Meditation vs. medication: A comic essay on facing depression
Exploring the stigma and relief of fighting mental illness with many tools, in comic form.
Originally published on Fusion in August 2015; then, Fusion became Splinter News and went defunct. Edited by Jen Sorensen, and Anna Holmes. Mini-comics available for purchase on Etsy.
Alt-text is super limited on Medium, so the full text of the comic is below!
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FULL TEXT OF COMIC:
Meditation vs. medication: Facing depression
A graphic essay by Deanna Zandt
Two years ago, I was diagnosed with major depression. I told the prescribing doctor:
“I’m not depressed! I just can’t do any of the things I want to do.”
While I’d struggled on an off with anxiety & depression for about 20 years, it didn’t occur to me that what I was feeling was actually a severe depressive episode.
When I thought of depression, I thought of:
* feeling sad, nonstop.
* wanting to kill yourself.
* never being able to smile, or laugh.
* feeling REALLY sad.
That wasn’t what I was feeling. I was:
* exhausted
* overwhelmed, constantly.
* raw.
* really, REALLY exhausted.
* foggy, distant — looking at life through a dirty windshield.
* still able to laugh and enjoy some things though.
I began to feel hopeless that I would ever feel like myself again. Thus, we can add in:
* not wanting to kill myself, but not really wanting to be on the planet, either, if this was how it would feel from here on out.
Depression is a leading cause of disability globally. (Second only to lower respiratory infections — like pneumonia — in inflicting most years of disability. [1])
Women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with depression, but men are four more times likely to attempt suicide.
Still, most of us don’t really understand what all is involved. Depression carries stigma — we all know that. No one wants to admit having this weakness. But then to be prescribed medication for it?
Forget it.
We have a complicated relationship with illness in general, especially mental illness. Everyone (except Big Pharma) hates the idea of relying on medication to solve our problems.
With depression specifically, there’s this sense that if you tried a little harder [2], you’d be able to get yourself out of it. That medications are just “happy pills” taken by people who don’t try hard enough. (Subtext: or at all.)
For some people, learning skills like mindfulness therapy — which has been shown to help people with depression leave a medication regiman safely[3] — is all that it takes.
Just “doing that bit of work” means you don’t have to take meds.
I relied heavily on yoga and meditation to help me manage my symptoms for years.
I went to therapy weekly.
As things got more and more difficult, medication was the furthest thing from my mind. I looked to food-based solutions, acupuncture, cranio-sacral therapy, and many more holistic therapies.
They all, in one way or another, helped my symptoms.
I was doing what I was supposed to be doing to fix myself.
But nothing could stop the creeping muck that had taken over my brain.
None of the soothing effects of the work I was doing seemed to last, nor did any of these therapies really penetrate through to the scariest parts for me.
As I lost the strength, physically and mentally, to practice my management skills, and the money to pay for various therapies, I felt like a failure.
To some extent, we all come with some level of buffer built around us, emotionally and neurologically.
Our bodies are built with stress-response systems that help us manage crappiness, whether the severely traumatic or everyday kind.
Cortisol is one part of that; it’s a stress hormone that’s generated by the adrenal glands.
When your body produces it at consistently high levels over time, though, it eats away at the neurons in your brain — reducing their number and function [4].
Stress also changes how your brain stores memories. If you’re constantly in fight-or-flight mode, your brain doesn’t hang onto to positive feelings.
All of this, and more, contribute to the complex web of depression.
As my symptoms worsened, my buffer was getting eaten away. It was a vicious cycle.
Sure, life had something to do with it — I always have a lot on my plate.
But the more I told myself to take it easy, the worse I felt.
I was ashamed.
It was a Herculean effort just to get by every day. I was losing an uphill battle.
Medication was an act of near-final depression.
But it was the one thing that finally got to my core… and stuck.
Taking antidepressants started to build my buffer up again. Literally. Antidepressants can stimulate the building of neurons in your brain that can process emotional content. They also suppress stress response like releasing cortisol, which staves off the eating up of your precious resources.
As my own buffer slowly returned, I felt the dirty windshield I’d been looking through starting to clear.
Then I found I had the strength to do some yoga, which also helped.
And meditation, instead of being a last ditch effort to stave off hours of crying, became another buffer-building tool.
I got really lucky with side effects; sleep problems, for example, faded in a month or so.
I worry sometimes that the buffer gets too thick. My old demons creep up on me, tell me that if I’m not living a painfully raw existence, I’m not a real artist™.
Maybe I’ll decide to live with less, or no medication someday. But never, ever again will I consider my medication for my illness to be a weakness. I dig my chemically-induced force field, and the space it creates for me to practice being a healthy human who’s still on the planet.
Willingly. Joyfully.
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FOOTNOTES
[2] http://www.robot-hugs.com/helpful-advice/
[4] http://www.bap.org.uk/publicinformationitem.php?publicinfoID=14