?”

“Because I asked the rep how it works and he said they didn’t know how it works.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Just the same. How about I be your Guinea Pig, okay?”

Happy ending. Brintellix is awesome. I’m focused again. I’ve stopped grazing on stupid food all day long. Strangely, the thought of alcohol makes me a little queasy. I like(d) to drink, but Lord knows I don’t need 1000 empty calories every night before I go to bed. I can tell I’m losing weight. I had to buy a webbed belt to keep up with my shrinking waistline. So far not a single side-effect. No suicidal thoughts. No anorgasmia. No skin-crawling itching.

Finally! I’m normal! Or, yaknow. As normal as I get. My writing discipline is more focused and that’s all I wanted for Christmas.

I’ve had a couple of epiphany moments, asking myself, “Dude, why are you doing that thing? It’s self-destructive. What were you thinking, man? Knock it off!”

Better living through pharmaceuticals.

If you are a Facebook friend of mine, you’ve seen my rants on Astressin-B, the stress-blocking hormone therapy that grows back your hair. All your hair. It also removes grey from your hair. For all practical purposes, Astressin-B reverts your scalp to the hairline you had at sixteen. Astressin-B works flawlessly and permanently in mice after only one cutaneous injection. The team working on Astressin-B went dark when they started human trials in late 2013. Total communication blackout. I hope that blackout is a good sign. I assume we would have heard if the trials were a bust. 2015 might be the year that we cure baldness. Bring it.

Also new this month is Contrave. Contrave combines the anti-depressant booster Welbutrin and Neltrexone, the anti-addiction drug that prevents heroin addicts from getting a buzz. The result is a pill that keeps food from creating a pleasure-addiction response in your brain.

Finally, a diet pill that works at the source of the problem: the crave.  Contrave kills the crave.

There are two other anti-obesity drugs on the market, but they are so fraught with side effects they can only be prescribed to the morbidly obese. Contrave can be prescribed for anyone with a BMI over 27.

As Contrave is hitting the pharmacy shelves, news breaks that Big Pharma has taken weight loss one step farther. They’ve figured out the gene-therapy compound that turns white fat cells into brown fat cells.

White fat cells are the gooey, no good kind of fat. Brown fat cells are a kind of intermediate fat with the job of breaking down the white fat if you ever find yourself on a post-apocalyptic trek through a mountain range to Shangri-La where you actually run out of every other energy source on your body.

Converting “White” to “Brown” exponentially dissolves the remaining “white” and then the “brown” has no purpose and begins to disappear. Kind of like white blood cells fighting an infection. Once their job is done, they die off. Cuh. Razy.

 

Yep. We live in amazing times. Or at least we’re about to live in amazing times. C’mon already, Big Pharma! Cure cancer and double the length of my wang! And while you’re at it, how about a pill that finishes that novel for me while I sleep?