jumpstarting a life with a little spark to the head

Sometimes, it seems like people who are very publicly open about their mood disorders talk of taking medication as something they do, not because they will be healthy, but because they’re depressed.  In a way, their choice to take medication sounds like a choice to at least internally label oneself as ‘mentally ill,’ even though the medication may be what would allow the public to never place that label on you.  I do know that sometimes deciding to keep on taking medication feels like an exercise of the depressed; most of the time, it is that way where I’m getting no better, but I have another prescription in hand.

My thoughts about how mood disorders are framed in this society and how I view my own disorder shifted quite a bit after reading Peter Kramer’s book, Against Depression. But when it is ‘eradicated’ from me, what’s going to be left?

I have read some articles and books in the past that looks at depression from a sociological lens. Until now, I’ve been able to connect with reading about the typical illness career that involves wrestling with medication or having to spend time in a hospital. With only about 100,000 patients per year that undergo ECT in the US, I haven’t been able to read up to see if there’s any emotional transition from having a ‘typical’ illness career to one that’s a little less common to that career. I tend to think that self-identity kind of changes when ECT comes into play.  With just medication and therapy, I do have the luxury of accepting or denying my illness at some points.  In the case of ECT treatments, I’m not sure that flexibility is available anymore.  A clearly physical procedure (like having surgery), I will not have a daily moment when I get to decide if I want to take medication. Instead, I don’t get to deny the seriousness of my illness. The thought process, at least for me, has been very different from how I’ve felt about medication. The process has been interesting (intellectually speaking–my body doesn’t find it all that amusing).

In Is It Me or My Meds?, David Karp asks his interviewees about their relationship with their psychotropic medication.  He found that most “had become wedded to a biomedical version of mental illness.” In the concluding chapters, he becomes skeptical of the growing acceptance of biological psychiatry that has led to an overmedicated society. The skepticism toward embracing a totally medical model of mental illness is, to an extent, understandable.  Karp notes that his issues are with the “confluences of forces that lead doctors to routinely medicate for life distress.” Sure, we don’t do enough to examine larger social problems that has led to our developing these psychiatric issues. However, when one chooses to have ECT, isn’t the acceptance of biomedical reasonings important to the ECT patient, at least so that s/he can come to terms with having to go through this procedure? By the time someone reaches the point of being treated by ECT, accepting biological psychiatry isn’t leading to an overmedicated patient.

Perhaps by choosing ECT, the patient is, for the first time, coming face-to-face with the gravity of his/her illness. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing at all.