If you're a woman in her mid-20s who's being medicated for depression -- in other words, if you're in a situation like mine -- you've probably wondered about the possibility of a healthy, drug-free pregnancy.
You'll wonder even more after reading Lauren Slater's essay, "Noontime," from Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression. It's one of the most harrowing, precise accounts of depression I've read in a long, long time.
I recommend buying Unholy Ghosts and reading the essay in its entirity, but an abridged version of "Noontime" is also available online, here.
A short excerpt:
Because I am a psychologist, I know all the signs. Disturbed sleep. Disturbed appetite. Neurovegetative symptoms. Psychomotor retardation. It is difficult to move; my limbs say no. I stand at the stop of the stairs, holding with one hand the newel post, looking down the slant and considering. I spend a long time weighing the pros and cons of staying put, or descending. The decision feels tricky and enormous.Posted by nchicha at June 28, 2004 02:12 AMAll the signs above are symptoms of depression. They are also, however, symptoms of pregnancy, so maybe I'm not depressed. Maybe I'm just pregnant. Maybe to be pregnant is to be depressed. Then would the converse also be true, that to be depressed is to be pregnant? Of course not!... My brain swims in my head, the questions are overwhelming, my heart flaps.
I make a decision. I get to the bottom of the stairs. Musashi [my dog] comes over and licks my knee. He keeps licking and licking my knee in one specific spot and at last I see why; I have a skinned knee, with blood and all, I don't know how this happened. Perhaps I fell down the stairs, although I highly doubt it. In any case, the hows do not matter, only the whys. Why Musashi licks my knee is because there's blood on it, I have an answer. I have an answer! His tongue looks pretty, a flickering red, but I know it's crawling with bacteria, that I should push him away from the cut, but I don't. I cannot find it in myself to care.
What I find in myself is a fatigue that flees during the night so I am wide-awake and blinking, and descends during the day, without warning, each nap a small delectable death. I nap at all the wrong times, in staff meetings, on the phone with a social worker, please God not with a patient, of course I am with a patient, she being me, napping and then jerked away, my heart's rhythm all wrong. "What's wrong?" Benjamin says each evening when he comes home from work. I say, "It's back, depression's a real mental illness you know," and he nods. He doesn't know. He brings me food, all of it very unappealing, especially the texture of toast. He brings me sliced tomatoes and I am nauseated by the way they look, like fresh peeled scabs on a white platter.