Anniversary - Prozac Monologues

Do you take antidepressants for depression and you are not getting better?  Do they make you agitated, anxious, insomniac?  Have you heard it often takes a while to find the right med, so you keep trying, you brave little soldier, you?

My friend, today you tapped your ruby slippers together, and Google brought you here.  Maybe not to your home, but to mine.  What follows is the back story to Prozac Monologues.  But first things first:

Stop.  Stop trying.  Go no further until you have taken the MDQ, Mood Disorder Questionnaire, right here at this link, and have asked a friend or housemate who knows you really well and loves you enough to tell the truth to fill it out for you, as well.

Holiday Shopping for Your Favorite Loony

Personally, I would rather stick a hot poker in my eye than go out on Black Friday.  But at reader request, I am reposting the following from 2009 -- reformatted, since I started using more images some time back, and updated in random places.

For all you who want to be part of the madding crowd, and even those who will be waiting for the dust to settle, start here for your mentally interesting friends and relations:

Holiday Shopping for Your Favorite Loony -- November 24, 2009

The Day after Thanksgiving, traditional start of the Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa shopping season is upon us.  You Hanukkah people better start cracking!  It is Prozac Monologues' attempt to be ever helpful to my dear readers.  As my therapist says, Virgo -- your destiny is service.  Get used to it.  (I have a therapist who says stuff like that.  The following is a holiday shopping list to guide normals who want to please their loony loved ones.

Holiday Survival Tips for Loonies

People are already googling prozac and holidays and bipolar and holidays.  This is excellent.  You are following your therapists' advice to reduce your anxiety by thinking through your triggers and how you will handle them.

So as a public service to my readers, I repost a slightly editted Holiday Survival Tips for Loonies from November 20, 2010:

Ah, the holidays!  Time when far flung family members travel home and grow close around the turkey table.  Time to renew friendships in a round of parties and frivolity.  Time to go crazy?

No Pink Ribbons - On Truth-Telling

I don't do the pink ribbon thing.

I was sitting at a sushi bar, watching a football game last month, and noticed the pink shoes and towels sported by both teams.  I mentioned that October was Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  Our server said he didn't know that, but pink is his signature color.

Okay, I think the Man Enough to Wear Pink phenomenon in football and Tough Enough in rodeo's version is way cool.  And a sweet young man in Idaho who owns that pink is his signature color would have to be More Man and More Tough than most.

But as a movement to define the struggle against breast cancer -- I couldn't put my finger on it, but something always seemed a little off.