Milligrams

There’s a metaphor many people use when talking about being on anti-depressants: the floor. The idea that a floor is raised when you take anti-depressants, up from a nearly bottomless chamber, to the light, where it stops just short of feeling normal, and rests. This recessed floor serves as the bottoming-out point for the patient from now on. They’ll say, “There was a floor past which I could no longer go down.” That’s why it’s called a floor – you can’t go down from there. And anti-depressants raise that floor for everyone I’ve heard from who took the drugs.

I think there must be something in the metaphor here, that “the floor” means something. Of course, it’s obvious that the floor is the bottom, what we tread upon, which is how the depressed person often feels: walked all over by life.

But is there something else to the “floor” metaphor? I think it’s about the return to feeling like other people. Walking around without a floor, the depressed person is lacking something that everyone else has, a bit of architecture. When the floor is raised, or created, by the drugs, the depressed person suddenly feels human again, a part of the collective, because they, too, now have a part of their house that’s so important.

This leads to a loss of that solitude that depression brought on. The depressed person begins to feel the inklings of connection with other people, an affinity, an understanding of one another. Hey, I’ve got a floor under me, too! I can live with the confidence that any little thing that might happen today will not destroy me, as it used to.

Having a floor brings us back from depression in two ways: by providing a baseline of mood that cannot be crossed, a new bottom that’s acceptably high enough to keep us out of trouble; and it gives us a metaphor for our intangible emotional disturbances, making them easier to visualize, to see finally that we’re back from the brink.