Valerian Will Get You Back on Your Feet
Of the thirty-one years of my life, I have spent seven with a diagnosis — depression. There is a common misconception that it is some sort of silly indulgence invented for teenagers and hysterical women with too much time on their hands.
I associated depression with gloomy characters in films and books who took antidepressants by the handful — and were invariably fragile, weak, vulnerable. They could be nothing else, since they could not sort out their problems themselves.
I always thought I did not have time even for prolonged sadness, because I was:
- Strong
- Positive
- Dreamy
- Driven
- Happy
In short, depression was “not about me.”
When I was in my twenties, I was writing my thesis. That was when I noticed an unfamiliar feeling of indifference to everything I was doing washing over me from time to time — and then I did nothing at all. Among students it is considered normal to “procrastinate” sometimes: watch ten kitten videos in a row, scroll through a feed of endless memes and recipes, or read time-devouring articles along the lines of “Ten Ways to Hold a Fork You Never Even Knew About.”
I was not procrastinating. I sat for hours in front of a screen with a blank page, one of many. My phone lay beside me, on silent, so no one could ask me a question, request something, demand something or otherwise make me talk.
At first I fell asleep at one, then at three in the morning, and then I stopped sleeping altogether and made it through to morning smoking two packs of cigarettes. I thought cigarettes helped me pull myself together, because at that point they were my only constant. I knew how to open a pack, tear off the paper wrapping, take out a cigarette, light it, and I knew what would happen next. Brief waves of pleasure against a backdrop of steady dejection. I sank deeper and deeper into that state, my thesis along with me. I was angry.
Of course I did not seek help anywhere. What person in their right mind would go to a doctor just because they had no inspiration for their thesis? Valerian, motherwort, Novo-Passit, suffer through the required number of pages, tar my lungs black, and then summer would come and everything would get better. It did not.
The thesis was written and submitted, my consumption of valerian reduced, but I spent the summer that followed in an unfamiliar way: recovering from a stay in intensive care, where my failing health had landed me, and the emergency operation that followed, as well as dealing with leaving a job I loved that paid well. I tried to look cheerful and happy, like someone fate had given a second chance — it had, hadn’t it? — and worked on my physical recovery, looked for a new “interesting project” and assured everyone around me that I was fine.
Perhaps I even believed it myself, until November came. It was not just that I had never liked Moscow autumns, which wash the warmth away with their cold damp, like a leaking ceiling in an apartment. Every year, as soon as the rain and slush arrived, I struggled to get out of bed to start the day, and on weekends I might not get up at all.
Autumn means runny noses and tonsillitis, that irritating cold that creeps into the folds of your clothes, short daylight hours and Dostoevsky plots. I never liked Dostoevsky. Every year the arrival of winter chased my melancholy away as if it had never existed. But just as summer had brought no relief, winter did not help either.
Hello, I Feel Terrible
The first snow had come and gone, then the second and the third, followed by four months during which I barely left the house. I sat in front of the television at night while everyone slept, watching things — dozens, hundreds of series and films. I slept during the day. Sometimes I would catch myself and make feeble attempts to analyze the situation, but soon give up. I could not understand why I felt so terrible and would immerse myself in another film that let me stop thinking.
By some miracle, I found a job in radio then. My only task was to be energetic for exactly one hour on live radio, but even that I could barely manage, at the cost of enormous effort. What saved me was that the program editor and my co-host were friends of mine. On the really bad days, when my thoughts were more muddled than usual, they would “carry” the broadcasts, and all I had to do was read the text off the page. Of course, that made me panic too, but my well-trained voice came to the rescue. After the broadcasts I went home — to the films.
It is hard to believe now, but that studio was almost the only place I left my house for — for an hour. That same friend, my co-host, picked me up in his car, and sometimes he also came for me at night and drove me around the snow-covered city. He knew and could see that I was having problems, and thought this might take my mind off things.
I have photographs from one of those outings. I am jumping in the middle of the street, surrounded by slowly falling snow, a yellow streetlamp lighting me from behind, smiling at the camera. Snowflakes, a pink coat, sparkling winter trees and me, seemingly full of happiness… I hate that photograph. More than anything, at that moment I wanted not to pretend our walks were making me happier, but to go home as soon as possible. But I did not want to upset my friend, who was trying to help me, and I endured the walk to the end.
Endured it so I could sit in my room again, smoke another twenty cigarettes and binge-watch another ten episodes of a series. I was not “sad” or “bored” — I no longer wanted anything at all. This emptied-out state lasted most of the time, but sometimes all those uprooted emotions would flood in at once, all together, always unexpectedly and at the worst possible moment — that is, when other people could see me. The emotions were always the same: the unbearable pain of being a failure who had lost everything that mattered to her.
