On coping with depression in confinement

Depression is a lot like jail. Because of depression, you may spend months without going outside, have trouble sleeping and eating, feel constant anxiety and barely talk to anyone. It’s hard to believe that someone may do it almost voluntarily—but that is the state I’ve experienced more than once. If just a couple of months ago I’d been asked what is worse, jail or depression, I’d have said without thinking twice that of course depression is worse. But somewhere in early September I started having second thoughts about this. Now I think that the worst thing is having depression while you’re in jail.

It so happens that I know a lot of methods and ways to reduce harm that this state brings, and to leave it rather quickly: for many years, I educated myself and others in this area. But I often noticed that each time, depression reaches some new “level of difficulty” where some methods stop working altogether and others are hard to implement.

In your very first depressive episodes, you may find that doing sports, meditating, eating well, taking amanita mushrooms, or talking with a good friend help you. But then suddenly, such a state comes over that all of these things become useless (especially the mushrooms :) ), and you’re only feeling worse.

At this point, it is quite hard to decide to try anything that is actually recommended to you. It’s scary to try antidepressants—what if they turn you into a vegetable? (Spoiler: they won’t.) What if that would mean that you’re not able to cope by yourself? It’s even scary to go to a therapist: what if others think I’m a psycho? But usually, when a person decides to try therapy or medication, it is a huge leap forward and any depression becomes easy to overcome. You almost don’t experience any side effects.

However, after many years of successful treatment of depressions that visit you from time to time, side effects start getting to you. This medication makes you gain a lot of weight and  that makes you sweat at night; if you’re on the third one, your libido goes down seriously (when after years of therapy you finally managed to find a partner you love and are afraid to lose them), and the fourth doesn’t go well with the mushrooms. You resist psychoanalysis, gestalt therapy makes you even more depressed, and you don’t have the money to get a good CBT specialist… by the way, you don’t really have money to get the original brand-name drugs you were prescribed.

Somewhere at this stage, an understanding comes that if you take your meds and add to them daily exercise, the simplest breathing meditation, healthy food, support groups, and slow down with the mushrooms, the result will be more efficient, painless, and budget-friendly. At this point, you feel like you’ve reached the zen of getting out of the depression, and even if this condition still comes for tea once in a while, it stays only for a couple of weeks and passes lightly.

But imagine you suddenly ended up in confinement; you’re really traumatized and because of bureaucratic delays you’re not able to access therapy—even six months after you first needed it. There is no way to correct the dosing schedule because the psychiatrist isn’t able to see you again after the first visit. You are only allowed to spend one hour outside—in a gray concrete 3x5 meters [10x16 ft] courtyard with a barred ceiling. The walk there is also the only chance to exercise—but still not at full pace, because your knees hurt and your joints deteriorate from running  on the concrete floor, and generally, a lot of your body parts hurt from several months of jail. You’re experiencing the lack of live, constructive, and understanding communication. Concrete walls isolate you from the people and animals you love the most. You haven’t been hugged for six months. You don’t have central heating or hot water. There is no heater or the second blanket. At first, you don’t even have enough warm clothes. You can’t drink loose leaf pu’er tea and can’t even dream of getting some amanita mushrooms… The cell next to yours is occupied by some dude who keeps yelling so the whole corridor can hear him, and who talks to the guards so loudly you already know his stories by heart. You have a new cellmate whose depression is ten times worse than yours but who doesn’t know any constructive ways of coping with it. Her favorite occupation is chain-smoking so that you have to open the window all the time, which makes the cell even colder. Somewhere, new threats of nuclear war sound, a draft is announced. Your beloved girlfriend can be drafted as well, and you aren’t getting any news from her.

The next day, you are brought your case files you have to look through. I’ve never experienced anything more disgusting and abominable than reading my criminal case. It feels like someone is reaching into your life with their gross filthy crooked fingers: reads your message history, looks through your phone, opens files on your computer, questions your beloved person whether she has an “intimate relationship” with you, interrogates your relatives and friends. I don’t know how I would’ve survived this had it not been for the neuroleptic and the mood stabilizer that the doctor had prescribed.

At first, I was afraid of taking the new neuroleptic, wary that since the communication with the doctor was so complicated, I wouldn’t be able to keep them posted about the changes in my state so that the dosage could be corrected. I was also scared of the possible side effects. But the medication turned out to be of very high quality (to tell the truth, had it not been for my arrest, I would’ve never been able to get such a professional doctor and take such high-quality medication). So it was the first week of taking the meds when I started feeling better already. I could calm down much quicker, I stopped feeling irritated by every single thing, and I could overcome the adversities and hardships of the confinement much easier—and I get almost no side effects. I have the energy to keep living and fighting, and even feel joy for the simple things: for instance, a sunny day, or the two green sprigs that suddenly grew from a crack in the floor in our cell—like life, which is stronger than anything else in the world, overcomes any obstacles and challenges, asserts itself, gives hope for a better future.

October 10, 2022

Translated from Russian

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