This hangover has nothing to do with binging or drinking. I did neither, though I did think seriously about it. I lingered in the wine section of the grocery store for a few minutes, wondering if I should buy a couple of those little bottles that are easy to hide. Maybe, I thought, I’ll have some tonight. No one will ever know.
Of course, there’s always a deeper emotion triggering the impulses. I think I’m feeling sorry for myself this afternoon because it’s a day off and I’ve been running around all day when all I really want to do is pull a blanket over my head and go to sleep. I got the kids up and off to school. I dropped off my niece, who spent the night with us. I checked on a guy I sponsor in OA to see if he was OK because he’s had some diabetic trouble. Then it was time to pay some bills and run to the grocery store. Now I have to run back out to get a coolant light in the car checked before the kids get home, at which point we’ll have to run to my chiropractor appointment. I can’t break it because I’ve been having twinges of pain in my back this week. Tonight I have to start writing a talk I’m going to give at an upcoming Catholic retreat.
If I sound like a whiny punk, that’s because I am a whiny punk. At the moment I am, anyway. This is especially unsettling because I have little patience for other people who do the same thing. Go figure.
So what am I going to do about all this?
I’m going to get the stupid coolant light checked and keep my chiropractor appointment. Once the kids are settled after dinner, I’ll write that talk. That’s actually something I’m looking forward to.
Life can be exhausting, but you know what? I sought the relentless activity in my life. It’s a blessing to do these things every day. And if the payment is that I have to keep moving when I want to collapse, so be it.
The answer for me is the same answer I give my kids when they grouse about having responsibilities:
One of the big things I’ve struggled with over the years is when it’s OK to be alone and when it’s not. I spent a lot of years in isolation. I’m slowly realizing isolation and alone aren’t necessarily the same thing. Isolation never amounts to anything positive for me. Alone does — when I let it.
I seem to always be around people these days. There are the folks in my 12-Step program, including my sponsor and the three people I sponsor. There are the one-to-three meetings a week, and the daily phone calls. For someone who hates the telephone, I spend a lot of time on it these days.
I spend a lot of time around parents of the boys’ classmates. I spend a lot of time around business associates. When there’s downtime, I increasingly seek out friends. Fortunately, they seek me out, too.
But while it’s never good for me to be isolated, I’m finding that I DO need to be alone sometimes.
Not alone in a brooding, depressed state. That better fits the isolation category for me. It’s more like being alone in a state of prayer or creativity.
I’ve come to treasure the alone time I get first thing in the morning, when I can listen to music, write or just flop my head back. My relationship with the car has changed. Instead of using it as a place to isolate and feed my addiction, it’s now a place for reflection, music and sightseeing.
It used to be on business trips that I would isolate in my hotel room whenever I didn’t have to be out in public. There’s a lot of trouble you can get into with yourself when you’re holed up in a hotel room.
Now, I make some alone time for myself so I can walk around the city I’m in and take it all in. Yesterday I roamed the streets of NYC and spent a lot of time at Ground Zero in contemplation and prayer. I continued praying as I walked back across the Brooklyn Bridge to my hotel.
It was excellent.
Later in the evening, it was time to mix with people again and I did — having a long overdue reunion with my cousin Andrew and meeting his beautiful bride-to-be, Violet. We inadvertently wound up in a gay bar, but it’s not like there’s anything wrong with that. And the other patrons were friendly and polite. It’s been years since I saw Andrew. Shit, I remember when he was small enough to fit in a beer mug.
Afterwards, it was time to be alone again. I went back to the hotel and read myself asleep, which didn’t take much.
If the whole concept of isolation vs. being alone is confusing to you, it should be.
It’s certainly something I’m still trying to figure out.
I’m getting there. Slowly but surely.
Of course, it’s time to go mix it up with people again, so off I go to listen and then write about day 1 of the CSO Security standard.
Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing on Sept. 11, 2001. Here’s my own account.
Mood music:
I was assistant New Hampshire editor at The Eagle-Tribune and I arrived in the newsroom at 4:30 a.m. as usual. I was already in a depressed mood. It wasn’t a sense of dread over something bad about to happen. It was simply my state of mind at the time. I wasn’t liking myself and was playing a role that wasn’t me.
