Of course, this treatment came too late for my (biologic-donor) father. His electric shock treatment didn't seem to really help, but that was many years ago, when psychiatry didn't believe in the dictum, do no harm.
A Depression Switch?
By implanting electrodes in the brains of patients, doctors seem to have successfully reversed some severe depressions — and provided a new way of thinking about mental illness.
How different would my life had been? Impossible to say. Other than this infrequent ache, this unfathomable hole in my life's construct, everything turned out for the better. Couldn't have asked for a better step-father. We are quite close, and he is a good, kind man. Someone I am proud to call, father (though of course, being a independent cuss, I always called my mom and my step-dad by their first names: my reasoning being, everyone else calls you that, why shouldn't I?), yadda yadda.
From what I've heard via secondary sources, my biological father, Bruce Richard Anderson, was an abusive ass, sometimes violent, possibly a speed freak, and certainly scary to my mother, both when he was manic, and when he moped in the dark. No doubt, some of the vile history I've heard over is filtered through years of second-guessing by everyone involved. Who knows. All I have are repressed infantile memories, plus a few faded photographs to reconstruct the man my mother once loved, her high school sweetheart in San Jose, who she eventually fled to Toronto with, and then fled from.
wrote this clunker years ago.
Kiln
When the bright spears of sunlightstop streaming, for reasons of their own
My windows cease to sparkle
and the bright emotions riding
the golden shafts
stop also
Left alone with my thoughtsI daydream
of lost father hugs
What would they have changed in me?
A stepfather's gentle shapingmust feel inherently different
than those unfelt touches
Different potters, same clay
yields different jar
My room suddenly becomes a potter's wheelspinning around my head
Vivid memories of old photographs blaze
melting my serenity into slag
Tags: Depression