Back then I grew fond of American detective series: they were long, fifteen seasons each. You could replace your own life with the characters’ lives, have time to grow to love them and feel you belonged in a new world. It successfully dulled my mind, and for a while negative thoughts and feelings stopped tormenting me. Each attempt, however, was harder than the last, and I became less effective at fooling myself.
Perhaps I could have resolved some of my inner problems earlier, but over time they grew and became more frightening, while the feeling of my own worthlessness, gathering mass every day like a snowball hurtling down a mountain, threatened to crush me. Maybe it was time to ask for help?
Already ashamed of doing it, hiding it from both my mother and my friends, I made an appointment at a crisis center. I simply typed “free psychologist Moscow” into Google and booked a consultation. I went there alone on the metro, across the whole city. I remember the sunlight hurting my eyes — I had grown used to existing at night. I desperately wanted to turn around and leave. But now that I had made up my mind, it was too late to back out.
I sat down in the chair in the psychologist’s office and burst into tears without warning. All I managed to say was, “Hello, I think I feel terrible.”
I cried for the first forty minutes. The center’s psychologist swung his foot in an orange argyle sock in time with my sobs. As if that were not enough, purple stripes stood out distinctly on the diamonds. I looked at them, cried, and felt as if I were in a bad film.
When my eyes were swollen and it hurt too much to keep crying, I began to talk. About the “dream job” I would never have again, about the project that had “failed to take off.” I shared my thoughts about the looming lack of money and my fear of being “left behind” in life, of failing to live up to my own hopes.
It turned out I had become a piggy bank for my own fears and disappointments, many of them imagined — but that did not stop them feeding on me, gnawing away at me beneath my skin like wood-boring beetles. I felt lonely, weighed down by failures.
I had always worked hard, done well at school, and put all my strength into beating out of myself the shy, quiet girl I had been since childhood, gradually replacing her with a new version of myself — energetic and enterprising. A year before these events I had been the editor-in-chief of a small channel, a TV presenter; I had a personal life, a substantial salary and a rented apartment in the center. And I thought it would always be that way.
But that relationship fell apart, the new one came unstuck, and although my thesis got a “five,” it left me feeling empty. I traded my prestigious job for airtime on a state-run station no one needed.
Despite the socks that irritated me, the psychologist managed to make a diagnosis in the two sessions I could get through. That was how I learned that clinical depression is a real illness or disorder, and that it was not invented in the twenty-first century to give people something to do between jobs they hate, searches for the meaning of life and staring at their phones.
I learned it, yes, but I was not ready to fully admit that the doctor was right. Even so, I had taken the first step, found a direction and was ready to act. I found a new job fairly quickly, restored my finances and decided I did not want to live in Moscow in autumn. Just then an opportunity came up to go on a work trip to another country, and I agreed, bought a one-way ticket and flew out the next day.
It seemed my plan had worked. I did not stay in one place, life itself kept throwing me opportunities to travel, and several countries and months later I found myself in Armenia, where, to my mind, autumn hardly exists. Depression was not supposed to catch up with me.
Yet another new job, a new home and renovations, new friends I met, a changed social circle, a new boyfriend — it all swept me up and spun me around. I was thrilled with my life, with the city I had found myself in and with a different culture. I sparkled with happiness, infected those around me with it, and silently, in private, felt proud that I had managed on my own, without antidepressants or psychoanalysis.
This honeymoon with my changed way of life lasted three years. I was my cheerful, vibrant self again, steadfastly weathering the ordinary stresses of everyday human life.
Pajamas with Rabbits
My parents’ retirement. Breaking up with my boyfriend. Exhaustion from work. Health problems. I do not know what caused it, or whether there was a cause at all, but I began sliding downhill again. My ability to feel joy gradually dwindled to nothing, and I started crying. At first only when there was a reason, then over any little thing. In public, on my birthday, at New Year. It could happen at any moment, on the street, in a car, in a café or restaurant. Periods of apathy alternated with brief bursts of strength and energy that then led to even greater apathy. Round and round.
Once I had stopped leaving the house, reading and listening to music, keeping track of project deadlines or caring about work at all, I realized I had broken down. I took pleasure in imagining myself in a vacuum, in nothingness. Escaping depression by going to another country and city had not worked. Late though it was, it had caught up with me.
This happens to everyone. You cannot run away from it, and it will not go away on its own. You cannot leave your head on the ocean floor or throw it out of an airplane window. I thought the problem was not in me, that I just needed a change of scene and everything would work out — and that was why I lost.
