Vacation

I still question the usefulness of such a kind of post, given there doesn’t seem to be any regular follower of this blog, but just in case I’m wrong…

I’ll be away for around 4 days starting from tomorrow, for a short vacation in Tuscany (Italy). It saddens me a bit to say it’ll be a eating and fishing-oriented vacation, yeah just like the ones of retired persons. But I’m not ashamed of that: eating and fishing are two of few the things I enjoy in life, though I think only new and interesting fishing locations may justify such a long travel. But it’s sad because if we keep spending our time together like some 50 years old fellows, me and my friends aren’t going to get in touch with girls even in a million years.

Not that I feel an intense urge for romantic relationships, but actually getting laid some times wouldn’t be that bad I guess. I know I don’t have the persuasion skills to convince a girl to have sex with me, and lying about my feelings to get laid is something I strongly refuse to do, but in the right situation, and with the help of alcohol, probably there’s some chance I could get near a girl and talk to her without panicking. My friends seem to be even more interested from the romantic side of things, and are surely more skillful than me in social settings, so I don’t understand why the behave like they don’t give a damn. Maybe they’re just too lazy to even try.

By the way, I hope the first days (the eating-oriented ones) run fast and without troubles, so I can concentrate on the fishing. It’s been almost a year since I had my last serious fishing session, and I badly need to fish: it’s an urge I’ve been feeling more and more in the last weeks, but I’ve been suppressing it because I needed to study. I also hope this time we actually land some nice carps, but it’s not a requirement for enjoying some time immersed in a quiet and relaxing environment, and water just has that magnetic feeling to me I can’t stop watching it.

I’m sure fishermen understand what I mean, just look at these fantastic pictures of the lake I’m going to:

That’s all, if I don’t get a food poisoning, drown, or die on the road, I’ll be back for Thursday or Friday.

One hour-long attention span

Nothing relevant happened today, did some more studying, and lost almost a hundred hair, yeah! Like I have so many of them I could sell them to wig makers… It’s so depressing and frustrating, nothing seem to get better in my life, perhaps excluding my university performance, and even if I don’t care for the most part about my life being a complete failure, I have already enough health concerns to think of, I don’t really need other new shit to worry about.

So I started taking some food supplements and applying some kind of lotion in the hope of stopping this sudden hair loss. I might just believe those who say my problems are all psychosomatic, but even if they are what can I do? Doing what I like instead of doing what people expect me to do never helped with my sleep, psoriasis or digestion, so why should it help with hair loss? If it is really situational depression, then the only way I can see to exit this situation is to kill myself, because the situation is the way life works in this fucking society.

But this isn’t what I meant to write tonight, I’m going to analyze in some detail how I live social situations with my friends from a specific point of view: tonight we went out to eat and drink something, and for the first hour or so I was more or less comfortable, the topics of conversation were related to video games or computer science so it was not impossible for me to say something, even if it they were mostly remarks. But then my ability to concentrate started to fade, and I really was having a hard time following the conversations, especially since I wasn’t much interested about the usual WoW-related discussions between my two friends. Unfortunately, my friends sometimes expected me to participate in the conversation and actually understand what they said, so I had to make some serious efforts to follow through their chat.

I don’t know if this drop in my ability to concentrate was somewhat related to the pub getting more crowded, but I don’t think so, I wasn’t much anxious, probably because there were no girls in the near surroundings. What I can say for sure is that one hour is a limit I encounter often while following university lessons, doing psychotherapy or playing guitar, after that hour it looks like I suddenly get bored and need to do something else. Weird, indeed, but the pattern suggests how this ease of boredom is a primary factor that undermines most of my daily activities, and solving that will probably lead me a long way in improving my life. Now if only I could know what’s the cause… I’m not even confident an average psychiatrist will have a clue, and by the way, I fear them. I’m sure they’ll instantly try to medicate me, but I’m not going to take medication until I’ll be fucking sure I really need it, I’m not going to ruin my life even more by becoming addicted to some drug.

