Mid-February Monte Report

Well, it's time for another edition of The Monte Report, and I guess I'm doing marginally better than I was at the time of my last posting. After seeing how poorly I was doing my doctor increased the dosage of my Seroquel by a factor of seven. That seems to have been a somewhat helpful move, although the drug makes me very drowsy and so it's even harder to get up in the morning than it used to be.

Yesterday I saw the movie that I mentioned earlier, the one I'd been looking forward to for about a year. I didn't really like it. (The movie is called "Jumper" and it is very loosely based on one of my favorite books.) So now I'm in the market for something new to look forward to. (I'm open to suggestions.)

I've picked up a book on depression (called "Coping With Depression -- From Catch-22 to Hope", by Jon G. Allen) that I started a couple years ago and never finished, in the hopes that it will do what the title promises and instill some sense of hope. In the past I've quoted some passages here, and I may start doing that again. In fact, here are some snippets from the introduction to the book:

"Understanding why it can be so hard to recover from depression may make the recovery process less painful. . . . When you understand the challenges of the recovery process, you will be able to adopt a more compassionate attitude toward yourself."

and

"If you are having a hard time climbing out of depression, you might have been given some or all of this advice: Be active. Have fun. Think positively. Don't isolate yourself from other people. . . . Here's the rub: all the things you need to do to recover from depresssion are made difficult by the symptoms of depression."

and

"The fundamental catch-22: to recover from depression you must have hope, but depression spawns hopelessness."

This all points to the notion that depression is difficult, though not impossible, to recover from. The degree of difficulty is what seems insurmountable to me. I know that it's plausible that I can recover, but I don't know if I have what it takes to recover. And I feel like I'm well down that slippery slope that ends in suicide. The task at hand is to find something to grasp onto that gives me the promise of hope.