The people around me said I needed to pull myself together and stop being sad, that I had to force myself to leave the house. But I was physically unable to do it, and advice like that irritated me. “Take your mind off things and come back to yourself” — when friends and loved ones say this, they are often trying to help people who have reached the dead end of depression. But unlike a specialist or someone who has been there themselves, they cannot understand what it is like to want to get out of yourself.
So as not to upset anyone, I nodded and agreed with everything. And inside my head my own voice was screaming, “I can’t do it!” It was as if I could not get over a high wall.
Then I started having panic attacks. The first one happened in the shower, and I did not think anything of it then. I could not get enough air; I wanted to run, scream and ask for help, but it was as if I had been nailed to the floor. The walls pressed in, the shower curtain clung to me and choked me, sounds reached me as if through cotton wool, and the air had been pumped out of my lungs. I was paralyzed with fear — of what exactly, I did not know.
It began happening again, outside and in that same shower. I stopped using the curtain and opened the windows wide. Then the attacks started happening in the bedroom, and I was afraid to get out of bed. The circle of my existence shrank to the rectangle of the bed, my little raft surrounded by a raging ocean full of sharks. But eventually the attacks caught up with me there too.
There was nowhere left to hide. I became sluggish and inattentive, with no energy for the most basic everyday tasks. I would sleep for eighteen hours and wake up even more tired. Sleep and wakefulness had no cycles and did not depend on the time of day. I was not tired enough to fall asleep, yet I felt exhausted all the time.
I spoke only to my parents — and only because they themselves had moved in with me after retiring. They understood I was changing, saw that I was feeling bad again, but tried not to “bother” me.
I slept through that New Year. My mother woke me when the clock was already striking midnight. I came out, drank a glass of champagne, looked at my parents’ worried faces and went back to sleep. My mother covered me with a blanket and said for the first time that I needed professional help, because I had never been this bad before. But I could not even answer. I simply turned to the wall and closed my eyes.
That night my friends called and made me go over to their place. They came and hauled me out of my room. It was a holiday, after all. I did not even have the energy to change, so I went in my pajamas with rabbits, just pulling on a pair of jeans. They probably understood perfectly well by then that something was wrong, but tactfully said nothing. They should not have.
Enjoying the Silence
The clock says spring, outside the window the birds are making merry from morning till night, and on this side there is me, wanting to disappear. A state without emotions, a place where my thoughts cannot find me — I would have descended into hell for that. Part of me wanted it desperately, and another part was scared as hell. Scared that one day I might start thinking about suicide. What if I liked those thoughts?
It is hard to say at what moment I reached a point that could be described as “really bad,” but one day I reached it. It was the day I typed the word “depression” into a search engine and started reading. The diagnosis had been hanging over me for several years, but I had brushed it aside — how do you fight something whose existence you deny?
I found a psychologist through friends’ recommendations. I called, arranged an appointment — and asked my mother to come with me. I could not have done it alone.
During the session the walls advanced on me, squeezing the air out of the office. I do not remember what the psychologist talked about, except that I “needed to talk things out” — but she did not give me a chance. The psychologist recommended mild sedatives, not much stronger than valerian, and sent me home. I bought the pills, but they did not help.
The last time, four years earlier, a one-way ticket out of Moscow had been enough to get me out of that state. Now, it seemed, I had let things go so far that I needed the heavy artillery. Without telling me, my mother called a friend of mine who worked as a psychiatrist in Moscow. He got in touch and managed to ask his questions in a way that broke the dam. I talked a lot, and openly, hiding nothing and holding nothing back — especially about how frightened I was.
The psychiatrist said the fact that it frightened me was a good sign. It meant I did not need to go to hospital yet, and that we could manage with outpatient treatment. That reassured me a little. I also felt relieved that I no longer had to drag the whole burden along on my own, and that someone had a clear plan of action I simply had to trust.
That was how a psychiatrist, antidepressants, stimulants, a daily routine and a meal schedule entered my life, along with a ban on news, films and books. It helped put everything in order. I got up at nine in the morning, had breakfast, took my pills, put on animal programs or cooking channels on YouTube, then ate again, took pills, went back to the screen — and so it went, round and round.
I started smoking a few cigarettes a day instead of several packs, and stopped drinking coffee. The pills knocked me out at nine in the evening, and I started dreaming — an unpleasant effect of the medication. It was as though a nighttime director were stitching together terrifying, colorful, realistic films out of the day’s painful experiences. I tried to see them as part of the therapy.
