This post was made by Tommy O (I had to move it when he accidentally posted it to another conference) --Jack

About a year and a half ago, I bit the bullet and admitted that I was depressed. I was just shy of 51 at the time, and I believe now that I had been clinically depressed since the age of eight. Didn't want to admit it.

In all those years, I had been achingly, seethingly unhappy, and hadn't been shy about spreading it around. Women are more likely to be diagnosed as depressed than men, and if I'm typical, that's because men are seriously in what is known as "denial." Male depression is likely to stem from issues related to success and self esteem, while female depression more often comes from social detachment. Men's depression is also more likely to manifest itself as violence. A guy that gets put down may become a bully to maintain dominance over somebody -- a wife, a child. I learned early to restrain myself physically, but I never learned how to keep from being loud, angry, and fuckin' undignified (I'll spare us both the details, but you should know it was ugly, and it was abusive).

In January of 2000, I sought counselling and pharmaceutical help. My theory of getting better is pretty behavioristic, in that I'm not too interested in why I'm unhappy and unpleasant (examining the etiology of my own depression sounds like pressing bruises); I just want to be happy and easy to get along with. I had two episodes that scared me in one year: in the first I was unable to write a coherent sentence; in the other, my ability to talk was limited to "Pass the salt," and "I'll shovel the walk." At the same time as I went after professional help, I also bailed out of a depressing work situation, straightened out some long-term problems in my marriage, and took up Iyengar Yoga. I feel much better, thank you.

I asked specifically for pharmaceutical help, and got a prescription for the Eli Lilly drug, Prozac.

Prozac is the brand name for the drug fluoxetine that Lilly developed in the seventies and first marketed in 1987. It is the first of a class of drugs called "selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors" (SSRI). Other SSRIs include Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa.

Clinical depression is believed to be caused by an inadequacy of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Depression is diagnosed when the patient has one or more episodes of at least five of the following eight for two weeks or more: loss of energy, fatigue; recurrent thoughts of death or suicide; lost appetite, or sudden uncontrolled eating, sudden weight loss or gain; withdrawal from normal activities, lack of interest in sex; unusual difficulty thinking or concentrating; restlessness, irritability, over or under activity; trouble falling or staying asleep, or the desire to sleep all the time; feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, inappropriate guilt. Depression runs in families, but I think it might be going out on a limb to say it's genetic.

The way SSRIs work is to keep the serotonin your body makes in use longer. Serotonin is one neurotransmitter. Nerve cells make it and put it into the gaps between themselves and other nerve cells -- synapses -- to conduct signals between them. After they're done, they suck the stuff back up. If it lingers longer, it moves more signals. As nearly as I've been able to find out, the fact that Prozac and other similar drugs work is why we think that depression is caused by a serotonin deficiency, yet there is no biochemical test for depression, and none on the horizon as of 2000.

Depression probably is caused by a combination of factors, possibly including genetic predisposition, conditioning, stress, allergies, poor nutrition, substance abuse and pollution. My personal theory of my own depression is that it's a dominance-hierarchy dysfunction caused or exacerbated by an acquired ability to manipulate my internal chemistry.

Consider a child who keeps disappointing his parents. They let him know that they want a sign that he's getting the message, but he's a kid: he's going to mess up; he's going to want to do things besides the things they want from him. He can't do -- or can't bring himself to do -- the thing they want him to, but he can act chagrined by his behavior, and in acting he becomes. That's the young me. Consider another kid who winds up the goat in his grade school class. He is even less likely than the other kid to please his tormentors because they're having a good time doing what they do. This kid not only does what the other one did, but learns to make himself ill to avoid having to go where the bullies are. That's somebody I watched when I taught art at a neighborhood after-school program. My guess is that the paradox of the unimaginative and second-rate's having a higher position in the playground pecking order has to do with the brighter more imaginative kids' having better access to their own buttons.

It may be that the buttons these kids push in themselves are entirely psychic. I believe instead that the buttons are in fact postures, breathing irregularities, facial gestures like grimaces and sneers, maybe even self-touches like scratching, lip-biting, fingernail-biting, some masturbation.

The practice of yoga postures is an early step in Patanjali's Eightfold Path to raise the kundalini. If by correcting, stretching and strengthening, by learning the proper, symmetrical and natural way to move, we can find new and unexpected strengths, why can we not injure ourselves by pinching the conduits through which the energy moves, directing it asymmetrically, concentrating and restricting it.

In any case, the serotonin connection between depression and place in the dominance hierarchy seems clear to me. I remember reading an interview in an Omni magazine around 1979 or '80. The interview subject spoke about researchers who gave what must have been an SSRI (because it was a drug that increased the level of serotonin in his system) to a male monkey that was at the bottom of his tribe's hierarchy. Over the succeeding months, this monkey rose to the alpha position and acquired the attentions and help of several females in the troop (consider, by the way, the womanizing of such alpha humans as FDR, JFK, Martin Luther King, Bill Clinton).

I consider Prozac God's gift to the twenty-first century, but I also consider it (inconsistently) existentially suspect, and I'm wary of unforeseen health problems. The doc who monitors me and my Prozac wants me to take it for the rest of my life. Get real, Lentz.

Being a child of the sixties, I took LSD or some other psychedelic 32 times, and did more than my part to help wipe out Michuoacan's trade deficit. I've done a number of other things that might be described as "self medication:" a two-pack-a-day Pall Mall habit in my late teens and early twenties, heavy coffee use in my late twenties and into my forties, heavy whiskey and cognac use in my late twenties, jogging, weight lifting, fasting and lots of different diets, also rock climbing and nudism.

