18 months after Erek's death and I should be writing an ad for Philips goLITE Blu. The item is a little full-spectrum daylight lamp with high intensity that one sets a couple of to 3 feet from the side of one's face and sits for 20 to 30 minutes once or twice a day. It stimulates the endorphins in one's brain chemistry that are necessary to sleep when one is supposed to, that are necessary for one to think relatively rationally, that are necessary to break the depression of long dark winters at a high latitude when one has not been born and acclimatized to months of short days, overcast and long nights. And they take the place of prescription pharmaceuticals in some people when those folks are faced with a depression so deep and so vast that suicide doesn't seem wrong but instead seems like the only rational way clear of that depression...the only relief.
There isn't an antidepressant on the market -- and several since taken off the market and several that never made it out of trials and on to the market -- that hasn't hit me with every negative side effect listed by the manufacturer, up to and including tardive dyskinesia.
Without that light this post wouldn't appear on this blog.
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