Update: saw the guy, got hooked up with the drugs. But I refuse to fill the prescription because it’s only for fourteen days of Rem… something (can’t read it after that, a friend suggested it might be a prescription for REM albums? That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spot, light, losing my religion). After the fourteen days are up he wants to see me again and odds are I’m going to end up in some kind of inpatient program. I’m reasonably anxious to avoid this fate, as you can imagine. If there’s anywhere more guaranteed to fuck you up than a psych ward, I can’t think of where it might be. I present a lightly-bowdlerized e-mail excerpt of the meeting here:

“Jesus!
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any scarier.

I woke bright and early for yesterday’s appointment at the special clinic and was standing erectly at the receptionist’s desk at half past ten on the dot, quivering with suppressed tears. And what do I get? Miscommunications, billing errors, doctor swaps, lunch breaks, doubleplus incompetence. I actually ended up seeing the damn doctor at 2:30, by which point I had finished the book I brought and had had two panic attacks, due to the ‘company’ in the waiting area – whose dubious quality I’m sure you can imagine.

Dr. C turned out to be sixty, monstrously obese, and completely bored with his job. After a cursory glance at my file, he scribbled out a prescription for what looks like… well, I’ve no idea. It starts with ‘Rem’ and I can’t read it after that. The scrip is lurking in my purse like a poisonous toad and I have no intention of filling it, for the very simple reason that it’s only fourteen days worth of drugs.

“I thought people were supposed to be on antidepressants for longer than fourteen days.”
“Fourteen days is the minimum you have to be on the drugs to let me get you into the inpatient program at Rockyview.”
“I beg your pardon?”

After the nuclear burst in my head had faded and I could speak again, I asked him about the program, which sounds like an absolute bloody nightmare – and the minimum detention time is THREE MONTHS. He kept looking at his watch, half-buried in his marshmallow wrist, as if to remind me that I wasn’t the only loony about the place and he had other patients to see. I said, “I think technically I can’t be forced to go.” He said, “Come back and see me after the fourteen days and I’ll decide whether you’ll go or not.”

I asked about the outpatient program. He claimed ignorance. I kept staring at his belly – his stained green dress-shirt was partly unbuttoned and an eighteen-inch wedge of hairy, tallow-white fat was clearly visible. He had rested my file on the bulge. I thought: “My God, and these are the people I’m supposed to trust with my sanity and my life? These are our efficient, ethereal, robotic heroes? They’re human after all – disgustingly, unabashedly human. They’re no better than me. That does it.”

I’m weighing my options now, and wearying of the whole idiotic parade of health-care ‘professionals.’ I’m sick of the runaround I’m getting – of the contempt, the far-flung geography.”

Etc etc, whine whine. Up to 11 suicide plans now. I had to discard the one where I jumped into that Indonesian volcano, as I understand the rumblings have subsided. But don’t forget, it’s when you can’t laugh that you’re crazy, not while you still can. No Joker references please.