What Flavor Is Your Mood Disorder?

08/10/201208/10/2012 ~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 2 Comments

“What’re you having?” the rakish twenty-something asks. Still staring into the fluted dish before me, spoon in hand yet inactive, I respond, “I’m not sure exactly. I asked for a double-scoop of Desire and was handed this.”

The twenty-something turns so his torso, while dissected by the cafe table, is visible to me, “What’s it taste like?” Turning my head in his direction I realize he’s: 1) That “guy-in-the-tuxedo” from my cousin’s Mystery Date game; and 2) Sans the tux! I asked myself, why would “Mr.-Mystery-Date-Man” be sitting in a soda fountain, at a table next to mine, wearing only a smile? My chagrin whips my gaze back to the disappointing confection now taking the shape of a poached egg. “Well,” I stammer, still shaken by his cheeky immodesty and dismayed by my immediate craving for carnality, carousal, and covetousness, “It hints at Desire, but clearly an inferior attempt; the delicacy of Desire is overwhelmed by the coarse texture and indulgence.” I decided to shift my chair and face the tempest of his proximity head-on, “What’s that you seem to be enjoying?” I ask, sounding foolish.

“A Raspberry Restraint,” he said as the spoon scraped and clanked against the spotless bowl. “I have at least one every day. I could probably eat fifty. Moderation, that’s what I hear, everything in moderation. Who’re they trying to kid? I can spell; and I assure you that there’s no Mania in moderation,” he said as he slid slowly forward in his seat, the heat of his knees gently toasting my flank; “Sounds like they did the switcheroo. . .gave you a two-scooper of Licentious Lingonberry; they do that when they’re out of Desire.”

Flabbergasted, I now understood why I was staring at the freshly filleted fellow, splayed before me like an all-you-can-eat-buffet stocked with preprocessed food. “But I wanted Desire. . .gentle, demur Desire. . .subtly prurient, hopeful and hungry. . .Desire. . .in general terms!” Sounding exasperated, I wave my hand indicating his wanton availability, “Licentious Lingonberry? No wonder it tasted so obviously. . .bitter. . .each spoonful made me thirstier. . .and there you were, the perfect glass of ice-water.”

I pushed my chair back and stood up trying in vain to disguise my arousal, “Sure, you’re lust personified; carnal; and after, I’m right back here; the one place where we can savor those flavors of humanity lost to us; before we go back to our senseless mockery of life,” I said as I began to leave.

“Sounds to me,” Mr.-Mystery-Date-Sans-Tux shouted, “like you ought to have ordered the Passion Fruit!”

An Open Letter to U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr.’s Mayo Clinic Physicians

08/07/2012 ~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 3 Comments

Dear Dr. So-and-So, et. al.:

I read with tremendous interest and a degree of de ja’ vu the front-page story written by Ms. Michael Sneed in the Sunday, August 5, 2012 Chicago Sun-Times which reported that U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. recently collapsed and had become completely debilitated by depression. Upon reading the story, I experienced a staggering degree of recognition, for I too, have (and continue to do so) hit the same kind of wall as Representative Jesse Jackson Jr.: A crippling mental illness diagnosis, specifically major depression (changed later to Bipolar II) following gastric by-pass surgery.

The story reported that Ald. Sandi Jackson (wife of Representative Jesse Jackson Jr.) doesn’t know if her husband’s depression is connected to his weight-loss surgery. As a person who finds himself in a very similar situation the development of major depression after elective gastric by-pass surgery) I would like to suggest that determining the cause of this on-set of depression is irrelevant and nearly impossible to determine. Based on the past four years of failed orally administered pharmaceutical treatment attempts, I strongly suggest that you titrate the dosing levels of psychotropic therapies dramatically (50%-75% higher) or increase the potency of the psychotropic therapies to compensate for the substantial degree of malabsorption (the basic tenet of Duodenal Switch Surgery) caused by the significant reduction in stomach volume (up to 70%) and the dissection and rerouting of a large percentage of the small intestine (which is largely responsible for caloric absorption). If the goal of the Duodenal Switch surgery is to limit volume and reduce absorption of food ingested orally, then common sense suggests that anything ingested orally will greatly lose its effectiveness (especially if the drug’s efficacy during clinical trials was based on subjects that did not undergo weight-loss surgery). Except now we want the body to absorb what it’s ingesting!

I endured two needless years of trial and error attempting to discover pharmaceutical regimen which would lift me from depression and put a lid on my mania. My psychopharmacologist knew I’d undergone gastric by-pass surgery a decade earlier yet refused to consider malabsorption as the cause of the ineffectiveness of every single prescription. Frustrated by my psychiatric team’s myopia, I returned to the care of my internist; he was the first doctor to consider that my body’s ability to absorb oral treatments had been reduced by as much as 75%. If an increase in dosage is impossible, then a different delivery system (IV, inhalation, transdermal patch, suppository) must be manufactured. Please don’t waste Representative Jesse Jackson Jr.’s time prescribing the usual litany of drugs at their recommended doses: It’s akin to trying to stop a charging elephant with a water pistol.

