dealing with down

You see, I have this friend. He's a real klutz, kinda tall, not exactly the ladies' man. He writes, hopes to go to medical school, and does the rest of the college stuff we all do. At the beginning of the fall semester, he started to get down. Really down.

He stopped hanging out with his friends, spent a lot of time by himself. It was quite a shock, as this friend is normally a fairly social animal, and sometimes pretty funny.

As the semester progressed, he stopped going to classes. He stopped washing his clothes. I stopped in to check on him around Thanksgiving, and he was so depressed that he cried pretty much all day.

Then, on a night in December, he almost committed suicide. He told me about how he had an entire bottle of Tylenol in his hand, and was within seconds of chugging it down. Somehow, as he raised the bottle to his mouth, he remembered his loving family and friends, and the enormous paychecks he earned from the Arizona Daily Wildcat as a writer, and he put the bottle down.

The next day he saw a psychologist and a psychiatrist, and was told that he had something called Depressive Mood Disorder. Immediately they gave him these cute little blue pills that said "Zoloft" and for the next two weeks he was in a hell of vomiting and hallucinations.

And then I got better.

I can now function as a semi-normal human being, washing my clothes and everything. I now only burst into hysterical weeping fits when I realize that "Rushmore" was shafted at the Oscars. What I call "The time in my life where I was very sad all the time and wanted to die" is over. I am now in a phase called "The don't forget to take your pills, and life is wonderful phase."

We don't understand hardly a thing at all about the human brain. However, we do know that chemicals control how we feel, and even how we think. I'm sure that this revelation comes as no surprise to many of you. Yet, I waited until I almost killed myself before I realized that something was wrong.

I'm writing this in the hopes that you don't. If you suspect that you are severely depressed (and not just about ASUA) please go the Campus Health Center and get help. It saved my life.

We live in a country where depression is quite commonplace. Most of the times, all we need is a little help from those around us and we bounce back. Sometimes we don't. Yes, there are many people in America on antidepressants who really don't need them. Yet also, there are people in America who would be dead without them. I know I would be.

Next week's column will be about a pair of cute puppies who fall in love and live forever after they win the lottery, I promise.