Maybe New Meds

I have an appointment with my new doctor Monday. Mostly, we'll see how this whole diabetes thing is going. However, I'll also be asking about medication for depression. My company is out of business, my romantic life gone, I'm out half a million, and I just had a car wreck. Paxil helped with anxiety and I hope something can help me at least cope better with these bitter circumstances. It's hard to say if I have depression or not, but I do feel numb and hopeless. Maybe that counts. Along with Attention Deficit Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Nonverbal Learning Disorder, depression is one of the four conditions for which autism is commonly mistaken, which is why I call autism the mockingbird of developmental disorders. What I'm feeling lately goes beyond the basic melancholy disconnect that I, and I think all autistics, feel and, while I'm managing to function on a basic level, I desire to take some of the screaming edge off of the weight of sadness I seem to endure in every conscious moment.

One psychologist used to tell me that depression is when things aren't going badly but you're still sad, whereas if you're sad because lots of bad things have happened to you, that's just a normal reaction. Well, I certainly have indisputable bad things that have happened to me and they have all happened in the space of two months. That much is certain. However natural and normal it is to feel sad after one's professional and personal life falls apart though, this does nothing to mitigate the unpleasantness of always feeling that way. Sure, I CAN live with constant sadness, just as I could live with the autistic meltdowns (basically a specialized form of panic attack afflicting those on the spectrum) before Paxil removed the need to do so, but why do that if it's possible I don't have to?

To be clear, I am not absolutely certain that I have depression and just as uncertain as to what my new doctor's reaction to what you've read here will be on Monday. Perhaps the crushing sadness caused by permanent unemployment and permanent loneliness will just be something I must tolerate for the rest of my life. However, I've never been open to the possibility of antidepressants before, so exploring medication as a solution to this problem is undiscovered country. Since I have determined that the brute facts of my life are immutable, the logical goal ought to be to find a way to be happy within those circumstances a and those limitations. It is by no means clear to me that there exists a pill that will aid me in my goal of becoming as happy as I can be, but I owe it to myself to try whatever I can to get there.

-Frank