I have always been a huge advocate of "whatever works for you." So what follows should be absorbed with this in mind...

At the heart of my resistance to being medicated are two things:
the first is my own experience, since 2005, with anti-depressants (largely unsuccessful), and the resulting unwillingness to any longer act as a "laboratory" for otherwise-bright psychs to experiment with. It is clear today that a mood stabilizer SHOULD have been included in my treatment and why this was not makes me like and trust any psych even less than I did upon my first admittance. I in no way mean to imply maliciousness on their part but the net sum of my experience with shrinks and therapists has been a less than positive one. And much of this has to do also with my mother's own long history of clinical depression, which after 50 ECT sessions, several suicide attempts, dozens of consults with psychs, many more dozens of therapy sessions-has only in recent years, finally arrived at a meds "cocktail" which has allowed to her to function as a relatively normal human being. I will admit to wanting to run every one of her therapists up the yard arm to let them swing but I no longer have this hostility; the distrust however, remains.

Number two is the instability in my life which has predominated since I first signed on aboard a merchant ship at 19. Being gone for months at a time has wreaked havoc with my relationships, with my own internal equilibrium. I am trying to remedy this but a life which allowed me to run from my problems is a very hard one to leave. I've actually got to stay and face these things down, imagine that! But I know in my heart of hearts that until I GIVE MYSELF the chance to try a different life, a settled, land-based life-I don't have a chance in hell of slaying these demons of depression and their attendant addictions. So first things first...deal with the environmental and social issues and only after I have done so will I really be able to say that I gave myself a fair shot at this. Thus am I embarking on a journey to test my own (but supported by some science) hypothesis that mental illnesses arise primarily due to disruptions/abnormalities in one's life-and therefore can be logically remedied by tracing the problems back to their root causes and addressing them.