Part 7 (1/2)

And why? Because I went off my meds.

Over the course of several weeks, I adjusted the 20 milligrams a day of Prozac that I'd been taking when I went into Meriwether and brought the dose down to 15 milligrams. Then 10. Then zero. It took a few more months before I hit the really rough stuff: to be exact, the three months between when I got out of Meriwether and when I made my trip to the bin in the hinterlands. The timing was almost perfect. I started sc.r.a.ping bottom, and then I got on a plane to present myself at a hospital once more. This time I didn't really have to convince anyone that I was depressed. It was pretty clear, even to me.

There are really two reasons why I went off my meds. One good and one not so good.

The good reason was that, while doing some of the background research to write this book, I'd been doing a lot of reading about psychiatric drugs: how they were and are discovered or synthesized; how they're tested, marketed, and prescribed; and how little anybody really knows about what they're doing to our brains. The more I read, the angrier and more apprehensive I became about using them. Hence my reluctance to take anything at Meriwether.

I just didn't want to be dependent for the rest of my life on a drug whose effects neither I nor the professionals could understand or predict, and whose glowing reputation had been based almost entirely on the meticulous propaganda of the companies that were profiting hugely from its sale.

I wanted to find a way to do without drugs, and not to succ.u.mb without a fight to what I considered to be the drug company's and my doctor's less than disinterested suggestions that I needed them.

I thought that that was a pretty good reason to try to go off my meds. I still do.

The not so good reason was that I did it for the book. I did it because, as I have said before, my brand of journalism is immersive. You have to have the whole experience, or as much of it as you can. You can't just stand outside as an observer, the way I had in certain respects at Meriwether. The whole point is that you are not objective.

Besides, I had started this book because I went to the bin that first time for real. I had experience with mental illness, or distress, or whatever you want to call it. I was a subject, too. My own subject. I couldn't brush that aside or keep it discretely apart while I watched everyone else crawl through the tar pit.

But, without actually becoming depressed again, I couldn't really pull myself into the experience in retrospect. That's the thing about depression, I have found, and this is a great mercy under normal circ.u.mstances. When you're over it, when you're not depressed, it's really hard to remember exactly what it felt like when you were depressed. You can remember it as an idea. You can describe it a.n.a.lytically. You know you felt terrible, and you know you don't want to feel that way again. But you don't really remember the details, the quality of the suffering. But I wanted to be able to reexperience that, and then render that in real time, as it was happening, not after it had pa.s.sed.

I know, I know. Stupid. But there it is.

And, for what it's worth, here it is.

So turn the page.

ASYLUM.

St. Luke's

It began with dread in the morning. I woke with a feeling of dread. The first conscious thought. Something is terribly wrong with my life, with life in general, how it works, how it goes. It's too much. I can't face it. I am frightened. I am too small and impotent to handle this. Something is terribly wrong with my life, with life in general, how it works, how it goes. It's too much. I can't face it. I am frightened. I am too small and impotent to handle this.

This was only an inkling at first, like the vestige of a bad dream. I could not even remember what I was dreaming about, but I woke with this feeling that lingered well into the morning, well into my coffee making and shower.

I stood in front of the toaster and thought: It is absurd to be this afraid of nothing. But I am. I am afraid of nothing. It is absurd to be this afraid of nothing. But I am. I am afraid of nothing.

I looked for reasons, causes to a.s.sign, but they were irrelevant. That was the point. The fear. The dread came from nowhere. It did not correspond to the present or the prospects of the day in front of me. I was on firm ground. I had an enviable life. But it felt as though I was perched above the void. Blankness below. And my world crumbling around me.

My doctors might have explained it as an incommensurate stress reaction, a flight response on overload but with no discernable provocation, my brain thinking I was rappelling on a cliff face, dangling in danger. Adrenaline pouring in, but nothing so extreme had happened. I was just standing in my kitchen. The cliff, the void, was in my brain, in my dreams-and then it carried over into the morning when I woke.

This was disconcerting enough when it began. More so as it grew and extended itself throughout the day, through more and more days. Then I was genuinely concerned. Taking a moment to step outside the immediate storm, which had become so consuming, I thought: This is not normal. I have never been normal, but this is diseased even for me. There is something really wrong. This is not normal. I have never been normal, but this is diseased even for me. There is something really wrong.

I thought this especially when somewhere around midday I crawled into the bathtub without running a bath. The fetal position, taking comfort in the cool, white porcelain pressing against my cheek, a substance both strong and smooth bending around my bent body, binding me, solid, firm, the bounds of a disintegrating self, the bucket that collects me, dissolving into a pool.