I was already headed toward one of my emotional breakdowns and the job was a catalyst at that point. By day’s end, I would be seriously reconsidering what I was doing with my life. But then everyone was doing that by day’s end.
I was absorbed in all my usual bullshit when the NH managing editor came in and, with a half-smile on his face, told me a plane hit the World Trade Center. At that point, like everyone else, I figured it was a small plane and that it was an accident. Then the second plane hit and we watched it as it happened on the newsroom TV.
I remember being scared to death. Not so much at the scene unfolding on the newsroom TV, but at the scene in the newsroom itself. Chaos was not unusual at The Eagle-Tribune, but this was a whole new level of madness. I can’t remember if my fear was that terrorists might fly a plane into the building we were in as their next act or if it was a fear of not being able to function amidst the chaos. It was probably some of each.
This was a huge story everywhere, but The Eagle-Tribune had a bigger stake in the coverage than most local dailies around the country because many of the victims on the planes that hit the towers were from the Merrimack Valley. There was someone from Methuen, Plaistow, N.H., Haverhill, Amesbury, Andover — all over our coverage area.
When the first World Trade Center tower collapsed on the TV screen mounted above Editor Steve Lambert’s office, he came out, stood on a desk and told everyone to collect themselves a minute, because this would be the most important story we ever covered.
Up to that point, it was. But I was so full of fear and anxiety that my ability to function was gone. I spent most of the next few days in the newsroom, but did nothing of importance. I was a shell. I stayed that way until I left the paper in early 2004. In fact, I stayed that way for some time after that. I should note that the rest of the newsroom staff at the time did a hell of a job under very tough pressure that day. My friend Gretchen Putnam was still editor of features back then, but she and her staff helped gather the news with the same grit she would display later as metro editor.
I remember being touched by a column she wrote the next day. She described picking her son Jack up from school and telling him something bad happened in the world that day. His young response was something like this: “Something bad happens in the world every day.”
Sometimes, kids have a better perspective of the big picture than grown-ups do.
I got home very late that day and hugged Erin and Sean, who was about five months old at that point. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of world he would grow up in.
In the days that followed, I walked around in a state of fear like everyone else. That fear made me do things I was ashamed of.
A week after the attacks, Erin and I were scheduled to fly to Arizona to attend a cousin’s wedding. The night before were were supposed to leave, I gave in to my terror at the prospect of getting on a plane and we didn’t go. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life.
There are two types of head cases headed for a breakdown: There’s the type that tries hard to get him or herself killed through reckless behavior, and then there are those who cower in their room, terrified of what’s on the other side of that door. I fell into the latter category. I guess I tried to get myself killed along the way, but I did so in a much slower fashion. I started drinking copious amounts of wine to feel OK in my skin, and I went on a food binge that lasted about three months and resulted in a 30-pound weight gain.
A few months ago I found myself in lower Manhattan for a security event and I went to Ground Zero.
Gone were the rows of lit candles and personal notes that used to line the sidewalks around this place. To the naked eye it’s just another construction site people pass by in a hurry on their way to wherever.
I was pissed off at first. It wasn’t the thought of what happened here. My emotion there is one of sadness. No, this was anger. I was pissed that people seemed to be walking by without any thought of all the people who met their death here at the hands of terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. It was almost as if the pictures of twisted metal, smoke and crushed bodies never existed.
As I started to process that fact, my mood shifted again.
I realized these people were doing something special. No matter where they were going or what they were thinking, they were moving — living — horrific memories be damned.
They were doing what we all should be doing, living each day to the full instead of cowering in fear in the corner.
Doing so honors the dead and says F-U to those who destroyed those towers and wish we would stay scared.
It reminded me of who I am and what I’ve been through. I didn’t run from the falling towers or get shot at in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Baghdad. But the struggles with OCD and addiction burned scars into my insides all the same.
I was terrified when I was living my lowest lows. But somewhere along the way, I got better, healed and walked away. I exchanged my self hatred and fear for love of life I never thought possible.
It’s similar to what the survivors of Sept. 11 have gone through.
They reminded me of something important, and while some sadness lingers, I am grateful.
So here’s what I’ll be doing this weekend, the ninth anniversary of the attacks:
For reasons not immediately clear to me, I’m in the midst of a mood swing. The day started off well enough, so as a little exercise I’m going to bang on this keyboard and see if I can figure out what’s what.