Morbidly obese patients who were diagnosed as depressed and were being treated successfully through oral medications prior to gastric by-pass surgery discovered that post surgery their depression worsened and their pre-surgery oral medication treatment failed to reproduce the expected degree of pre-surgery success and relief. Your patient is in crisis; your patient is experiencing a major depressive episode; your patient’s natural ability to absorb what he ingests has been compromised to the degree of ineffectiveness; your patient needs an extraordinary, preposterous, wholly unimaginable antidote, not a boilerplate solution.

I salute the Jackson family for supporting Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. through this difficult period and wish them all God’s speed.

The Rough Patch

07/22/2012 ~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

The thoughts washed over me like a warm dishcloth in the hands of my mother, softly scrubbing the days grime and grit away. The thoughts brought comfort and tenderness. The thoughts eased my anxiety. The thoughts allowed deep breaths out of shallow breathing. The thoughts had me wonder, “would anyone care?” The thoughts came to me through cupped ears, uncertain of the message and always certain of the sound. The thoughts came to me in hushed tones, as though they were being spoken in a pew in church, or a movie theatre, or a play. The thoughts popped into my head like bread from a toaster, but with less fanfare. The thoughts came to me like a piccolo in the distance or the bark of a dog through a curtained open window in summer, somewhere far away, present and avoiding distance. The thoughts always came to me as I was thinking of nothing else, crept in like an intruder or a rapist. But the thoughts were always the same, “it would be better if you were gone.”

When you live with mental illness, you also live with suicide. Not as a threat, or a cry for attention, or a misdirected plea for help. A life with mental illness means a life with suicide. And thinking about it daily is a good thing. For me (and many of my friends who live with mental illness), we understand the destruction, the collateral damage, the years of anguish suicide dumps onto those left holding the bag; this bag, now empty, once held a precious life to those it touched. But to the person to whom it belonged? It became too heavy to carry or too light to matter, too crazy or too solitary, too depressed or too manic, too congested or too separated, too observed or too ignored, too involved or too bullied.

To those of you without mental illness a word of caution: Suicide isn’t the end. Suicide is the beginning of horrific nightmares, overdue and now regretful answers to calls, lamentable hours sorting things which recently were belongings but no longer hold meaning, the gash of your disappearance which takes years to heal (if ever). It will never be an answer: it can only be a question.

Personal Assistant Career Application: Word Problems

06/24/2012 ~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

So you’ve always wanted to be a personal assistant to the wealthy, the famous, the powerful! Oh, the perks you tell yourself; the glamour; the benefits; the cocktail conversations!

To be a successful personal assistant you’ve got to produce, produce, produce anything asked of you, since you are an extension of them (but one they keep hidden like a blemish or disfigurement – which you’ll quickly discover).

But here’s an excerpt from a “PA Application” specifically asking how you would handle odd situations in order to avoid adding further stress to your boss’s life. A PA is, after all, the gasket between their boss’s expectations and the reality which most of us endure.

In this section you will be presented with a series of actual situations which faced top-level Personal Assistants. Please select TWO and in a brief essay,
describe how you would handle the situation. Your answers will help us assess your creativity, dedication to service, and results orientation. When you are finished, put down your pencil, remind yourself that every working day as a PA will resemble this test, oh, and you’re top salary will be $10/hour.

1. Your charge, an adept 14-year old boy has recently been expunged from AOL and his mother (your boss) insists that the charge did nothing wrong, and insists that his privileges be reinstated immediately (including a formal letter of apology and one-month free service). When you discuss the situation with the charge he insists he did nothing wrong. You contact AOL as the family representative and discover 2 issues: A) The charge was kicked-off because he was downloading reels of porn videos; B) Only the Mrs. could reinstate the account (given it was her account).

2. Your boss owns 3 dogs, all of which move to Fisher’s Island for the winter via the family jet (as was explained to you during your interview).

Dog 1: Silky Terrier (size: Toy: 7″ tall x 9″ long (excluding tongue), 5 pounds),
and is a constant traveling companion via a shoulder-bag carry-on.

Dog 2 & Dog 3: Bullmastiff (size: Gargantuan: 27″ tall, 135 pounds),
guards country property in neighboring state; aloof; maintain a distance.

