Day Fourteen

It's annoying the way that something that's always there disappears the moment you decide that you need it.

What I need and can't, at the moment, seem to find, is a depressed person. On an average day I trip over myself trying to avoid script after script of Zoloft or Prozac or Efexor or Lexapro. Yet when I'm actively seeking a sad panda, they decide to scoot.

Even if I manage to find one, the task isn't easy. The tricky bit isn't to find just a patient dosed up on tricyclics or SSRIs, but to find one that's willing to talk about it. You'd probably be more at ease telling me why you have glaucoma than why you've become so miserable that you feel the need to modify your neurotransmitters.

Then there are questions involving treatment, which will inevitably involve adverse effects, which broaches another sensitive area - weight gain. Antidepressants will turn you into a fatty, which raises the complication that even if you're no longer brooding over whatever made you turn to them in the first place, you now have to worry about your colleagues rubbing your chubby belly for good luck.

So I braced myself for a series of rejections, only to spend six hours handing out Amoxil.