Impulse Response

I was on antidepressant medication and other medicines for AD/HD or other various "behavioral disorders" for a period of many years, and it was a wrest of control to stop taking them without turning into a social vegetable. If there is any justice in the world, one day the term "behavioral disorder" will be exposed for the unscientific voodoo that it is, and medicines purporting to treat these "disorders" will have to be tested in a manner that acknowledges that chemicals have effects on the brain that don't necessarily show up within an 18-month study window (or, are not within the powers of the study's purview to identify). (A thought: any time a medicine is used to treat a condition that has no physiological definition, I would think about how much the drug manufacturer is likely to know about what it really does or how it really works.)

Coming off of these drugs has been a frustrating, seemingly impossible, impenetrable task. Getting here has happened over an amount of time that I am guessing is just what has been necessary for my brain to re-adapt. And it hasn't done it perfectly; my skin often itches for no reason than (I would assume) that my serotonin levels are low; my compulsions (picking under my fingernails, for instance) are strong and difficult to resist.

A person who is ruled by such visible compulsions on the surface is almost invariably consumed by them beneath the surface as well, and this has been my struggle for the past couple of years as I have slowly backed away from my medication: I can take it and become a paean of rationality and slow overheating, or I can refuse it and never have a truly quiet, isolated thought again. It would be an easier choice if consistent medication did not have the equally undesirable tendency to wind me up so tightly with focus that I would give myself headaches, backaches, even swollen eyes.

There is a reality to the world that is hard for any one of us to see natively, that our consciousness always seems perfect until we go to some trouble to drop an anchor and see which way the waves push us. This is an exercise that some people never do. Unfortunately, given enough time with these medications, I've discovered that both states are reliably troubling. For years I thought one or the other were correct; first, I thought that my normal consciousness must be the answer, and second, I accepted that the medicated consciousness was correct. Now, I am old enough to know that both posits are absurd. Not because an ideal consciousness does not exist - it certainly does - but because man-made tools of attaining it are hopelessly blunt instruments to use on something as elaborate as a human brain. Pardon my awesomely crass and lazy metaphor, but it is like doing brain surgery with a hammer.

My question ending this post is like the question that ends many of my posts. I suppose that there is a predisposition at work here. After all, I tend only to write about subjects that I cannot dispatch. It makes sense, then, that I would end posts with the natural summary of a question - the place the post began and ended.

How do I establish mental balance without the use of side-effect-addled (and potentially damaging) chemicals?

McCarthy

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

-"Blood Meridian: or, The Evening Redness in the West", Cormac McCarthy