Hiraeth Excerpt (Interlude: Mental Health and Other Team Sports, Part One)

The following is an excerpt of:

Hiraeth: 

The Boy Who Dreamed and the Big Bad Wolf Which He Became

By Tex Batmart

If you haven’t been with us from the start, check out Chapter One here

Interlude: Mental Health and Other Team Sports (Part One)

He’d hit puberty a bit earlier than expected, but that only meant that his mental health began deteriorating much more quickly. Over the years, he visited several counselors, all of whom attempted to manipulate him into bargains or behaviors which he found repulsive. And, having been thusly challenged, he responded with acerbic wit and levied the full weight of his hatred and intelligence upon them. He found a sort of glee in dismantling them, like broken toys ripped apart for spare pieces. The final counselor with whom he ever spoke was seeing both he and his girlfriend in the summer of 1998.

One day he happened to compare notes with his friend, Dave Feise, and discovered that they’d been seeing the same professionals, often at the same time. When they checked to see how many had retired, and how soon after having seen them, they were both pleased to discover that they were an effective team. Many years later, Tex would entertain the notion of seeking someone out who might be of some assistance to him, but things kept getting in the way, and, in truth, he was afraid of tarnishing what had been, until that point at least, a perfect game.

When he was sixteen, he was diagnosed with Manic Depression, and very nearly forced to take the latest wonderdrug in the growing Mental Health Industry. He’d been a minor, and on poor terms with his mother at the time, and had he not gone with the deep feeling in his gut that something bad would happen, would most likely have been forced to continue on a regimen of Prozac. The following year, after he’d started up with Her, she’d let him try one of hers, and he took it, curious to see what might have happened all that time ago.

Most doctors will say that it takes four to six weeks for those type of medications to start having a positive effect, but it was less than half an hour until Tex began to suffer from uncontrollable auditory hallucinations. He knew then that he had been correct to waive his family doctor off. Later, he tried Wellbutrin for a while, but found that, rather than cure him of depression, it left him only in a state of rage. It wasn’t until he was hospitalized in March of 2001, that he finally found something which worked for him, though he was never able to get another prescription, as there are no Drug Rep kickbacks to be made from Lithium.