Got all wrapped up in the election. Was legitimately so wrapped up in the election that I just couldn’t get it up enough to hop on over here to entertain y’all.
Then after the election, I got depressed for a while. I usually go down pretty hard as soon as the weather and time changes. Seasonal Affective Disorder it’s called. I was down hard for a week or two but now it seems to have lifted. But then we have hard warmer and sunnier weather.
When I was down, I felt pretty funny. I knew I was depressed and I kept telling myself I needed to snap out of it, but my depressed mind kept saying, “Why in the Hell do you want to be happy? Fuck happiness! Happiness is a drag. It’s stupid. Why not just be depressed. This is so much better. Besides, how could you not be depressed anyway.
Last year was the first year for a long time that I did not go down in the winter, but I was on an antidepressant the whole winter, often on a pretty high dose too. Lexapro 20-40 mg (often 30-40 mg.) if you are interested. I also take Wellbutrin 300 mg. every day, but I’m not sure exactly what it does. I do like to keep taking it though.
The Lexapro definitely has side effects I don’t like, but the Wellbutrin doesn’t seem to have any at all. I suppose it can raise your blood pressure, but I take blood pressure pills every day, so I should be all right. I can go up to 450 mg. but it’s a bit of a risk of seizures but not much – it goes up from .1 to .5. Big deal. Wellbutrin is a very nice speedy non-sedating antidepressant that doesn’t kill your sex drive at all! In fact, it may even increase it. Side effects are pretty much zero for me. If anyone has issues in this area, I can’t recommend this drug highly enough.
Lexapro is nice too, especially at the higher doses of 30-40 mg. It’s sedating and it can kill your dick or orgasm in a variety of ways, depending on your age. But Lexapro is the least dick-killing of the SSRI’s. Not that I worry terribly about killing my dick nowadays. For all I know it’s probably barely alive as it is. Hell, killing it might even be a good thing. Put it out of its damned misery.
Forget about the Long QT or Torsades du points risk for Lexapro. I don’t know much about Torsades du points, but I know a bit about Long QT. It’s pretty much negligible risk unless you already have Long QT for a genetic reason or you are taking a drug that lengthens the QT interval.
Now if you are going to take a handful of them and try to overdose, it’s another matter, but those cases typically survived, and many did not even suffer Long QT.
Not that I recommend trying to kill yourself with a handful of pills. Basically attempting suicide with the new SSRI antidepressants is just stupid. It doesn’t seem to work very well, and all it does is put you in the hospital.
My father tried to kill himself with a handful of Benzodiazepines. He almost succeeded. He took about 40 of them. He almost died but he managed to survive. That’s another lousy drug to OD on.
A former girlfriend took a handful of Xanax benzos and had the cops come bust down her door. She just passed out. Didn’t even come close to dying.
Another girlfriend took a handful of assorted pills but just went to sleep a long time. I made fun of her, “Damn, you’re a loser! You’re such a failure you can’t even kill yourself!” She was Jewish so that was good for a belly-laugh. Self-deprecating humor and all that, Borscht Belt in upstate New York, right? Woody Allen was good at that, but I always liked Lenny Bruce better.
I had another girlfriend who took a handful of tricyclic antidepressants, and you’re damn right those will kill you. She was in a coma for three days.
In the last few years I dated a few young women. Three were suicidal, aged 18, 19, and 27. I’m starting to wonder how many young women nowadays are not suicidal. Are there any?
I am also starting to think that Suicidality, that is, the urge towards self-annihilation, is an essential part of the Feminine Character. If you think that’s bad, the correlate in the Masculine Character is a homicidal drive to annihilate the other. Neither is optimal but I think I’d rather live next door to the suicidal chick than the homicidal dude, all things considered.