“A few weeks after I graduated, I tried to jump in front of a train”: My bipolar disorder nightmare

www.salon.com|Mary Lu Unterburger

When I was 17, I decided that I wasn’t going to get out of bed anymore. It was a grey morning in March, and I woke up feeling lifeless and sad. There was nothing particularly wrong with my life; I had a great group of friends, I was involved in several clubs, and I was set to graduate in three months with straight A’s. I knew my misery was completely unjustified, but I couldn’t move.

My dad dragged me to a psychiatrist and I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. This wasn’t a shocking revelation for me. It was pretty obvious I was a sad kid. I had figured out that I was probably depressed years ago, but until the diagnosis, my family had dismissed my lifeless demeanor as typical teenage angst. I was almost proud to hear a doctor say that I actually had a mood disorder; it made all my mood swings seem legitimate and, more importantly, fixable. I was going to be prescribed a happy pill, feel better, and go back to my life like nothing had happened.

“I didn’t feel fit to be a mother:” I was holding it together, pushing through, getting by, and then one night, I wasn’t

www.salon.com|Mary T. McCarthy

At 25, I gave birth to my first daughter, Sarah, at 29, my second, Molly. I didn’t experience any feelings of depression whatsoever surrounding their births. I began a successful part-time writing career while I raised my girls. After about two years, I had a miscarriage about 12 weeks into my pregnancy. It was a devastating loss — I’d seen the baby’s heartbeat, everything had progressed normally and suddenly the heartbeat was gone and I had to have surgery to remove the lost baby. Heartbroken, I sought out other women who had experienced miscarriages; they seemed to be the only ones who knew what to say. Others said the wrong things, awful things. Too soon after, another pregnancy came and another miscarriage at around nine weeks. I couldn’t understand why, after two full-term lovely girls, my body seemed to have forgotten how to be pregnant. It was only after this second miscarriage that I learned I had a condition called bicornuate uterus, which meant I’d only ever had a 50/50 chance of carrying a baby to term due to the shape of my uterus.

Facebook is annihilating your self-esteem, and you’re not alone

www.salon.com|Nico Lang

Last month, I reactivated my old Facebook account for 15 minutes before realizing I’d made a terrible mistake.

I deleted my profile last year because I didn’t like the person I was when I was on Facebook—or the person that I was pretending to be. If they say that on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog, my experience of Facebook was like being a canine with a keyboard, pretending to be human. In place of feeling connected to those around me, I had “Likes” to do that for me. Being a good “friend” to 2,000 people on the Internet meant I didn’t have to be one in real life.

But like an alcoholic passing a favorite pub, I often get nostalgic for a place where everybody knows my name. I find myself craving a sip of the old social media juice, but this time around, it didn’t taste the same.

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As a girl, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. Or a heart surgeon. Or maybe one of those movie stars who adopted kids from third-world countries. Whatever my future career, I wanted to be glamorous, and I wanted to change people’s lives.

My interest in glamour faded over the years, but my desire to change lives grew. Perhaps that’s because I struggled to change my own. Around the time I entered middle school, an unexplainable sadness began sapping my days of pleasure. I’d simply forgotten how to feel happy. Some kids had drug-addicted mothers or violent fathers or uncles with wandering hands. I had loving parents and a house in the suburbs. I got good grades. I had close friends. I read self-help books in my spare time. But no amount of reading or self-analysis could make the sadness go away. Other people’s depressions seemed tragic and justified. Mine seemed like evidence of a deep personal failing.

My newfound interest in boys only complicated matters. I craved their attention but wilted under their gaze, hyper-aware of my own flaws. When boys did show interest in me, I wrinkled my nose and replied, “You’re kidding, right?” Needless to say, I didn’t get asked out often. Part of me preferred it that way. The random hookups and keg parties that thrilled my friends left me paralyzed with dread. They experimented with pot and LSD while I experimented with SSRIs, searching for a pill to dull my sadness.

When antidepressants didn’t work, I thought saving lives would help give my own meaning.

Mothering didn’t come easily for me. Not in the fertility sense, but the instinctual one. For years I’d seen women on the street and on social media cooing over babies. When my daughter arrived, I was in more shock than awe. I’d spent my 20s chasing career advancements and men, telling myself I’d settle down later. And as if on cue, by my 30th birthday I had a man, a marriage and maternity, as if the biological timer detonated before my brain could catch up. But the change happened with such velocity — someone’s bride and another’s mother – that I was scared to death.

Over the past two decades, I have taken Effexor, Lithium, Buspar, Wellbutrin, Klonopin, Topamax, Lamictal, and Prozac—the last two of which have let me be my fundamentally cheery self for over a decade. After several sessions and a thorough history of my meds and moods, my new reproductive psychiatrist made a judgment call.

“There are some people who can go off their drugs during pregnancy,” she said. Pause. “You are not one of them.”

I once lost the ability to pee for nine whole months. For the better part of a year, my life was a nightmare of lonely trips to the bathroom. I spent hours standing over the motionless water of countless toilets, laboring in confusion to produce even the slightest dribbles. I was an otherwise young, fit and healthy person but had become the victim of a strange, biological mystery that I could not solve. I don’t remember how the problem started. It wasn’t like the beginning of a football game, with a kickoff signifying the possible carnage to come. The onset of my urination struggle was more like a voodoo curse cast on me from afar. One day, I had to pee more often than usual. Except when I tried to pee, nothing came out.

Why, then, would I ever want to break up with the thing that had brought me actual mental health? And why hadn’t I known how hard it would be? To be honest, I hated how I looked and thought Zoloft was to blame, and the idea of being on any medication for my whole life made me feel seriously uneasy. Also, my psychiatrist had suggested that I start the tapering process now that I had been (relatively) panic-free for three years. So I did it. And it sucked.

For most of my early 20s, I knew that one day I would end my life. I knew that it was only a matter of time before I downed a bottle of pills, let the life spill out of my wrists, or swerved my car into a river. It was not chaotic or poetic, just a quiet reality sitting in the back of my mind, waiting for the right moment.

Yet last month, Erick Turner and some colleagues released a new analysis, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, looking this time at drugs used to treat anxiety disorders—and they found almost the same results. Nearly every study (40 of 41) that the FDA determined to be positive ended up getting published. Of the studies the FDA determined weren’t positive, almost half didn’t get published; those that did were largely published in ways that conflicted with the FDA’s findings.

Do you have to be unhappy to be funny? Time and time again, we are confronted with the idea that humor and depression are two sides of the same coin, while the many public narratives of comics grappling with mental illness — Maria Bamford and Rob Delaney, the late Robin Williams and Freddie Prinze — appear to bolster that idea that laughter has to come from a place of deep suffering.

Many of us have known a dog on Prozac. We’ve also witnessed the eye rolls that come with canine psychiatry. Doting pet owners—myself included—ascribe all sorts of questionable psychological ills to our pawed companions. But the science does suggest that numerous non-human species suffer from psychiatric symptoms. Birds obsess; horses on occasion get pathologically compulsive; dolphins and whales—especially those in captivity—self-mutilate.

It turns out that rationing the amount of time we spend serial-watching a show is just as important as putting the brakes on after-work cocktails before they turn into a serious bender, and checking in with ourselves about our motivations and limits. Watching TV might not sound as dangerous as a sex or gambling addiction, but the researchers say there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it’s not a harmless habit.