Medi?ation: Meditation and Medication in a Personal Tale of Clinical Depression

MEDlìATION: MEDITATION AND MEDICATION IN A PERSONAL TALE OF CLINICAL DEPRESSION SHEVA CARR* What is it like to go on antidepressant medication? What is it like to wake up and find the sheets on your bed no longer attack— no longer offend frothing seething skin?! What is it like to feel for the first time the tickling texture of your hair and to wonder whether the difference you feel is in your hair or in your feel?! Do you know what it is like to be so sensitive that the air makes your eyes sore and so does sleep? To be so sensitive that to pet your dog is to grapple with grimey livery-lack-luster hand heat? * Correspondence: California Medical Arts, 1437 Seventh Street #301, Santa Monica, CA 40401.© 1999 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/1999/4301-lÍ25$01.00 98 Sheva Carr ¦ Medi nation and Medication in a Personal Tale of Clinical Depression To be so sensitive that food forges flaming fireworks in your gut and your jamming joints slide slicing with pain? Do you know what it is like to feel people's pain and your own sadness seep stinging along never-ending nerves? Such that you can't risk your own overwhelming pleasure because it pains the same? Do you know what it is like to be so sensitive that it makes no sense? And then to open your eyes one morning minus simple soreness?! Do you know what that is like?! Do you know?! It is what it is like to be drowning daily and then suddenly find yourself floating face up to the sun. It is what it is like to feel afraid that the sunlight is a dream and tomorrow you will wake up asleep again. I wrote this poem as a way to express to one of my "alternative" health care practitioners that finally, after several years of struggle and conflict and very hard work, after yoga and meditation, homeopathy and naturopathy and acupuncture and Chinese herbs and Tibetan medicine and daily Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 43, 1 ¦ Autumn 1999 | 99 dance classes and chi gong and a deadly diet of beans and bitter vegetables, I had given in and gone on the antidepressant Paxil. Upon reading it, she shook her head sadly and said, "I think it would be good for you to find a meditation instructor, because you really should be able to work with this sensitivity through your meditation practice." In that single sentence she summed up what had been a very personal internal struggle for me, and what I have since seen to be a hot debate in contemplative communities in general. Is there such a thing as physiological depression which requires medical intervention, or is depression curable through meditation? I took my acupuncturist's advice and found a meditation advisor, whose first words to me were something along the lines of, "Don't come to the cushion expecting to be cured of who you are. Practice must be done with pure motivation." Pure motivation. Pure motivation to me is a genuine kind of curiosity to take a look and see what is there without the desire to change or influence the situation. To meditate for the purpose of conquering depression is not pure motivation. My personal experience verifies this. Meditation did indeed lift me out of funks and foul moods, but never did it alter the physical experience of depression. Instead of alleviating symptoms, my time spent on the cushion illustrated to me in a very clear and painful way how those symptoms were affecting my life and the other people in it. If a group of people were sitting in a meditation hall and it caught fire, would they continue to practice or would they get up andjump out of the windows? In the physical experience of my depression, the bodily house which carried me around from place to place and which on all too many days I dragged along like a crueljoke, felt like it was on fire from the inside. I was claustrophobic inside of my own skin. We can work with hunger in our practice...