About the same time that I tripped across Jack's site, I was experimenting with masturbatory masochism (clothespins), and I discovered the Kundalini-Tantra site. Kundalini Tantra's main thesis is that kundalini is in fact the flood of hormones, neurotransmitters and peptides produced by the body during prolonged sexual stimulation, and that it is this chemical flood that allows us to approach the divine (there's a lot in KT about the Qaballa and people's finding short-lived salvation at tent meetings). KT is a wonderful sensation -- the same as MMO -- but ejaculation stops it, and it's way too hard to avoid ejaculation.

Anyway, I learned what that felt like. I also felt a trickle of excitement -- just a tiny, tiny bit -- from the Valley Breath and Key Sound. I didn't dare touch myself while breathing and making the sound; I'd taken Jack's warning to wait before adding sexual stimulation too seriously (the trick is to give yourself the tiniest bit of stimulation and be amazed at how potent it is).

Then I started doing yoga and taking Prozac. The doctor I had then (not Lentz) went wild with my dosage (60 mg.) and one night during a guided meditation after yoga class, I started to jerk. Speaking of jerks, my doctor didn't return my phone calls. For a month, if I was chagrined, I twitched; if I was pleased, I twitched; sometimes I just twitched. For the most part, it didn't interfere with my sleep, but one night I awoke in the small hours, exhilarated. I felt like I had just fallen in love, and I had a very stiff erection.

The estimates of how often Prozac consumers have some kind of sexual dysfunction vary (Lilly of course says it?s rare). Side effects can include nausea, headaches, changes in appetite, drowsiness, sleeplessness, weight gain, and loss of libido. These days, I'm taking 15 mg. a day, and I don't have the same spontaneous desire for sex that I did before Prozac, ejaculation is more difficult, arousal may disappear during sex, and twice I have lost an erection. I believe this is typical.

But at 60 mg., I was full of the life force. Having practiced yoga for about a month, I thought I had raised my kundalini. What I want to underline here is the parallel between the sensations of a slow-moving Prozac overdose and extreme sexual arousal. And MMO.

When I told Lentz about it, he said that the extreme euphoria I'd experienced probably indicated a mild bipolar disorder in me -- manic depression. I stressed that what happened had been drug induced. He acknowledged that he understood that (you gotta talk to these guys; they're human and they can misunderstand -- or prescribe you some insane level of a drug). Prozac is not supposed to be a stimulant, and the fact that I experienced it as one of the best I ever had said something about me to Lentz.

I thought that was nonsense, but I couldn't help but think about it, and remembered how my first pot experience rescued me from a pretty nasty depression during my first year in college. Ditto a certain LSD trip four or five years later. Fasting once, I went to a bar and hustled pool (I never even played pool in bars then). I did the only piece of ceramic glazing I ever liked, tanked on coffee. In fact, the only thing in the paragraph about self-medication above that never gave me a period of exhilaration was tobacco (the worst drug I ever used: it makes you sick until you get used to it, it doesn't do anything for you and it's close to impossible to quit (it was after a certain Halloween-night acid trip that I managed to kick nicotine)). Unfortunately, all my self meds ended in crashes. I stayed off smokes, for instance, but my acid high ended in eighteen months of depression during which I kept wondering what had happened to my poise and optimism.

Maybe I'm full of beans, but my hope is that with MMO, yoga, diet, breathing, the discipline to keep myself from sneering, deriding, grimacing, scorning, I can forget about taking my meds. The sensation of MMO is wonderful, and I'm guessing I can regulate my dosage in a way that will keep me on an even keel, happy, useful, likeable, but not in peril of crashing.

And, like I said in another post, Prozac doesn't seem to make a difference to MMO.

Tommy O

This reply to Tommy O's post was made by Taobear. -- Jack

"I hitched a ride with a vending machine repair man
He says he's been down this road more than twice
He was high on intellectualism
I've never been there but the brochure looks nice
Jump in, let's go
Lay back, enjoy the show
Everybody gets high, everybody gets low,
These are the days when anything goes
[Chorus]
Everyday is a winding road
I get a little bit closer
Everyday is a faded sign
I get a little bit closer (to feeling fine)"

from Everyday is a Winding Road, Sheryl Crow

It's great to hear other's life stories, thanks for sharing yours Tommy.

Sheryl Crow's lines came into my head and made more sense. It seems from my experience too that extreme highs are balanced with extreme lows, which kind of feels pessimistic, like best to remain neutral.

But I do not believe neutral balance is a steady state, there's potential to be balanced but as you wander down that balanced road, between high and low you begin to realise the highs and lows were just different sides of the same coin and then you start to get into a really pleasurable mind set, because you can look back at those experiences and gain strength from the ability to have perspective on them, the balancing then gradually becomes more 'graceful', i.e. becomes more what you would have once termed 'high' but now know is unconditioned pleasure and therefore does not have the need for a reverse side.

Seeking balance is therefore not a search for mundane neutral, it becomes a means to gain individual acceptability of a profound and potentially infinite pleasure.

And before my words begin to fail conveying any sense, time for a walk, where the movement becomes the experience and you realise how limited words can be.

taobear

Hey, taobear, thanks for the response. I've never really understood the kind of philosophical figure-ground problem you're commenting on. I think Lao Tse said something to the effect that the light required the dark, and I went "Huh?"

You seem to have a different take on it, but right now I'm reminding myself of a teenaged girl I know who has Asperger's Syndrome. She cannot understand irony to save her soul. That particular human organism just doesn't do irony. This one doesn't do paired opposites.

Your tone was hopeful, and I appreciate that. Thanks.

Tom