You are summoned into your boss’s office and told that the next weekend is when the “pets” should travel to Fisher Island. Wonderful, you’re thinking, strolling across the tarmac, the toy terrier in a Louis Vuitton doggie bag, and the 2 Mastiff’s flanking you on both sides. You climb the small stairs into the Bombardier Global Express and make yourself comfortable while attended to by handsome staff. “The Gary hanger?” you ask.

“Gary? Oh no. . .impossible; we’re taking that to Valencia for the Ryder’s Cup. . .” Well, you think, should I ask about the Citation or the Astra (normally on a 24-hour hold for Nanna); “Waukegan then, the Astra or. . .” She stops you with a flip of the hand; “I thought you’d figure it out, but I guess I have to spell it out. . .O-H-A-R-E.” “Commercial?” I gasp. “American. And the Mastiff’s are in the country so you’ll have to get them there, then drive them to the vet for papers or something. . . American has cargo limits of which I’m certain you’re apprised. . .” Now what?

3. As powerful as she is in corporate America, she’s able to master only one recipe: spaghetti. And she uses only one brand and only one size of the very specific brand: Decca No. 12 (not No. 11 or No. 13). She plans on making New Year’s Day dinner for 25 Fisher Island friends and expects Decca No. 12 to be amply stocked when she opens the pantry door.

It’s December 29 at 3:30 pm when you discover that no grocery store of any size or affiliation in the state of Florida carries Decca No. 12. You call the family’s local grocer here who will immediately send a case to Fisher Island. On December 31 at 1:30 pm Immelda calls from Fisher Island inquiring about the spaghetti; she assures you that it hasn’t arrived and the Mrs. will not want to start the New Year (furthermore, hasn’t ever started a New Year without Decca No. 12 since 1968) without the ingredient which assures culinary success! What do you tell Immelda? What do you do next?

Good luck and we’ll score your test and post the results!

Pages From The Past (Journal Entries, 2010)

06/01/201206/01/2012 ~ Harlan Didrickson

The vestiges of my past hang at the back of my closet: Suits, shirts and ties organized by color and pattern; shoes and belts; whimsical cufflinks rest in velvet-covered nests in a wooden box; kaleidoscope silk kerchiefs lay folded in a drawer next to ironed linen hankies. These things wait, set aside or put-away once the armistice had been agreed. But these armaments which were once crucial to my survival now gather dust in a similar fashion to the life which wore them. Like a warrior returning from a campaign, I now stand in unfamiliar territory: what once was my life is now my past. I wish my reinvention were as simple as a down-sizing or relocation or economical result; but mine occurs as the result of a collapse of comprehensive proportion; I simply went mad.

My madness manifested itself in a broad incapacity to hold things together: think Pandora’s box unhinged, and all of life’s graces emancipated from the mind which held them captive; a purging, or emptying of clutter; raging torrents of once-organized-now-disassembled debris of thoughts; memories like photographs tossed to the winds; a palette of emotion falling face down, once true colors now soiled creating strange and unpredictable influences; flair, forte, savvy and knack bundles ripped open, their dusts snaking across the ground or swirling in the air; fresh conversations gushing at first but slowing to the trickling of archaic chitchat; a tool shed of implements strewn across the prairie; and an inky sense of dispassion swabbed across its interior.

Blindness eventually annexed madness: an incapacity to witness authenticity:

June 26, 2010

Yesterday turned into one of the worst days I have had in a very long time. My niece is visiting us and I guess I was a little edgy about that: she’s a precious yet precocious girl; but having someone new in the house, especially one with such unbridalled passion for life is, well, overwhelming. And the places that I normally go to enjoy quiet time, the lakefront for an early morning walk with Jenni, was filled FILLED with people in various colors of spandex and rubber all waiting for the start and/or finish of some race or another. Therefore, the cadence of steps while walking a dog was intermittently interrupted by throngs of sweaty people moving in packs like gazelles down the savannah. It just didn’t turn about the way I had expected, and change is incomprehensible. My partner of 25 years is such an incredible sport through all this: so supportive and understanding. And while I like the euphoria and focus the Adderall does provide, it also gives me a sense of urgency about things which I am am uncomfortable wth and unfamiliar.

By the time my group support meeting rolled about I was already feeling very irritiable, and had it not for my niece’s preference to remain sequestered in our Edgewater home as opposed to an adventure amidst world-class art and history museums, my other choices were a room full of depressed or manic middle-aged gay men (where are all the young and beautiful depressed or manic gay men I’ve often wondered) or the crippling jaws of a ravenous city whose downtown was infested by oblivious and awed visitors, unaware that the city is our home, not some ruin on the mediterranean; given those bleak options I may have opted to simply stay in the relative safety of my backyard and enjoy its serenity. Perhaps there’s nothing I really want besides not having this mental illness, as it wreaked havoc on my yesterday.

