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.

Elections and Mental Health

Full disclosure: I am a Christian.  Every baptism I attend, I renew my vow to follow and obey Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.  When I was ordained a priest, I made another vow, to pattern my life in accordance with the teachings of Christ.  So that I don't just make it up as I go along, I also vowed to be diligent in the reading and study of the Holy Scriptures.

I'm telling you -- I'm serious about this.

Just so you understand -- that means I am a Christian first, an American second.

When I vote, my faith determines my vote.

In my reading of the Holy Scriptures -- and I read it a lot, and I read the whole thing, and keep reading it to catch things I missed the first and second and twentieth time round -- it is very clear.  According to Jesus and the prophets, a nation will be judged not by the private morality of its citizens, but on how the nation itself treats the most vulnerable in its midst.

When I vote, I am voting for policies that determine how my nation will be judged, because I believe this nation will be judged.  Since this is a democracy, as a citizen, I also bear some responsibility for what happens in this nation, and expect to share in its judgment.  So I am voting for people whose first priorities will be the hungry, thirsty, alien, poor, sick and those in prison.  Because those are the priorities on which we will be judged.  Matthew 25.  Got that?

So I am voting for mental health.  We throw around a lot of words, but behind these words are real people.  I know some of them.  Even if I didn't. I am commanded, by somebody I have vowed to obey, to do for them what I would have done for me.

Medicaid, veterans, parity, research, access to health care, including sufficient professionals to provide mental health services -- there is a lot at stake in this election.  Follow the link to NAMI's What's at Stake in the 2012 elections? for the details.  Then decide who you think has the same priorities as Jesus and the prophets.  I am not assuming anything here, just telling you where I stand.  Maybe you share these priorities, maybe you don't.  But figure it out.

And be honest about it.

Then go vote yourself.

clip art from Microsoft.com

icon of Christ Pantokrator, 6th c. St. Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai, in public domain

Pinky and the Brain

While I catch up on laundry from vacation, here's something to keep you little squirts happy.

And if you want the full tutorial, here is a new resource.  But no Pinky.

Hope for a Cure? Or Not?

But we have to keep hoping for a cure, don't we?

I spent six months preparing a power point presentation on stages of recovery and fifty minutes delivering it.  My co-presenters and I described the misery of the Chemistry Experiment, and the hope offered by other interventions that harness the brain's capacity to heal itself.  Medicine is a piece of the answer, but just not inadequate to carry the whole load of healing.

But DNA operates even deeper in an organization than in an individual.  NAMI was born out of the medical model, when parents who had been wrongly accused of causing their children's illness pushed back and insisted on their innocence.  Mental illness is not caused by distant fathers and overprotective mothers.  Mental illness is a physical illness.

Yes it is.  Whether it arises from chemistry, wiring or structure, it is an illness in the brain, a physical organ, inside a body.

Well, it was a short jump from that insight to the search for a cure, a medical cure.  Because that is what medicine does, it cures physical illness, right?

So there was that question, the NAMI parent's quest for a cure, in response to all our elegant talk about Recovery, the NAMI peer's quest for a life worth living.  Forget Recovery. Don't we have to keep hoping for a cure?