Antihistamines and the Big Sad

On itching vs despair

Photo by Ilona Mester on Unsplash

It has been a season heavy on the ragweed, which blew up all my plans. Normally, of course, what you do in an itchy sneezy situation is you take an antihistamine and quit your whining and get on with things.

However, since at least 2001¹, I’ve been one of these rare people for whom antihistamines—any antihistamine, from the hoariest old chlorphenamine to the shiniest new bilastine—trigger an instant depressive episode, which lasts exactly as long as the antihistamine does, and then lifts immediately, bringing me back to my old self again as easily as it knocked me down.

Alas, I am also one of these people who suffers from the classic eczema / hay fever / asthma trifecta—atopy or whatever you want to call it. So simply living without antihistamines when my triggers are on the swirl is not possible.

The obvious downside to this is that I am rendered utterly incapable, sometimes for weeks, while my brain battles the Big Sad.

The very small upside is that it gives me insight into depression that I would otherwise have never had, since before this all began I was an overwhelmingly forceful person of stainless steel mood, and had little understanding of or sympathy for gloomy whingers.

One interesting thing I have discovered is that there are different flavors of depression. There is a type, which sufferers of PMS/PMT may know well, which, from the inside, seems to cause everyone else in the world to become utterly insufferable. Your significant other, mysteriously under the influence of your own hormones or brain chemistry, cannot stop blathering about boring or irritating things, and begins to torment you by leaving out dirty spoons or delaying action by over three seconds when you ask them to take out the recycling.

There is a type of depression that simply empties your head of any idea except the one about your having no ideas in your head and therefore doomed to never having another one and therefore you should give up writing and apply for a job at the supermarket immediately before you die in penury while your child starves. (Possibly specific to writers.)

This type is also associated, in my experience, with finding nothing very pleasurable—not music, not books, not films, not even the antics of your adorable cats or the smile of your beautiful kiddo— except possibly mountains of sugar, and that not even really pleasurable so much as intensely tolerable.

Then there is a bizarre type that I’ve only had a couple of times, the last time being in Germany, when Fiamma was a toddler. She was babbling happily and beautifully in a patch of spring sunlight on the floor, where she combined the odd objects I’d given her—whisk, newspaper, wooden blocks, empty boxes—in novel and exciting ways, many percussive. I, on the other hand, lay down upon the cold tile floor, pressed my cheek against it, and closed my eyes. It felt sensible to do this. It felt nothing could be more sensible. And I thought, lying there, I don’t see why I should ever get up. I might not have, except I had to feed the baby. I had taken a loratadine, because the flowers were in bloom.

This is the type of depression I was reminded of when I read about the proposal that depression is physiologically similar to the state of hibernation. It made sense. After all, we don’t know what the bears are feeling when they crawl into a cave for the winter. Perhaps they also think, nothing is wonderful. Perhaps they also eat everything sweet they can find in reach, consider that they have no ideas for the future, feel very cold and heavy and go lie down somewhere, thinking, I don’t see why I ought to get up.

I am glad that I have never felt like dealing myself any worse unkindness than lying down on a cold tile floor, and hope I never do.

Anyway, all this is to say that I have been forced by botanical events to take the demon pills over the past month, and I have not written nearly as much as I’d like. When I do write things, I hate them and start editing and then simply deleting them wholesale, and fortunately have the good sense to close my laptop before I start deleting all trace of any word I ever set down from the beginning of time, chasing them across dead blogs and social media and the entire Internet and making a bonfire of all the printed pages, because in that state I certainly would like to.

Enjoy your sunshine, clover and buttercups, friends. I’ll see you when the vegetal riot dies down.

I can’t imagine putting a post about antihistamine sadness behind a paywall. What if someone needs to know about it, who is chronically sad and doesn’t realize it’s the DRUGS? Nevertheless, you could still pay for a subscription anyway, just to cheer me up. Big shiny eyes sad face! (Or just like or share.) Thanks for reading!

1. In 2001, I was diagnosed with asthma and given a corticosteroid inhaler, a prescription for Zyrtec (still under patent), and a prescription for Singulair, aka montelukast. Today, the neuropsychiatric side effects of montelukast are well known, and doctors are encouraged to try pretty much everything else before trying that. No one knew it then, though. After 9/11, we were all out of our minds more or less (whereas Rudy Giuliani, who ordinarily is out of his mind, was briefly scared into his right mind), and then as the New York Times and others began drumming up popular support for an invasion of Iraq, I began to freak out. I freaked out reading about the abuses of Saddam Hussein’s government; I freaked out imagining my own country using my own taxes to kill innocents in Iraq the way Al Qaeda had killed the people in the towers. I started to think evil was everywhere, that there was no reason anymore that horrible things that happened to other people shouldn’t also happen to me. The worst thing was that it was true: there was no reason they shouldn’t. It was like I was a child in bed, terrified of the vampire I knew to be living in my closet, only it was broad daylight and I was convinced a murderer would jump out from behind a dumpster and stab me, even though I was walking with my boyfriend on a busy street to the subway station. I had never had thoughts like this before, and I was amazed to discover that even after I had logically dismantled all my fears, they would answer back, “NEVERTHELESS,” and there I was, stuck with them. My thoughts would go round and round, playing the same terrible ideas. I described it at the time as having been all my life perfectly able to pull myself up out of any ditch I’d fallen into, only to find myself suddenly in a crevice so deep I could no longer climb out without help. When I stopped the prescriptions, all the anxiety stopped.