After my visit to the doctor in December of 1996, we began a four month series of trial-and-error attempts to alleviate my depression "naturally".
The closest thing to a medication we tried in those early days of treatment was an herbal supplement called St. John's Wort (a European herb for which there is some scientific evidence supporting claims of efficacy in mild and moderate--but not severe--cases of depression). I had high hopes for the little capsule of pulverized leaves, but a few weeks into the experiment it became clear that I was experiencing no ascertainable relief and, with my condition worsening, it was time to move on. Before moving on, though, we kept upping the dose, hoping that the next bump would provide relief. It didn't.
Next, we pinned our hopes on vitamins. Specifically, we had heard that a vitamin B12 deficiency could trigger depression. However, in our effort to find a natural remedy (and a physical explanation) for my condition, we failed to account for the fact that depression caused by a B12 deficiency is extremely rare, at least compared to the brain-based and psychological causes of depression. It's unlikely that the type of deficiency caused by an inadequate diet and remedied by vitamins would cause depression. Rather, a deficiency acute enough to induce psychiatric symptoms is usually produced by a serious autoimmune disorder that prevents absorption of B12 from the stomach and intestines--and even then it's almost always in the elderly. But medical facts be damned, we were going to rule out any and every possible physical cause for my condition, no matter how unlikely, before admitting the sinister reality of mental illness.
I had just resolved to take a multi-vitamin every day when I returned from high school one afternoon to find that my mom had purchased nearly a thousand dollars worth of vitamins and nutritional supplements from a Shaklee sales representative. I was livid when I found out (not so much at my mom, but at the sales rep). I explained that, at best, excess vitamins are simply excreted in our urine--there's no sense in taking massive doses of them. At worst, they build up in our fat to levels that are toxic.
Since I wasn't present at the sales pitch I'll never know what the rep said; I'll never know if her claims fell within the "puffery" that is legally permissible in sales and marketing, or if her claims crossed a line into something less legitimate. But I know that ethically, if not legally, something seemed off. She had provided an individual consultation in our home where she hawked her goods as a potential remedy to my myriad mental and somatic complaints without ever meeting me, much less diagnosing me. But worst of all, she ignored what her conscience must have been telling her--only desperate mothers buy a thousand dollars worth of unproven supplements for their children. But that day, a desperate mother made up most of her commission.
I hated this woman for preying on us, for profiting from our desperation, and from my pain. I hated her even more for the false hope she gave my mom, and for the failure I knew I would feel when this treatment didn't work--for the disappointment I suspected was coming. I hated to hear the desperation in my mom's voice when she urged me to "Please, just try it. I've already paid for them," and so I did try them.
I began taking the complicated regimen of 17 daily supplements the rep had designed for me. The pills were split between morning and afternoon administrations, and they included everything from a standard multivitamin to individualized complexes of B, E, and C, as well as a formulation of uncertain provenance called "Mood Lift."
The effects were immediate. My urine turned dark yellow, and it occurred to me that I probably had the most expensive pee on the planet. But there was no discernible impact on my mood. In fact, my mood deteriorated as the guilt set in. When I considered how we had been duped into giving up a thousand dollars I couldn't help but blame myself and my inability to pull out of my downward spiral.
With no time to lose, I had lost exactly that trying our "natural" remedies. And by the spring of 1997 I was in crisis. It was nearly five months after my initial diagnosis and I had yet to receive any effective treatment. We all knew the next step was "real" medication, but, again, we kept putting it off in hopes that higher doses or different formulations of the vitamins would work.
They day we gave up on the vitamins was either my sixteenth birthday or the day after, I don't remember. By that point the misery was so constant that I tried to block out the passing days. I remember feeling vaguely self-conscious that my morbidly depressed mood was incongruent with the exciting threshold to adulthood that 16 represents, but as self-conscious as I was, no one outside my immediate family seemed to notice.
The night we acquiesced to the medicine I lay on my bed crying while my parents tried in vain to reason me out of self-hatred. Finally, my mom said "We need to go back to the doctor, don't we?" I nodded. I was just as scared to acknowledge what that meant as they were, but also relieved that someone was finally taking this seriously enough to consider evidence-based medicine.
So back we went, beginning my first real recovery from depression.
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