Globe PR for the Drug Companies?

Globe PR for the Drug Companies?

Bugansky tells only that he took pills. (Tim Bugansky, "I miss my
depression,"
Boston Globe, November 20, 2007) He does not reveal what else he changed besides
geography that contributed to his improved perspective. Did he end a love
affair? Did he get a new job he enjoyed? Did he have plastic surgery? We only
know that he took pills. Was he paid any money by a drug company as two-thirds
of medical school teachers are paid? He didn't say.
The Boston Globe seldom writes any negative stories about the drug
companies or the psychiatric industry. Does the Globe promote psychiatry and
drug treatment for any rational reason? When will the Globe publish a story
about the adverse effects of psychiatric drugs?

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

I miss my depression
By Tim Bugansky
Boston Globe
November 20, 2007

TEL AVIV
AUTUMN visited Israel recently. The temperature sank, chilly rain spattered the
streets, the wind tossed the trees to and fro. As I sat outside on the porch one
night, I found my mind yanked back to Ohio, and I was struck by a familiar pang
of sadness - and I missed, achingly, the decade when I was clinically depressed.
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The irony of depression - for me, at least - was that it made me feel a
pervasive sadness that pierced my heart like frigid, jagged glass, but it also
made me feel supremely alive. Depression isolated me within myself, yet through
its ever-present melancholy, it also made me feel completely connected to the
world.

Anything had the potential to envelop me in tentacles of despondency: a parking
lot at dusk; illuminated living rooms on dark city streets with families moving
about inside; an elderly man hobbling through a store all by himself; train
tracks disappearing into the distance.

These were amplified by the gracefully turbulent decay that accompanies autumn
in Ohio, where I have spent most of my life. Brisk breezes bore reminders that
life is fleeting. The moon hung morosely above cornfields. Brittle leaves
crunched resoundingly like fragile hearts underfoot.

Amidst the crushing poignancy, I was also more creative, more perceptive, more
in tune with the world. I can remember entire weeks when I was depressed more
clearly than I can remember the particulars of any one day last week. Although
days were interminable back then, they were also alive and palpable, bursting
with beautiful futility.

It's been four years now since I began a course of treatment, swallowing daily a
white pill that changes not only my brain chemistry, but also the very ways I
perceive the world, the ways the world affects me. Besides all the questions
antidepressants raise about reality and perception, "mental illness" and
normalcy, my personal reality is that I am different now. Antidepressants
altered my existence.

I eat and sleep more regularly. I can now get sad without venturing into the
borderlands of despair. I can get happy without that happiness seeming like the
gleaming tip of an iceberg - full of splendor at the surface, but dwarfed by the
hulking dark mass of potential disappointment beneath.

I don't mean to glorify depression. Had I not taken those little white pills, I
would probably have become seriously ill, more and more troubled, increasingly
incapable of living in a world constructed by and for the "normal." There is no
question that depression can and does hurt people, both the depressed and those
around them.

But while depression is often portrayed or understood in simple terms, it is
more than just an affliction. Its complexity is all the more apparent to me now
that it is absent from my life; yet the memory of it can still transport me from
the edge of the Middle Eastern desert to the American heartland.

And I wonder - as I sit outside on quiet nights and sense the seasons shifting
and wish that I could "feel" the phenomenon like I used to - I wonder how many
others like me are out there in the world, wandering through their own private
autumns, fortunate to be alive today yet missing the brilliant sadness of the
past.

Tim Bugansky, a writer and teacher in Israel, is author of "Anywhere But Here."
He wrote this column for the International Herald Tribune.