So the pharmaceutic industry is evil indeed…

Here’s what I found looking up the SSRI my mom suggested me to try 3 years ago, during one of my first episodes of depression:

For 10 years, GlaxoSmithKline’s marketing of the drug stated falsely that it was not habit forming. In 2001, the BBC reported the World Health Organization had found paroxetine to have the hardest withdrawal problems of any antidepressant. In 2002, the Food and Drug Administration of the United States published a new product warning about the drug, and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations found GSK guilty of misleading the public about paroxetine and breaching two of the Federation’s codes of practice. The British Medical Journal quoted Charles Medawar, head of Social Audit: “This drug has been promoted for years as safe and easy to discontinue…. The fact that it can cause intolerable withdrawal symptoms of the kind that could lead to dependence is enormously important to patients, doctors, investors, and the company. GlaxoSmithKline has evaded the issue since it was granted a license for paroxetine over 10 years ago, and the drug has become a blockbuster for them, generating about a tenth of their entire revenue. The company has been promoting paroxetine directly to consumers as ‘non-habit forming’ for far too long.” Paroxetine prescribing information posted at GlaxoSmithKline now acknowledges the occurrence of a discontinuation syndrome, including serious discontinuation symptoms.

A British Government parliamentary inquiry into a number of prescription and over the counter drugs noted problems with SSRI antidepressants including withdrawal, suicidal thoughts and other adverse effects. The inquiry found that paroxetine (Paxil, Seroxat) has, more commonly than other SSRI antidepressants, a very devastating impact on some users’ lives. Since the FDA approved paroxetine in 1992, approximately 5,000 U.S. citizens have sued GSK. Most of these people feel they were not sufficiently warned in advance of the drug’s side effects—particularly the withdrawal syndrome discussed above, after GSK had specifically advertised the drug as non-habit forming

In the UK since 2001 lawsuits have been filed representing people who have been prescribed Seroxat. They allege that the drug has serious side effects, which GlaxoSmithKline downplayed in patient information.

In early 2004, GSK agreed to settle charges of consumer fraud for $2.5 million (a tiny fraction of the over $2.7 billion in yearly Paxil sales at that time). The legal discovery process also uncovered evidence of deliberate, systematic suppression of unfavorable Paxil research results. One of GSK’s internal documents had said, “It would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy [in children] had not been demonstrated, as this would undermine the profile of paroxetine”.

On January 29, 2007, the BBC broadcast a fourth documentary in its Panorama series about the drug Seroxat. This programme, entitled Secrets of the Drug Trials, focused on three GSK paediatric clinical trials on depressed children and adolescents. Data from the trials show that Seroxat could not be proven to work for teenagers. Also, one clinical trial indicated that adolescents were six times more likely to become suicidal after taking it.

I confirm the withdrawal problems, when I forgot to take the pills I felt so bad I wished I was dead even more. Then I asked myself why, and took the damn pills. In retrospective, deciding to stop taking Paroxetine after a few weeks of treatment (slowly decreasing the intake to reduce withdrawal symptoms) was a wise decision. People struggling to get off this drug have all my support and respect.

I know this is capitalism and the other systems have failed and shit like that, but hell, we’re talking about children and suicides here!
And while an unlucky man could be sentenced to death because he’s supposedly a murdered, the people working on that company are still there and they’re still making billions. So someone tell me what’s the difference? They’re both murderers. No, wait, the former might even be innocent!
I know, this is only a simple example of the twistedness of this world, but the point I’m trying to make is: are depressed people really sick? Refusing in participating to this massacre we call life is really a sign of insanity? Or do I see things this way because I’m depressed?
Damn, I wish I could know what’s wrong and right without even thinking, as religious people do, but most of the time I’ll be lying myself.

The way politics and economics are exploited to drain money from the poor and bring even more wealth to the rich really drives me mad, so this will not be the first time I’ll complain about that.

Anyway, today I feel somewhat better than yesterday, the depressive thoughts are still here, but they’re easier to suppress. The lack of something interesting and challenging for my mind to wonder about clearly leads to boredom, and boredom leads to depressive thoughts. So I need a new obsession, even though I’m not dropping my previous one, guitar: I always loved rock and metal music and someday I might be able to play in a band. But given my current problems with mood, memory and social anxiety, it’ll be all pointless. You can’t just be in a band and keep forgetting your songs and panic when you’re on the stage…

Hopefully my new obsession will come soon, as always. I tried to make this blog my new obsession, but it worked for about 10 hours, as I should have expected, I’ve never been much passionate about writing. Though lately I started to suspect how my “ability” to get bored might be growing exponentially with time; I just hope this isn’t true, because if that’s what’s really happening, I’m screwed.
So if I’m going to be screwed, I need to be prepared for that, and even if I hate to say this, I’m tempted to take some of that Paroxetin. I still have a couple dozen of pills here at home. But you can’t take that fucking stuff as it was a serotonin candy, it’s fucking addictive and you got to be prepared for the whithdrawal when you stop taking it. If only I could afford some weed or such…