I woke up at 4 a.m. tired but happy. I was out late last night at one of the planning meetings for a weekend Catholic retreat I’m on team for next month and I was assigned a cool talk to give during that weekend. The coffee was good and strong and I got to work ahead of the traffic and thunderstorms.
I talked to my OA sponsor and talked to one of the guys I sponsor (another sponsee was late calling and I never got a chance to call him back). I wrote a blog entry and plunged into work. Good day so far. I was especially glad to be writing something, since I’ve been doing a lot more editing and planning than writing these last two weeks. I’m always happier when writing articles.
I think the spark for the mood swing happened during the writing of that article. It’s for a three-part series and while I have a crystal-clear idea of where I’m going with parts 2 and 3, I hit a wall writing the first one. I didn’t have as clear a sense of where I was going and it slowed me down. So instead of writing all three articles, I only got through one.
Ridiculous, you say? True, three write-ups in one day is a lot to expect and most people are happy to finish one. But writing multiple items in a day is something I do all the time. I wouldn’t care as much if not for a burning desire to get the series off my plate before heading to New York for a conference Sunday.
The second spark, I think, is that my editor hadn’t gotten to reading my story by the time I left and I had high hopes of posting it this afternoon. This is also me being ridiculous, because it is not time-sensitive stuff. But I am a control freak and when my work is in someone else’s queue I have no control. That stuff I wrote this morning about learning to surrender? Sometimes I suck at following my own wisdom.
So I guess I know what my problem is now. I don’t feel like I was productive in my work today, and I thrive on being productive.
That’s a sucky feeling.
But it’s too bad. I know I just have to get over it and move on.
Tomorrow is the chance to do better. Tonight I’ll just move on.
I also could have gone on a binge like I used to when feeling unfulfilled at the end of a day. But I didn’t.
This blog is chock full of my own experiences with depression and addiction. I even hint here and there about how the addictive behavior runs in the family. But I’ve avoided the story of depression among siblings until now. This post is about my older sister, who had it much harder than me, and whose progress over the years has inspired me.
I haven’t mentioned it up to this point because it’s her story and her business. I didn’t want to violate her privacy. But recently I’ve realized her story is an important part of my own. So I sought and received her permission to tackle it head on. Hopefully, this post validates the trust she’s putting in me.
Wendi’s is a success story, whether she realizes it or not.
Sometime around 1991, things started coming to a head. She started plunging into deep depressions. Between 1991 and 1998, I can remember three occasions where this led to her hospitalization. She talked openly about wanting to kill herself. One such occasion, in 1998, was a couple months before my wedding. Since it was only two years after Sean Marley’s suicide, this made me more angry than anything. My anger was a selfish one. How dare she get suicidal and hospitalized and put me through this all over again. And how dare she do this while I was getting ready for my wedding.
I realize something now that I didn’t realize back then: Depression and the collateral damage it causes to others is never really in the sufferer’s control to stop. And it can care less about timetables. Mental illness doesn’t take breaks for holidays and weddings, for the convenience of others. Given my own battle with depression in subsequent years, I get it now.
I’m sorry for getting angry with her back then.
There’s something else I feel sorry about: Because of my own mental turmoil, I chose to avoid situations that made me uncomfortable. Wendi’s depression made me very uncomfortable. The result is that I wasn’t the helpful younger brother I should have been.
In 2003, Wendi caught a bizarre infection the doctors couldn’t make sense of. She spent a couple weeks in ICU and pumping her full of antibiotics didn’t seem to help her much. A couple times we were certain she wouldn’t make it. But since then, things have gotten better for Wendi. Not easier. Maybe not even happier. But better.
A couple years earlier, she had announced to the family that she was gay. It took some family members by shock, but not me. When I thought about a couple of the more “normal” relationships she had tried to nurture in past years and the depression she went into when things didn’t work out, it all made perfect sense to me. She was trying to live a life that didn’t gibe with her true nature.
When she came clean about that, her life didn’t get easier. But I suspect, because she found a way to be truthful with herself, that some things got easier to deal with. She’s been through her ups and downs since then. A marriage didn’t work out. She suffered some nasty complications from gastric bypass surgery. But she has moved on from those difficulties much more quickly than in past difficulties. It’s been heartening to see.