Who do I imagine I am? This was a pressing question suddenly. But unanswerable, of course. This was a pressing question suddenly. But unanswerable, of course.

I stood abruptly. Rushed to the mirror. I held my face close and stared, reminded of a friend who, after a traumatic brain injury, emerged from a coma, looked in the mirror, and did not know who she was looking at. Really did not know who that person was. Had never seen her before. Could not fathom ident.i.ty.

That was happening to me, only it was happening in the way that simple everyday words like ”because” and ”h.e.l.lo” lose their meaning when you stare at them too long on a page, or are suddenly unsure how to spell them. It was a fundamental falling away of the most basic a.s.sumptions. The known suddenly somehow foreign.

Who the f.u.c.k are you? And what the h.e.l.l are you doing in the bathroom?

This was a real question. I meant it. I really meant it.

I was in a bad way, and it was my own fault.

I wanted to go off the meds and so I did, tapering slowly, wisely, this time, or so I thought. I had coping mechanisms in place, exercise, meditation, work, experience. And for weeks I was fine flying solo, though fatigued and susceptible to cold, even gaining weight, such that I wondered whether my thyroid had been thrown out of whack by the serotonin, another of those effects no one seems to know about and can only guess at from the symptoms.

After a few more shaky weeks, I began waking in the morning with the dread. And then the bathtub and the mirror. And then the extension of the morning dread into the day, and a darkness being thrown over the world, and a solid belief in the untenability of my life. The infantilization. The curling up. The sense of being ill-equipped for everything, the conviction gathering speed that death was the only real option.

I cannot work. I am useless. I am taking up s.p.a.ce. Consuming resources. I have no function. I am stupid. I will fail.

I had gotten out of Meriwether untrampled and I thought I was on my game. And then there I was thinking about where I could buy a gun.

A gun seems best. I am a maimed animal. Perhaps I can hire a hit man. I will tip him very well to take a clean shot.

Cowardice. You see?

I had been commissioned to write a book about loony bins. I had been to one already. I thought it was going to be a success story. Look at how I got off the meds and learned to make it on my own. But that is not how it worked out. I was going in again, this time with a wound in my side.

For research?

If you say so.

Pah. For real.

There was no need to pretend this time around. I cried in earnest in the admission interview. And why? Because that is another thing that happens when I stop the meds. I cry a lot. Big jags of tears over things like Oprah, Oprah, which was what I was watching on a 52-inch plasma TV, waiting in the lobby of yet another hospital. which was what I was watching on a 52-inch plasma TV, waiting in the lobby of yet another hospital.

The intrepid reporter undercover.

I want someone to take me in. I want to pretend that I am doing my job, but I belong here. I am a pitch-perfect silent screamer, a forlorn lump.

Oprah. And I was crying in this tiny Catholic hospital-facility, really-more like a clinic, a specialty clinic for addicts and lunatics plunked down there in the middle of the plains where the freight trains pa.s.sed through town outside the rain-bespeckled windows, moaning like whales under the broad gray sky. And I was crying in this tiny Catholic hospital-facility, really-more like a clinic, a specialty clinic for addicts and lunatics plunked down there in the middle of the plains where the freight trains pa.s.sed through town outside the rain-bespeckled windows, moaning like whales under the broad gray sky.

I listened as I sat. Sometimes I walked to the window and looked, saw the red signal lights flas.h.i.+ng on the gantries, the line of waiting cars with their echoing rows of red taillights blurring in the downpour.

In the corner of the room, next to the window, there was a life-size gilded statue of the clinic's presiding saint, Luke, standing over the four rough upholstered armchairs, one of which I was occupying.

There was a Fisher-Price play station at my feet, with ramps and tracks and obedient b.a.l.l.s, a knee-high table and chairs, a box of toys half scattered in the corner. They treated children here, too.

What a place, I thought. What a place. So kind. So homey. Carpeted and warm. Quiet. There was only the TV, the volume low, and then only the sound of fingers softly typing, phones mutedly ringing, genteelly being answered.

It was late Friday afternoon. I had come for an appointment I had made by phone earlier in the week. I had called in supposed distress. Said I was on the road, about a hundred miles out of town. But I really made the call on my cell phone safe at home in New York.

Right. Safe.

As soon as I got the appointment, the so-called needs a.s.sessment appointment, I booked a flight.