Withdrawal symptoms
Jeremy Clarke
Now doctor is telling me my anti
depressant is possibly addictive, Instead of broadcasting them around the depressive community like seed, as in the good old days, he's started rationing them. Every few months I'm supposed to go cap in hand and say, 'Please, sir, can I have some more?' If I was asking him whether I could keep my crutches a bit longer, fine. But I object to catching a bus down to the local surgery to plead and cajole with a man at least three social classes above me for a 12-week extension on my happiness.
At the very beginning he'd told me my debilitating lack of happiness was essentially to do with a deficiency of certain chemicals in my brain. Fortunately, he'd said, there was a tablet in his pharmacological arsenal that would replenish them and I should be happy again in two to five weeks. The thought of being happy in two to five weeks improved my condition on the spot. But the implication that happiness was dependent on molecular structure depressed me again. It was logical positivism gone mad. 'What about my soul?' I said, aghast. 'Do you mean I haven't got one?' He was sorry to be the one to break the news, he said, but no, I hadn't.
The tablets worked a treat. They didn't, as I'd hoped they might, make me feel like I was starring in the musical Oklahoma! But they definitely made me feel almost human again. And now all of a sudden my doctor's telling me I've got to get off them because they're addictive. How can that be? If, as he'd first promised, they merely fine-tuned my brain chemicals to make me feel normal again, what was I in danger of being addicted to — normality? Perhaps normal now varies according to how British medical rhetoric is fine-tuned by multinational drug company lawyers responding to legal precedents set in north American law courts. 'Addictive!' I said. 'You've changed your tune.' Possibly addictive,' he said, and ripped the script for another three months' worth from the printer and handed it over.
The last lot ran out a couple of months back. Pride has prevented me from returning to ask for more, which I suppose means I must still be well. I was browsing in the local healthfood shop the other day, however, when I came across a jar of homeopathic tablets labelled Serotone 5HTP. Assuming them to be something to do with serotonin, one of the brain chemicals I was short of, I pocketed them. The dreadlockal white anarchist behind the till must have watched me steal them because as I went out he said, in the nicest possible way, 'Have you got everything you want?' I wish I'd had the presence of mind to warn him that freedom was just an idea. Instead I stammered, 'Yes, thanks!' and went red.
Having recently slid into valetudinarianism, the vitamin and mineral pills I take each day fill a cupped palm. So for a few days I wasn't sure which was responsible for my new and alarming mental state in which I was either asleep and having nightmares or awake and angry for no particular reason.
On about the third day I didn't wake up till lunchtime, having being chased all through the night by the police. The police were in cars, helicopters and on horses. I was on foot. Lunch was already on the table when I came down. There was a guest, an elderly Christian friend of my mother's. who said grace. In the course of a long and sincere grace, he drew the Lord's attention to Internet pornography, asked Him to give wisdom to Mr Blair and Mr Bush, and to 'bless all our brothers and sisters in Iraq'. As I sat and watched him bent over his plate of roast lamb, praying to his Lord, I probably looked a bit like that notoriously strict county judge who came home and found Laurel and Hardy in bed with his wife.
I had nothing against our guest. He was a sweet, serene old man who loved God with all his heart, whose eyes lighted up at the mere thought of Him. 'And how are you, Jeremy?' he said, turning misty-blue eyes towards mine after the 'amen'. Through my eyes I could feel the devil in me glaring back. I didn't answer. I couldn't. The kindly spirit in his eyes turned to confusion and he turned his attention to the roast lamb. 'He's just got up,' said my mother by way of an explanation. 'He's coming off antidepressants.' 'Ali!' he said. Then to me: 'I quite understand.' And he began to recount for us a 'truly wonderful' sermon that had been preached recently at his church about the kind of vengeance the Lord is going to take when He comes.
Previous page