This post is my long overdue hat tip to you, Wendi. I love you.
I used to be terrified of hurricanes. The fear and anxiety in me would latch onto these storms like Crazy Glue. Yet with Hurricane Earl approaching New England, I’m feeling strangely apathetic.
Maybe it’s because I don’t live on the coast anymore. In Haverhill, we’re not expecting much from Earl. Some of it is definitely because a lot of the storm-driven fear left me when I brought the OCD under control.
Let’s do a flashback so you can get a better perspective:
I grew up on Revere Beach and I think the Blizzard of 1978 traumatized me for a long, long time. Every summer, when a hurricane would head toward us, I’d start having Blizzard of 78 flashbacks of the ocean surging down the Lynnway, right in front of my house, and the waves leaping over the sea wall with chunks of ice that hit the closest homes like missiles.
The tops were torn off some of the pavilions along the beach.
They stayed that way until a beach restoration project in the early 1990s. In the 1980s the exposed frames served as a reminder of what these ocean storms could do. For a long time, every nor’easter riding up the coast filled me with anxiety.
The TV news doesn’t help. Impending storms are more often than not pitched as the coming apocalypse.
From the late 1970s straight through the 1990s, I’d shake from weather reports mentioning the Blizzard of 1978 with each new storm. As a young adult, I developed a pattern of throwing a blanket over my head and going to sleep.
That’s exactly what I did in 1985 when Hurricane Gloria grazed us and, at age 21 in August 1991, when New England took a direct blow from Hurricane Bob.
My step-sister still likes to bring up how, on the morning Hurricane Bob was coming, I came into her room and yelled at her to wake up, telling her, “This aint no (expletive) Gloria.” That was me in OCD mode. I’m a little embarrassed every time I think about it, but that’s OK. Nobody got hurt.
That rough weather scared the heck out of me as a kid, I think, was perfectly normal. Carrying that same fear and anxiety well into adulthood? Probably not so normal.
In more recent years, I’ve overcome that fear, and I actually like a good storm now and again. I love to drive through the snow. And when Washington D.C. got smacked with 30-plus inches of heavy snow in a blizzard during one of my visits there last February, I gleefully walked the streets as the storm continued to rage.
This morning, I find myself wanting to grab my camera and drive to Cape Cod, which never would have occurred to me a few years ago.
Instead of fearing the danger, I want a piece of it.
I’m not going, though. Erin and the kids would not approve, nor would my friend Bob Connors, an emergency preparedness professional who has been warning his Facebook friends all week not to do stupid things like that. Since he sometimes supplies me with high-end cigars, I really don’t want to make him mad.
To my friends on the South Shore, I hope everything goes OK and that the damage is minimal.
I still respect these storms, and when we’re under the gun I know we have to be prepared.
I’m just not letting the fear suck the life out of me anymore.
I’ve seen plenty of examples of failed justice in my day: A judge letting an abusive dirt-bag dad get unsupervised weekend visits just because he reappeared after a few years. A thrice convicted pedophile being let back out on the streets. I never expected to hear about the court discriminating against someone for having OCD.
I usually try not to write posts in response to comments that flow into this blog. I like to let readers’ statements stand on their own. But when someone flags something particularly insidious, I have to share.
The two examples that follow came my way by way of a couple mental health forums on LinkedIn where I post blog entries.
I’ll keep their names to myself to protect privacy.
But to help you appreciate the first person’s perspective, I’ll tell you she’s a certified mediator who provides psychotherapy for adults, children, couples and families. She also does group sessions for anger management, domestic violence and parenting.
I have a special respect for someone in this line of work. As a kid suffering from a particularly vicious form of Crohn’s Disease and, by extension, behavioral issues, I firmly believe I was saved by the children’s therapist assigned to me. That same person kept me on the sane side of the line when my parents’ marriage dissolved in hatred, abuse and mistrust.
I’ve had a couple really bad therapists along the way, too, so I never take someone’s word as Gospel just because of what they do for a living. But the person who contacted me yesterday seems solid and worth listening to. Here’s what she wrote to me in response to Monday’s post, “More Bullshit About Mental Illness“:
My clients just lost their kids in family court because the mom had OCD. She “counts” and so this was considered “traumatizing to the two older kids.” They are in their teens, however; the bureau allowed them to keep their two younger children. The Child and Family Services organizations are off their rocker. I see kids returned to abusers and drug addicts, I don’t get it.
