Drug narratives and an elegy

One of the features of working in a newish corner of the university is that everyone has come here from somewhere else. Some of my colleagues had splendid, rakish sorts of research profiles before they laid down their burden beneath the friendly wheel of preparatory education.

It was as a result of this that I last week attended a departmental seminar given by a teacher with an academic background in medical anthropology. He was talking, among other things, about the metaphors associated with illness and treatment: the way that people receiving western medicine think about their illness, their treatment and its side effects. Many people construct a narrative of illness and recovery that explains their experiences, drawing on their cultural heritage. Hence, for example, arises the ubiquitous “cancer battle” narrative, which may be no more materially true than if we were to talk of “cancer fiestas”, for example (the latter is my coinage, I should add).

It’s with all this in mind that I’ve been thinking about my wash-out experiences this week. How can I describe them for you? One answer is through metaphor, not least because of the uncertain science around the drugs themselves, in which causes are even more uncertain than their symptoms. I’m well aware that there may be other factors at work on some of what I take to be symptoms of Paroxetine withdrawal, even as I stitch them together to form a whole. Another is through plainer language, through itemising and lists.

What can I say about it? It’s bad, but not the worst of anything. I’m glad not to be experiencing this at work, even as I’ve worked under greater stresses. I am variously too hot and too cold, sweating and shivering accordingly, although not as bad as if I had flu, for example. My internal clock seems to have reset itself completely to its former night time rhythms: today, for example, I am only just starting to feel awake at five o’clock, and can easily sit up until after one or two without feeling tired. This of course has a cumulative effect. I feel hungry a lot, for all kinds of heavy, creamy, delicious food, with the result that I have probably put on some weight this week, although, given the pleasure of the señor’s wonderful cooking, I can’t say I mind too much.

When I talk about how it feels mentally, that is when I must draw on metaphor. I feel as if my borders are fraying very fast. Concentrating on anything for more than a few minutes is hard, so I pass the evening in a kind of devil’s multitasking. (The señor and I watched DVDs last night simultaneous with my checking my email, plucking dead hairs from Arthur’s coat and giving the señor a manicure, all of which he patiently endured.) What I think of as the normal cycles of mood that occur through the day still happen, but faster and with greater intensity. This is hard on my secondary sense of equilibrium, that overall, I’m okay. The changes mean that in some way, I feel crazy. I’m worried about teaching again next week as I do the wash-in.

This fraying of borders leaves me open to the world in a way more reactive than normal. Thoughts, music, images all distract me. In many ways, of course, this is what lower-level mental illness feels like anyway, always having emotional threads hanging out that make it difficult to push on through the day’s minutiae. Even as I’m getting most things done, I don’t feel very productive. The kind of high-powered editing I hoped to do on my manuscript this week will be, I think, impossible. On occasion, I can hardly type.

All this is made possible by the knowledge it’s only temporary, but it’s still hard. The hardest thing, I think, is needing continually to remind myself that my emotional feedback, the data that anyone needs to make their way through the day, is skewed and unreliable for the wash-out period. Not only am I under light bombardment with feelings of all kinds, all clamouring for my attention, I have to determinedly turn away. The effect is of shutting a door on five barking little dogs.

While the physical symptoms relate mainly to the process of withdrawal, the mental symptoms relate to the concomitant lowering of the dose. I am not the kind of depressive who minds too much about the loss of these kinds of mental states that will come with more drugs. There is a kind of elation, a sense of being authentic, that comes from the fraying of high-functioning me, but I don’t see any kind of social or emotional pay-off in remaining this way. (People complain enough about my quirkiness without getting it blasted at them in a double dose.) I shall be more than happy to put back to bed the personification of my self-doubt, which draws its resources together, undrugged, into an early morning nagging voice, whose messages, redacted, are something like those “are you depressed” questionaires. Feeling X? Thinking Y? That voice tells me I am indeed those things, and is a branch of the self I’ll be happy to set to sleep again.

None of what I write in this regard should evoke pity. This is unpleasant but I can cope, and am well-looked after by the señor, whose aforementioned cooking and DVD procuring is doing much to forestall the full-blown crazy. But I feel an obligation—to whom, I’m not sure: the internets? The people contemplating a wash-out of their own?—to try and describe in a straightforward manner what this is like, so that when it’s done I can say, this is what I’ve pushed on through.

I’m kicking round a thought in all of this that I haven’t quite shaped into coherency yet, and it goes something like this: that in some settings there are social-payoffs for this kind of mental fracturing, especially if its possessor can tie it to gender (the improbably efficient multitasker who never does one thing for very long) or creativity (look at meee! I’m so bohemian! I get up at midday and weep unexpectedly at bright colours and popular music!). This is not to say that multi-tasking women, or bohemian women for that matter, are all mentally ill, but rather to muse on how we highlight aspects of our character according to selected social norms, particularly those which appeal to us.

In my postgraduate days there was a lot more reason for me to be rambling, spontaneous and erratic. It enabled the kind of spontaneous explosions of thought that generally turned into research breakthroughs, not to mention the high drama of socialising with souls in similar circumstances that was in those days my fun of choice. There were buffers within that part of academia for people thus handicapped or enabled—indeed, such mental states were common enough to be the norm—but when I moved into my present neck of the woods, such behaviours were regarded with suspicion: might such a character rock the team boat, waste the time of others or be otherwise difficult to work with?

That now I so value my steady calm and extended concentration may well be a product of the rewards my job places on these things, not to mention the increase in general responsibility that comes with age and a little more money. It may be that the drugs enable me to live with myself without anguish, at a time when there is no benefit to be had from keeping that anguish as a tenant.

I think something like this on a much bigger and weightier scale must have happened to Georges Braque when he came back from the Great War and didn’t want to be a Cubist anymore. Those formal experiments that previously seemed like the vital intersection of art and fun retreated, as everything retreated, under shelling. He to his wife and a quieter life, Picasso to the Ballet Russes and the cruel celebrity of the 1920s. Settings change, we change, and can’t go back to what we were. The longed-for transformation brings with it losses that at the time we weren’t even aware were ours to lose.

It is like the wind, streaming over Wellington hills,
Which, bearing all sunset’s flame, scorns not the kites:
It is like the tide, flowing out from Island Bay,
Bubbling round dinghies, it lifts the children’s boats. (RH, “Fragments from Two Countries”, 65-8 )