Serotonin Syndrome

I got an email from a student saying her paper would be late because she had spent the weekend in the hospital with Serotonin Syndrome.  Well, that’s a syndrome I had not heard of, thought I should have.  It’s when you get too much serotonin in your system and it’s not a good thing, leading to spasms, twitches, coma, and possible death.

Things sure have changed.  Twenty years ago I don’t think most people knew what the hell serotonin was or is; now we have serotonin syndrome and students who get it because they are on antidepressants.  It’s a form of poisoning actually and seems most frequent among young people who take antidepressants and then take ecstasy.

My student hadn’t taken ecstasy though.  She is on wellbutrin and lexapro, and her doctor had upped the lexapro with bad results.  So she spent the weekend in the hospital and could hardly remember any of it.  Just a blank.

So I said she could take more time to do the paper. We talked about it for ten minutes or so pretty comfortably because I am on antidepressants myself and she knew that.  And I asked her if my teaching seemed OK, because I am in the throes of a depression for diverse reasons, and have really had to drag my butt to class.  I teach from myself and don’t run a robot routine, so if I can’t get my energy there in the room I just don’t feel as if I am doing my job.  But she said I was doing OK.

I think a number of my students in this particular class have had bouts with depression.  I assigned an article on it because we were doing a little reading unit on the mind/body problem, and I was surprised at how many students—maybe a third—wrote mostly about the depression article.

Maybe this is all wrong.  Maybe we are taking drugs for what’s no more than normal human misery.  Of course, one might need a drug for that when one lives in a society that seems to deny the idea that there is such a thing as normal human misery.  I think normal human misery should be an accepted aspect of human life, not to be taken lightly or messed with.

 So teaching isn’t what it once was for me.  Things have changed.  I have changed.  The students have changed.  Though normal human misery persists.