There are elements about this that I have questions about. For starters, why take the teenagers but let the younger kids stay? I suspect it’s because the teenagers are at an age where seemingly abnormal behavior is going to freak them out more. Teens are almost always confused. But the larger suggestion that someone got a raw deal in the courts because of her OCD quirks is totally believable to me.
I’ve seen more than one fellow OCD sufferer scorned in the workplace for being a little different. Not in my workplace, but in other companies.
True or not, I think that when someone has OCD, they always need to be prepared to defend themselves against someone else’s stupidity. Of course, it’s not enough to say someone discriminated against you for having a mental illness. You need to be able to prove it. That shouldn’t be hard for obsessive people who are known to be painfully diligent at documenting things.
Breaking a stigma is hard. There’s no play book. There’s always the danger of coming across as delusional or whiney. Come to think of it, some of us ARE delusional and whiney.
Despite all I say about breaking stigmas and fighting back, I have to be honest and say that I’ve never experienced the kinds of things people write to me about. I’m very lucky. I’ve gotten nothing but support from every office I’ve ever worked in. If I was going through depression and needed time off, I got it. When I decided to write this blog, the folks at work were very supportive.
You might say that for an OCD patient, I’ve led a charmed life.
I do know this, though: When you take a skeleton like mental illness out of the closet and toss it to the middle of the street for all to see, the control it has over you lessens and the bones of the disorder turn to ash.
I’ve lived it. I know it. I used to live in mortal terror of speaking up for myself. Once I got over that initial hump, there was no turning back.
Another reader recently wrote to me about the injustices she has suffered for having a mental illness:
I have two very bad instances of discrimination based on mental illness. I worked for medical doctors for ten years, had all outstanding performance reviews, and received bonuses periodically. I began to have trouble functioning because of undiagnosed and untreated bipolar disorder. I had doctors working with me who told me I needed a leave of absence to get medical care. I went to my boss, the executive director and an MD, and told him what my therapist and neurologist recommended. His words were “I’m a doctor, I can’t have someone with a mental illness in a position of authority in a company I run!” Second case, my supervisor docked my pay for going to the doctor even though I was exempt. Also, she told me that I had to have therapy sessions via phone or email because she couldn’t afford to let me leave the office. She also told others about my illness without my permission. It was at that point I decided I have to try and find a way to work for myself even if I had to leave in a homeless shelter. I will never be treated that way again.
Me neither, my friend.
I can’t tell someone how to fight back when a judge or employer screws them over their illness.
I only know what I do: Minimize the impact of my OCD by exposing it for all to see through my writing.
Overcoming fear and anxiety is a major theme of this blog, and people who think they’ve experienced it often ask me to describe what it’s like for me.
Mood music:
It’s been about four years since experiencing a real anxiety attack, but I remember the feeling well.
It starts with a worry. Maybe it’s concern that Sean and Duncan are sick. Kids below the age of 10 spike fevers all the time, especially in the winter. But when it would happen, I’d start to ponder all the worst-case scenarios.
That worry would simmer into full-blown fear that something awful might happen. Because of the loss I’ve had in my life, the anxiety attacks would always come back to that fear of loss.
If I had an argument with my wife, my brain would spin on that, and it would escalate into full-blown fear that she might leave me. That was never a real danger, mind you. But escalating fear is part of the process.
If I had a sore toe or a pain in the shoulder, it would escalate into fear that I might be having a heart attack. A history of particularly vicious Crohn’s Disease left me prone to the constant fear of impending death.
Then the anxiety attack would move from the worry stage to the point of physical discomfort. I’d start having trouble breathing. My chest would throb and hurt. I’d get the pin-and-needle feeling in the feet that one would get if those body parts fell asleep.
The overall experience would last anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours.
As the attack eased, I would go looking for comfort. I always found it in the food or the wine.
In one particularly inspired moment, I took two Vioxx pills with a few swigs of wine. I was on Vioxx for back pain, and was pissed when the drug was taken off the market for causing real heart attacks.
Two minutes after swallowing the pills and alcohol, full-on wooziness kicked in. It felt good for a few more minutes, until the thought sparked into my head that maybe I was woozy because I was about to overdose. It’s also worth mentioning that I was doing house work during all this.
