ten things to know if you're taking an anti-depressant

1) It’s important to know what you’re taking the medication for. This might seem like an obvious point, but I see patients all the time who are taking anti-depressants and don’t know why they’re taking them. What are you targeting with the medication? Anti-depressants can be described for different things: depression, anxiety, pain management, obsessiveness, vertigo. It’s a good first step to narrow it down to one of these categories, but it’s possible to be even more precise. Depression, for example presents with different symptoms in different people. For one person, depression may present with irritability, feelings of sadness and loss of interest in usually pleasurable activities. In another person, depression may present as loss of appetite and sleepiness. If you don’t know why you’re taking the medication, it will be impossible to know if the medication is doing what it was intended to do.

picking up the pieces

ONE OF MY PATIENTS is a young man, twenty years old, who sustained a brain injury last year after shooting himself in the head. He can’t remember how it happened, which is commonly the case with injuries of this magnitude. There’s often a chunk of memory from the days or hours leading up to the injury that’s lost, as well as a period of time after the injury during which the person cannot remember any details. Sometimes the amnesia goes back for months, often erasing major events such as getting married, the loss of a family member or having children. In this case, he can't recall what led him to shoot himself, so it has remained somewhat of a mystery.

levitation

I’VE BEEN GOING in to work this week a couple hours early so that I can finally finish the mural I’ve been working on for like a year. I still have about 15 hours of painting left before the Peaceful Habits classroom is complete, and now that the book has been put to bed for a while, I thought I’d try to finish it up.

what the sign says

NOW THAT WE LIVE in a different neighborhood, I have a new commute into the city. It’s a cool ride. I bike from our apartment near Memorial Park, all along Buffalo Bayou, into downtown Houston — and I never have to stop at a stop sign or a traffic light. The bike trails go over and under the surface streets.

brainglow

BRAINGLOW is the visual adornment of a cartoon brain — usually represented as a disembodied organ — with an outward-radiating illumination-of-sorts. Brainglow doesn’t exist in nature, of course. Brains don’t literally glow blue-green. But you’d never know it from the pictures of brains you’re likely to encounter walking through a bookstore or surfing the internet these days. You see brainglow everywhere — dust jackets, glossy conference brochures, websites promising heightened brain power.

hara hachi bun

THERE’S A CONFUCIAN teaching that instructs people to eat until they are 80% full. As the saying goes, “eight parts of a full stomach sustain the man; the other two sustain the doctor.” I can’t remember who told me about this tradition, but it has stuck with me ever since, and I see echoes of this wisdom in various aspects of life that have nothing to do with eating. A broader interpretation of the teaching might be: “You don’t always have to fill something to its capacity.”

small gold box

I FOUND HIM near the nurse’s station in his wheelchair, receiving a cup of pills in his hands. His right leg, badly mangled in the accident, had been screwed and pinned back together and wrapped up in a soft cast. He couldn’t bend it at the knee, so when I wheeled him around and down the hallway to his room in the locked unit, I was mindful of the large sweep his outstretched right leg made as we rounded the corners.