The breakdown which occurred emptied out the contents of my mind; in the past two years I haven’t so much as been piecing them back together as much as letting old things back in if needed. There are some memories best forgotten; there are some experiences best left in pieces; regrets seem to have their own distinct pile; I do feel somewhat hobbled together, as though the first me, the pre-breakdown me accumulated things like an attic; and for the most part many of these things, while important at the time, ceased in their importance, and therefore were forgotten. There are piles and piles of those things; there are sharp pieces of glass and mirror strewn everywhere, memories of moments when my appearance seemed important: but more that anything, there is an emptiness I feel, as though I were walking about an outdoor market an smelling and squeezing and weighing items which might make their way into my mind: the harbor this morning; Jenni in a puddle; Nick’s smile after his first mouthful of a warm dinner on a cold night; winning at cards; I want to learn to be okay with less. Less is lighter and mobile.

June 28, 2010

The Adderall seems to make me very anxious and quick to draw conclusions. I find myself to have a very short fuse. Without the Adderall I felt that the world was moving slowly. That my mind wasn’t filled with this scratching sound, as though the inside of my skull was being scratched by long fingernails; or white noise which fills my head with noise. I find I am soothed when I am surrounded by quiet and calm; I find that when I ride my bicycle I am surrounded by quiet and calm and the errant tinkle of a passer-bys bell. I haven’t felt euphoric since the first dose of Adderall a week ago. What I do feel is a need to move. To be doing something.

I’ve been waking earlier than normal these past recent weeks. Because of that I have been taking Jenni out for her walk. When I was struggling with my sleep meds for the past year, Nick has been kind enough to get dressed, even in the harshest of conditions, and take Jenni for a walk. She doesn’t seem to mind the weather, though. There were days upon days when I literally couldn’t pull myself out of bed in the morning. And on quite a few of them I’d find myself sleeping past the time Nick would leave for work. It was all a very difficult time, and not one in which one learns very much; I was dealing with all the symptoms of mania or depression that I never really spent much time on me, or what I would do. One of my biggest losses is my lack of desire. There’s nothing propelling me towards anything. It’s not that I feel adrift. It’s that I don’t really feel anything.

In these past two years I have surrounded myself with an environment in which I feel safe. It is quiet when I need it to be quiet; there are guests when I know there should be guests; I can nap when I feel tired (which is still daily); it’s as though I’ve created this little world in which I live. And I’m very comfortable here. It’s when I venture outside of the environment that I feel most terrified; crowds; noise; hostility; aggression; these are the things which unnerve me.

The coffee is set to brew at 6:00 a.m. We’ll load into the car after that and go to the lakefront for a walk. I hope that this too doesn’t become common place. I just wish I knew what was normal from what has been reengineered. I yearn for the mental march of my first fifty years; these past two year of reconstruction have been uncomfortable and confronting. Much like, I assume, the construction of an adolescent. Except that society accepts the adolescent, where society shuns us.

July 7, 2010

The anniversary of my breakdown was met with a variety of emotions: On Sunday, 4 July my partner and I were on a bike ride from Winnetka to the Botanic Gardens. It was a warm and muggy morning and we had already logged a 1.5 hour walk with Jenni earlier that morning. But there were a number of bicyclists already on the narrow trail and often they would pass us at a high rate of speed or say “on your left” to alert us that they were passing. All these things seems normal enough, but for me they were very stressful. Eventually I couldn’t even achieve the Botanic Gardens and had to stop by a lake and under some crab apple trees for a rest. More than physically tired, I was emotionally tired and felt myself on the verge of tears. I was deeply saddened by the reflection of my former self, my post two-year self and his physical and mental strength to ride a bike in a crowd, and this present timid, cautious, and moody bicyclist rattled by the velocity by which he was being passed. After some time had passed Nick graciously offered to ride back alone to the car and return, but I idiotically and stolidly mounted my bicycle for the return trip to Winnetka. Once back on the trail, again we were passed by menacing and reckless cyclists which aggravated my sense of diminished capacity, and which catapulted to the present my mentally weakened state. This sadness disintegrated into an overflowing of tears and weeping which sidelined our forward progress towards Winnetka.

July 10, 2010

It feels as though I’m sinking into a lower depression. The days seems harder to muddle through, and without the Adderall, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be of much use. Nick being on vacation is making me a little nervous as I know that he likes to be busy, and frankly, though I provide a lot of the housework around here, I’m afraid that he’s going to want to do more than I’m used to doing. So I will try to keep up.

The crying spells from last weekend alarmed both Marge and I and it’s something I should start to talk to Corey about. Perhaps we should start experimenting with anti-depressants again. I’m not too concerned that they will trigger mania; mania would be a relief from this constant, senseless existence.