I called Erin, who was at her friend Sherri’s house, and told her what I did. Sherri, a nurse, said I’d live, and I started to calm down. But for a few minutes I was in full anxiety attack mode.
It’s been an eventful week and I am close to fried. But before I collapse, I have many hours of travel ahead. As daunting as that may seem, I’m feeling a strange sort of satisfaction this morning.
Rough as this has been, I accomplished a lot. I got four articles out of the conferences I attended — one extra than planned, thanks to the Secret Service.
I got to spend time with our cousins, who are always a blast, and Erin and I even got a date night on Solomon’s Island at the tip of Southern Maryland. Tuesday night, I drove into Virginia and had dinner at the home of Ann and Bob Ball. Ann is a dear friend of mine from the days of North Shore Community College in the early 1990s, and I’ve found a new political debate buddy in Bob. Too bad he’s not on Facebook. Their kids call me “Mr. Bill.”
But I’m ready to be home and back to the normal routine. I’ve pushed myself to the limit this week, and I’m finding it difficult to keep a lid on my addictive instincts. I’ve pulled it off so far, with plenty of help from others. Ann, for example, made me a perfectly abstinent salad the night I visited.
But there has also been a lot of meals in restaurants. I’ve made the best choices possible for my program, but restaurant food is still restaurant food, and I’m feeling the slight bloat of what I call dirty recovery. The motor is feeling gummed up, and it has clouded my head a bit.
It really hit me last night. While on our date, Erin and I visited a liquor store to buy a couple bottles of wine as gifts for people. As I walked around I found myself staring obsessively at the bottles of gin and whiskey. I started to want some.
I haven’t mentioned this much before, but this time last year I was really leaning on alcohol as a crutch to help me keep the food plan intact. It sounds stupid, because drinking inevitably leads to binge eating for me, but for some reason it helped calm me down enough to avoid the food at the heart of my most self-destructive addiction.
In fact, as late as December, I was swilling wine even as I wrote “The Most Uncool Addiction” post at the beginning of this blog.
I was starting to drink hard stuff, too. There were bottles of gin and brandy in the kitchen cabinet Erin used for cooking. One day, I decided to start drinking both. I was also drinking a lot of wine on a daily basis.
A couple weeks into that, I saw what was happening and decided that sobriety had to be part of my abstinence from binge eating. I was feeling dishonest about calling myself abstinent while drinking alcohol.
I’ve had my challenges since giving it up in late December. Free booze flows like a tsunami at the security conferences I go to, and I actually found myself feeling awkward without a glass of wine in my hand. But I pulled it off by keeping that hand busy with glasses of club soda and cans of Red Bull. Red Bull feeds another addiction, but as I’ve said before, people like me play addiction like a piano. When you put a lid on the addiction that’s most self-destructive in your life, a few smaller addictions bubble to the surface.
I was at 60 MG for the winter and most of the spring, but dialed it back to 40 in May. The reason I’m going back up, though I feel fine, is because August is when the days start to get noticeably shorter.The therapist believes upping the dose now will prevent a repeat of the usual blue moods that hit me when the sunlight becomes more scarce.
It’s interesting that this experiment would begin on Aug. 2. Twenty years ago today, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and all the talk about Saddam Hussein being a new Hitler threw me into a deep, fear-induced depression that August. Back then my OCD always manifested itself in a fear of current events. In fact, it was only about four years ago when that brand of fear eased off.
That summer was actually the closest I came to suicidal thoughts. Ironically, it was Sean Marley — a man who would take his own life six years later — who talked me back to a certain level of sanity.
Most recently, in 2005, I had a long panic streak over the bird flu in Asia, which was predicted to be the next great pandemic, as deadly as the one in 1918-19. I would read every magazine and every website tracking all these world events as if my personal safety depended on it. If a hurricane was spinning in the Atlantic, I would watch with deepening worry as it edged closer to the U.S.
Though those fears are gone now, I still have the blue-to-black moods to contend with from time to time, so it’ll be interesting to see how this experiment works.
If it goes well, I may actually have a Christmas season I can enjoy, instead of walking around alternating between haze and craze.
The trick, meantime, is to avoid the short-term mood swings that go with a dosage change.
