I don't believe in Santa Claus anymore

My mood is really not good. There was a time I would be all about the next antidepressant- let's try something else.

But I've become disenchanted with meds over the years. I'm in a strange place- too scared to try to go off what I am currently on, and too skeptical to want to try anything else.

My current thought is to try to change my sleeping medication. I can't take a full dose of Ambien, because if I do I cannot concentrate enough do do paperwork until about noon the next day. So, I take half. And it works in the winter, when all I want to do is sleep, but not in the summer. So now I am supplementing it with a little klonopin- but I don't think that is helping my mood, even though it is only a quarter of a milligram. And some nights, I still don't sleep.

But Sonata has a shorter half life. Maybe I could take that and take the full dose and be fine the next morning. Maybe that would help my mood, if I could reliably sleep- and no klonopin.

There are two different types of people in the antipsychiatry camp. Some say that the drugs don't work. And I am starting to think that they are more right than wrong. And then there are others who say that it is not just that the meds don't work- there is no such thing as mental illness. It is not just that we are overdiagnosising, there aren't any diagnoses- we are just pathologizing human suffering.

This is where I don't know if I can go. It is true on one level, there are no diagnoses- it isn't clear what we are treating. We are just trying to put our own categories on natural variations of behavior. But that doesn't mean that there isn't anything to treat, ever.

It is quite possible that if I had a very different life- if I was living in a hunter gatherer tribe, or if I was a nun during the Middle Ages, there would be very different demands placed upon me and I might not be experiencing the kind of distress I am experiencing now. But I do live in the now, in this present world and society. And it is this society that I have to function in- and in this society I am depressed. Maybe it is not a good fit.

Do I label what I am feeling as depression? What does that buy me? And if it is not depression, if it  is just that I am not up do the demands of living as an adult in the modern world- well then I guess I should just end it all now. Because after 8 years after getting off of disability, it hasn't gotten any easier. So I call it depression, because that somehow sounds more fixable, but I'm not sure that it is.