bad habits

He walked in and sat down in a heap. He looked forlorn, again. This was his second session. He came last time telling me how terribly depressed he was, and he was right, he was. He had been for years.

He had started on medication about a month ago, and he said that he could feel that the medication was helping a tiny bit. He felt that some of the pressure in his chest was lighter. That was good.

But he said he was still miserable -- the foreclosure, his alcoholic father who was now dependent upon him, has wife's sometimes unstable medical condition,and worries about how long the company he worked for could last.

Then he said again, that he cannot remember a day since he was ten years old, when he had not at some moment, thought about committing suicide. Now, he's thirty-four. He was a bit fearful of how I would react. When he told this to his doctor the man had made him promise that he wouldn't kill himself until he was the psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist then sent him right on to me. He was afraid I would send him to a hospital and he didn't want to go.

But I just shrugged and told him not to worry to much ( of course, he worries all the time). Those suicidal thoughts are really just a bad habit. Your mind works like that. You run into a problem, you feel a negative emotion, or a bad thought pops up, and that feeling becomes tightly associated with other thoughts you have had in the past when you felt like that. The more this happens, the stronger the link becomes. Really, it's like taking out a cigarette when you have a cup of coffee, or thinking about sex when your girlfriend closes the bedroom door, or wanting a beer when they announce the starting line-ups. It's operant conditioning.

This guy sees a bill in the mail and then thinks about killing himself. It's a habit. It's a bad habit, but just a habit. If he hasn't done anything rash for twenty-four years I'm not too worried that he will now.

Still, I hope he shows up next week.