I am not OK, but that's okay.

To round out October as National Depression Awareness month, I thought I'd put all my thoughts of how I'm doing in one spot. As some who have read my Facebook posts might have wondered, I'm in a less than optimal state these days. Perhaps the largest indicator that something has been amiss is that I stopped writing in my blog--I remember a high school English teacher once telling me that people should be worried, not when I write about potentially dark or concerning things, but when I stop writing about them.

I've occasionally seen posts from several Facebook friends with the relayed message that goes something like "Please post this so that people know that someone is listening." Frankly--it doesn't do a whole lot for me, but I'm sure there are people that it does help, so please keep on with that.  What did help me enormously was when a friend reached out to me late last week over text message and just asked how I was doing, and offered to help in any way that he could. Just being able to explain my frustration with the state of mental healthcare in this day and age went a long way to settling my thoughts.

I should begin, not at the beginning, but at a point where this snowball began. Somewhere around a year and a half ago, I saw a new psychiatrist who put me on Remeron, which did wonders for immediately fixing my issues with getting to sleep and staying asleep. She was fairly certain that based on my activity level, the usual side effect of weight gain would pass me by. I gained somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds almost immediately, and then plateaued, and I accepted this as a necessary side effect. More concerning was that I woke up most mornings in a fog that did not clear up until noon, and I lost pleasure in the simple act of getting a workout in. You know that feeling of runner's high? Gone.

Just gone. The endorphins that went along with working out were eliminated from my psyche.  Working out became about effort. It became about looking at my workout on paper and deciding if it was good or not after the fact. It became about redefining joy around a performance--be that finishing a workout, or about meeting a speed objective. I lost the ability to independently say whether I enjoyed doing what I was doing or not.

My psychiatrist suggested lowering the dose of Remeron, which appeared to help with the "been in the hit head with a shovel" aspect of waking up every morning. Strangely, the weight gain picked back up again, and there was no improvement in the runner's high side of things. I made the determination that I needed to come off of this drug, and with my psychiatrist, we decided that we would see how things would go in an unmedicated state. I'd been on this antidepressant for a year, and we agreed to taper off of it. She said she didn't need to see me again unless things went wrong. At the end of it, I gained 17 pounds, almost 10% of my initial body mass.

So, I came off the Remeron. I passed four kidney stones in three months, and work became a great upheaval of overcommitment. I recognized the problem as it was happening--I was on a trip, and having to deal with another program from my hotel room, in a double duty fashion, and a third thing occurred. When I politely explained my predicament, the requests just got louder (as in emails to include the managers in my group about me not getting stuff done). I wound up doing the work, and made mistakes like forgetting to load files onto my laptop so I could work on it while I was flying--I was just in a state where all the cylinders weren't firing, and it was digging an even deeper hole for me. After landing in Paris, I spent a good chunk of time in my hotel room completing a document because of that screw up. Maybe it helped with the jet lag. I don't know. I started on Klonopin again to get myself to sleep--which is the red flag I had set for myself that things had gone awry.

I passed that fourth kidney stone a few days after I got home from Paris. Dehydration from flying probably had something to do with it. I then threw out my back the day after my stone, and met with my therapist and my urologist. At the urging of my therapist, I met with my manager to talk about how to reduce my stress load at work, and he said all the right things in that meeting. "We need to find people to take over some of the work you have"..."we need to find ways to eliminate some of those problems that cause you issues, like the commute from Long Beach to El Segundo"--my experiment with a desk in Seal Beach failed miserably over the past year, because I had nearly daily reasons I had to be in El Segundo.

However, I left that meeting with no concrete plan--no actual changes to the schedule. No actual shifts in responsibility. So, the days unfolded as they had before. I would work on something, at the demand of somebody who had already thought that I had failed by being late, and get that done, and then go to another building the next day and repeat the process. The discussions with my therapist about going out on disability for stress leave became more real. I also decided I needed to get back with my psychiatrist to go on another anti-depressant, and it turned out that she was gone on vacation for 5 weeks, and refused to start me on anything from a distance because it had been too long since I had seen her--5 months apparently exceeds her threshold. She said I should go to my GP to get started on a different drug, and it was in that moment that I decided she had simply washed her hands of me.

So, I simultaneously tried to make appointments with a new psychiatrist my therapist had referred me to and my GP to get me started on Wellbutrin. The psychiatrist's first availability was Nov. 22nd, and my GP's was after my scheduled trip to D.C. I agreed on a same day appointment with another doctor in the office I had never seen before. He asked me a series of questions basically covering his ass, and then prescribed me a dosage of Wellbutrin that is, in all likelihood, ridiculously insufficient.  It's less than half of what I took when Wellbutrin worked for me before.

For anyone who was concerned about why I posted "I'm pretty sure one of the leading causes of suicide is 'we can't get you on the schedule for 2 months'"--this is it. To be very clear, I am not suicidal--but I believe that anyone who is that faces this complete load of crap in trying to seek professional help might just have problems making it through. I had follow up discussions with my manager over email, and he now understands just how serious this problem is, and is working on a path to correct it. The plan is not concrete, but it is coming together. I am hopeful that my life will begin to turn around very quickly.

But something needs to change. And I mean something very significant about how this country views and treats mental healthcare. It should not be the right of only the super rich who can afford to pay out of pocket for professionals who know what they're doing. And it should not only be the right of the wealthy upper middle class who have decent insurance.

I have a plan. I am not ok. But I will be ok, so that makes it ok. And I am hopeful that, as I claw my way out of this hole, I will find the joy of working out again, and the feelings of accomplishment that come from doing a good job on something at work, while not having to prioritize things in a way that starts with "Who do I want to piss off the least today?"

So, for all you out there who may be going through something similar--I'm here.