Plus ça change??

If I were gay I think I would try to convince this guy to leave his wife for me:

Dear Prudence,
I’m a man in his mid-40s who has been happily married for 10 years. I particularly enjoy my wife’s dry, some would say sarcastic, sense of humor. Her wit not only attracted me to her as a partner, but it was one of the things that got me through a difficult time in my career, enabling me to see the humor in absurd and uncomfortable situations. About 18 months ago my wife’s mother passed away suddenly and my wife began seeing a counselor. After a few appointments, the counselor prescribed an antidepressant medication, Paxil, and my wife’s has been taking it ever since. As a result, my wife's personality has changed. Not dramatically, but enough so that she has become a glass-half-full, constantly cheerful type of person. I have no idea if this is common or perhaps if she was always depressed and her dark humor existed for her to deal with it. I'm glad she's happy now but I thought we were happy before and frankly, I miss my old wife! The new rainbows-and-sunshine person I'm living with gives me a headache and I find myself less attracted to her. I feel like a jerk and don't know what to do. Help!

—Dark Side

In my experience there are too few people who can use dry, sarcastic humor to deal with "absurd and uncomfortable situations."  And, there are way too few who can appreciate that sort of humor.  Again, this is in my experience. My own humor tends toward the parched and ironic, and I've met very few people who appreciate that sort of thing. Americans, alas, are bred to be cheerful and earnest. Most people I've known just miss the irony completely. This is not unknown:

Toss in my penchant for dark humor and you have a recipe for someone to be mostly alienated. And it probably is my dysthymia more than anything else that has always compelled me to see the thinnest of lines  between "cheerful and earnest" and "fatuous." And, having dated one or two "rainbows-and-sunshine" women, I can say that it was exhausting, at best. Indeed, at times it was like a collision of worlds, like when the Spaniards marched into Mexico: about the only thing those colliding worlds had in common was their basic biological humanity. Beyond that it must have been one profound misunderstanding after another, a comedy of errors every step of the way, at least until it became a tragedy of errors.  Which pretty well describes my relationships with the rainbows and sunshine women.

And now that I'm on citalopram, an issue that I've pondered only briefly the last several years is now in the forefront of my concerns: what might these pills do to my personality? Of course this question assumes that pills will do anything at all other than leave me in a stupor for most of the afternoon to early evening hours. Which they do very well, by the way.  It assumes that the pills do some sort of healing.  It assumes that Edward Shorter (author of Before Prozac) was unintentionally hyperbolic when he wrote "Psychiatry today is a barren tundra, where drugs that don't work are used to treat diseases that don't exist." I do not really disagree with that assessment's general thrust. IF depression is a real thing, psychiatry certainly does not know what it is. And the landscape is littered with clinical trials (the most damning of them unpublished) finding that medication is only marginally better, if better at all, than placebos. 

Indeed, if I did not know many people who swore by their anti-depressants I would never have allowed a citalopram tablet near my lips.  The potential downsides are too worrisome, the chance for improvement too slight. But here I am,  allowing myself to follow anecdote (the experiences of my friends) rather than science. I'm allowing myself the one thing that is hardest for a depressed or dysthymic person to grasp: hope. 

But back to the question: will these pills change me? Given how integral my sense of humor—ironic, dry, often dark—is to my personality, I cannot even imagine what I would be like were I to experience the transformation that Dark Side's" wife underwent after going on Paxil. For that reason, it is a transformation I am reluctant to experience.  But can a person even have such a sense of humor as mine without being at least somewhat depressed? At the very least I think such humor comes from a tragic view of the world. Can one be not depressed and maintain such a view? Would maintaining such a view even be desirable (or perhaps necessary) in the absence of some affective disorder?? How much of my core self is a product of my condition?? How much of that self might survive the amelioration of that condition?

The only thing I know on that topic is this: I never want to become someone for whom the world does not stop when he hears Sheila Chandra singing "Lament of MacCrimmon."