Appendix (4): Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression

Good Mood

Home
About Julian Simon
Table of Contents
Ways to Overcome Depression
Conquering Depression, Enjoying Life
Download Chapter
Buy the Book

back to
depression community

send this page to a friend

Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 2

cont.

In April, l976, I was employed selling real estate in an office where my husband, Eddie, was boss. I was totally functioning and happy. But he hated his job so he resigned. When he resigned they said, "Take Gloria with you. You're a team." That was a blow to my self-esteem at the time. I think that's where the clinical depression, the illness itself, was setting in...

I totally lost myself during this clinical depression. I didn't know who this other person was and felt I was going crazy. Where was Gloria? Where was this once-confident person?...

...The worst for me was sleep disturbance-- the inability to get any rest at all, not even one hour's sleep at night. In regular life, I'm not an eight-hour sleeper, I only need four hours of good sleep.

During the clinical depression I thought my husband should get a divorce and marry a young woman and live in a tract house and raise little children. So that's what I told him to do...

As my depression wore on, I stopped talking to my friends. I didn't want to tell them I was depressed because I didn't want them to worry about me.(11)

An English writer:

My wife, who visited me nobly at least twice a week for the whole eleven months of my confinement ...was the only person to whom I dared confide my horrors, and I tried hard to show my train of reasoning. Roughly it was that I was a sort of opposite of Jesus Christ. Satan's job had been to catch a man, get him to sell his soul to him completely and utterly, like Faust, and then take him down alive into the pit. That was a sort of necessary counterweight to the resurrection of Jesus and the elect. I was the man. But if I could only kill myself, it might blow up the whole Universe, but at least I would get out of eternal torture and achieve the oblivion and nothing- ness for which my soul craved. I did in fact make three attempts at suicide, the most serious of which was when I tore myself from my attendant and threw myself in front of a car, with my poor wife, who was visiting me, looking on.

Although my attempts at suicide failed, they had one satisfactory effect; the doctors increased my drugs. As long as I was able to attain unconscious- ness at night (with the aid of three or four doses of paraldehyde), and to maintain a fairly soporific state during the day (with anything up to four tablets of allonal), I could just keep the horrors at bay. My whole conscious effort was now directed towards the aim of putting off the moment when I would disappear finally into Hell...

By this time, say four or five months after my arrival, I had evolved a definite technique to help me in this effort of getting through the days and nights. I had frankly admitted my position. God had turned His back on me and left me to Satan, but perhaps I could persuade Satan to put off the evil day a bit. That was all I asked for, and it seemed to me I stood a chance of getting some postponement if I could worship Satan really properly. So I evolved my own little rituals--they incidentally have little to do with genuine Satanism, which is obviously much more closely associated with my manic periods.

Every night I said the Lord's Prayer backwards, letter by letter, smoking three ritual cigarettes as I did so. By that time the drug I had taken used to begin to work, and I always got to sleep before I had finished the prayer...(12)

top | continued | site map | send page to friend
chapt. 2 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

HealthyPlace.com Depression Center Links
home ~ site map

HealthyPlace.com Homepage
Chat ~ Forums ~ Communities
HealthyPlace.com Films ~ HealthyPlace.com Radio ~ News
Site Map ~ Web Tour ~ Advertise ~ Email Us
send this page to a friend

We subscribe to the HONcode principles of the Health On the Net Foundation.