And I will never forget Susan's face when she rushed into my apartment about an hour after my emergency phone call and saw me in a heap on the couch. The image of my pain mirrored back at me through her visible fear for my life is still one of the scariest memories for me out of all those scary years. I huddled in a ball while Susan made the phone calls and found me a psychiatrist who would give me a consultation that very day, to discuss the possibility of prescribing antidepressants. I listened to Susan's one-sided conversation with the doctor, listened to her say, "I'm afraid my friend is going to seriously hurt herself." I was afraid, too.

我永远忘不了苏珊冲进我公寓时的表情，当时大约是我打了紧急电话过后一个小时，她见我瘫倒在沙发上。透过她担忧我的生命所流露出的表情，我的痛苦反映到自己的眼中，此意象对我来说，依然是那段恐怖岁月中最最恐怖的记忆。我缩成一团，苏珊打电话找精神科医生，让他当天给我诊疗，讨论开抗忧郁剂的可能性。我听着苏珊和医生的单边对话，听她说我担心我的朋友会严重伤害自己！我也很担心。

When I went to see the psychiatrist that afternoon, he asked me what had taken me so long to get help—as if I hadn't been trying to help myself already for so long. I told him my objections and reservations about antidepressants. I laid copies of the three books I'd already published on his desk, and I said, "I'm a writer. Please don't do anything to harm my brain." He said, "If you had a kidney disease, you wouldn't hesitate to take medication for it—why are you hesitating with this?" But, see, that only shows how ignorant he was about my family; a Gilbert might very well not medicate a kidney disease, seeing that we're a family who regard any sickness as a sign of personal, ethical, moral failure.

当天下午去看精神科医生时，他问我为何拖这么久才寻求协助——好像这么久以来我没尝试自救似的。我对他说明我对抗忧郁剂的反对与保留立场。我把自己已出版的三本书摆在他桌上，说：我是作家。请别做任何伤害我脑子的事。他说：假如你患了肾脏病，你不会对服药有所犹豫——却为什么对此犹豫？然而，你瞧，这只显示他对我的家族一无所知；吉尔伯特家族成员很可能不去服药治疗肾脏病，因为这家人将疾病视为个人、伦理、道德失败的表现。

He put me on a few different drugs—Xanax, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Busperin—until we found the combination that didn't make me nauseated or turn my libido into a dim and distant memory. Quickly, in less than a week, I could feel an extra inch of daylight opening in my mind. Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch—there's not a chance. The pills gave me those recuperative night hours back, and also stopped my hands from shaking and released the vise grip around my chest and the panic alert button from inside my heart.

他让我试着服用几种不同的药——Xanax，Zoloft，Wellbutrin，Busperin——直到我们找到不使我呕吐或把性欲变成遥远记忆的组合。很快地，不到一个礼拜，我感觉到心中开启了一线曙光。此外，我终于睡得着了。这真叫人欣喜，因为你睡不着的时候，便无法爬出阴沟——毫无可能。药丸使我重拾恢复体力的夜间时分，也让我的手不再颤抖，松开胸口的紧张和心头的恐慌。

Still, I never relaxed into taking those drugs, though they helped immediately. It never mattered who told me these medications were a good idea and perfectly safe; I always felt conflicted about it. Those drugs were part of my bridge to the other side, there's no question about it, but I wanted to be off them as soon as possible. I'd started taking the medication in January of 2003. By May, I was already diminishing my dosage significantly. Those had been the toughest months, anyhow—the last months of the divorce, the last ragged months with David. Could I have endured that time without the drugs, if I'd just held out a little longer? Could I have survived myself, by myself? I don't know. That's the thing about a human life—there's no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

尽管如此，服用这些药物从未使我安心，尽管它们立即奏效。无论谁告诉我这些药物是好主意，而且安全无虞，我却始终觉得矛盾。毫无疑问，这些药是我通往另一头的桥梁，但我却想尽快摆脱它们。我在2003年1月开始服药。到了5月，我的剂量已大大减少。那几个月却是最艰难的时期——离婚的最后几个月，与大卫之间残破的最后几个月。假设我再撑久一点，我能否不靠药物度过那段时期？我能否靠自己存活下来？这就是人生——没有控制组；若更改任何变量，我们便无从晓得自己会变成什么样子 。

I do know these drugs made my misery feel less catastrophic. So I'm grateful for that. But I'm still deeply ambivalent about mood-altering medications. I'm awed by their power, but concerned by their prevalence. I think they need to be prescribed and used with much more restraint in this country, and never without the parallel treatment of psychological counseling. Medicating the symptom of any illness without exploring its root cause is just a classically hare-brained Western way to think that anyone could ever get truly better. Those pills might have saved my life, but they did so only in conjunction with about twenty other efforts I was making simultaneously during that same period to rescue myself, and I hope to never have to take such drugs again. Though one doctor did suggest that I might have to go on and off antidepressants many times in my life because of my "tendency toward melancholy." I hope to God he's wrong. I intend to do everything I can to prove him wrong, or at least to fight that melancholic tendency with every tool in the shed. Whether this makes me self-defeatingly stubborn, or self-preservingly stubborn, I cannot say.

但我知道这些药物稍微减轻了我的痛苦。我对此不胜感激。然而我对改变情绪的药物仍深感矛盾。我慑于它们的力量，却对它们的泛滥感到不安。我认为在我这个国家应由医师开立处方给药，应当更适可而止地使用 ，而且必须与心理咨询并行治疗。以药物治疗任何病状，却未探勘其根源所在，是轻率的典型西方想法，认为任何人都能因此好起来。这些药丸或许救了我的命，却是结合了我在那段时间内同时所做的其他二十种努力才得以奏效，而我希望永远无须再服用这些药。尽管有医生指出，我一辈子或许得断断续续地服用多次抗忧郁剂，因为我有忧郁的倾向。但愿他是错的。我打算尽自己所能证明他是错的，或至少用尽一切手段对抗忧郁倾向。究竟我的顽固是自毁或自保，我也还不知道。

But there I am.

Eat, Pray, Love

不过我就在那儿。