The pills also made my hands shake and left me constantly nauseous. When it began interfering with work, I took indefinite leave. The long-awaited silence came to my head. I was no longer looking for a vacuum — I was in it. It might sound frightening, but I was within arm’s reach of happiness. My brain, with its power switched off, could not generate negative thoughts. For someone who had spent a long time in a constant state of electrified despair, it was a real rest and a chance to relax.
All my internal processes froze, my reactions slowed, and I still could not get enough of it. While I was not thinking about anything bad, my inflamed, frazzled brain folds were apparently healing and recovering. Soon I began to laugh, to smile sincerely, even to leave the house.
Only a few months passed before I could go back to work. My body had adjusted to the treatment, the tremor and nausea had gone. The psychiatrist said that if I had started therapy earlier, things would have gone much faster. I had worn my psyche out and now had to pay for it in full. But I was still terribly pleased.
I took antidepressants for almost a year. And I was very afraid of coming off them, afraid, of course, that the calm and awareness I had built up would not be enough, that I would not cope and the symptoms would return. I liked being in the soft room my head had become far too much, a place where I could not bump painfully into anything or hurt myself with bad thoughts. I felt everything, but in a muted way. I could not be hurt. I think even if my ex had cut my cat into little pieces, I would not have been able to get upset.
Coming off antidepressants is a difficult, lengthy stage that I postponed twice, asking the psychiatrist to give me a little more time to recover. I learned to divide the pills first into halves, then quarters, then… eighthlets. I can do anything in life now — I can chop a tiny pill into eight equal pieces! Though I hope I will not have to again.
Coming off them took about a month. Although it all went fairly easily and gently, I was in constant contact with the psychiatrist. He adjusted the dosage whenever I felt unwell or some new side effect appeared. Reduced something, increased something else. When that was not necessary, he simply reassured and encouraged me.
While I was being treated for depression, the psychiatrist became my best friend, my mother and father. He took the place of the common sense and willpower I did not have. Curing depression without a psychiatrist is almost impossible. At least if, like me, you have let yourself go until you are a miserable vegetable.
Because a doctor is the person who takes control of the situation. The patient simply has to relax and go with the flow. I felt as though someone had opened valves in my head I had not even known were there. The pressure dropped. It got easier.
Life After
I am coming back to life. I can admit it now: yes, I had depression, but I dealt with it. It may come back, and there is nothing I can do about that. But this time I will definitely be ready.
Of course, I have changed, and I can no longer be the person I was “before.” I still sometimes find it hard to answer the phone or reply to a text. I prefer to stay at home rather than go out partying with friends. And my social circle has shrunk.
I did not start following the news again until almost six months after I stopped taking the medication. One day I happened to come across it online, read it, realized I could handle it — and began reading the roundups from time to time. I used to consume news every day, in huge quantities. Now life has only got better without it; I recommend it to everyone.
Among the other things that have changed: I have become more susceptible to stress, and sometimes I have mild panic attacks. But they no longer determine my life; I have learned to control them. And I try to take better care of myself, not letting difficulties and troubles seriously affect me.
To do this more successfully, I constantly analyze my moods. If I am in a bad mood, there has to be a reason for it. Or apathy: is it really apathy, or just tiredness after a hard day’s work? When I realize I might start sliding downhill again, I take a couple of days off, stay at home and regain my strength.
If I know a stressful situation is coming, I buy a few Persen tablets in advance. Perhaps healthy people should do this too, given our frantic pace of life, full of events following one after another and omnipresent information noise.
Now I can analyze which events in my life led me to the psychiatrist’s office, and which events were a consequence of depression. It is important to be able to tell one from the other — the former must not be repeated, and the latter must be put right.
I also know that many people I know have similar problems. Some take pills, others regularly see a psychiatrist, and some even spend time in a clinic once a year as a preventive measure, to recover. What unites them all is silence.
Talking about depression is improper, not something people do, because even people with depression often consider the illness a sign of weakness, as I once did. I am partly reinforcing that stereotype myself by publishing this article under a pseudonym — opening up completely is very difficult, even though I understand I should not be ashamed of what happened.
I am glad I have told the story of my journey: from being convinced that depression was a cinematic invention for impressionable ladies to recognizing it as a serious illness. It was hard, but I asked for help, climbed out — and even wrote about it. And this piece seems to have become the point after which I can say with certainty, “I am well.” Not bad for someone who once saw in the New Year in pajamas. With rabbits.
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The creation of this article was supported by the Armenian civil society development program of the NGO NESEHNUTÍ (the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ TRANSITION Program)
