Depression at a psychologist from Russia: history and treatment. Life, Illness, Science, and Job search

Conditions and process of forming plans for the future (where and how the outlook on life was formed)

About the place and time of my birth, family composition

I was born at the end of 1989, in the Republic of Kazakhstan, in the city of Petropavlovsk. The city is located in the north of the country, within the forest-steppe and steppe zones. The nearest large city in the country is Kokshetau. It is near it that the mountains and beautiful lakes Borovoe (in Kazakh – Бурабай) and Chelkar (in Kazakh – Шалқар) are located. In Russia, they are called “the blue lakes of northern Kazakhstan”. It was about 200 km to get to them. The same way to the capital of Kazakhstan – Astana (during my time the capital moved from Almaty to Astana) is 440 km. The nearest large Russian cities are Omsk, a city of over a million (about 250 km) and Kurgan (approximately the same distance). And Tyumen, where I would move when I was almost 15, is located 450 km to the northwest.

Petropavlovsk is located on a large hill, that is, no matter where you enter it from, you need to go uphill. Or go down, if you leave the city. In winter it is cold and it gets dark earlier, in spring there were streams running and there was a wonderful smell, in summer it is hot and light for a long time, in autumn it was rainy and there were many yellow leaves. Each season took its place, but winter was, apparently, the main one, and took a month from autumn and spring. Winter is about -10 – — 20 degrees Celsius, if there is frost, then -35 degrees, probably happened. Summer is hot, most often +20 – +30 and more. I do not have objective data, but from my memories, if it rained, it was warm. That is, it was impossible to freeze under it, and there was often a mushroom rain.

The Ishim River runs through the city, which has both flat and high banks, and also looks greenish from afar. There is a free city beach and a dam on the Ishim – it is, roughly, like an artificial waterfall. I believe that the city loved nature, in particular trees – they are everywhere and the city turned out to be green and cozy. The city park, especially in childhood, seemed like another world. There, coziness was multiplied by a very large number. Trees, attractions, monuments, sculptures, a pond with important white birds, fenced with a cozy high mesh fence behind which you could easily go, cafes and all this is intertwined with paths.

I liked the holiday of Nauryz, it is a celebration of the beginning of spring. It took place at the end of March, when there is still snow outside, but spring is already in full swing, the sun begins to warm, and the length of daylight hours has noticeably increased. Then one of the central streets was closed for cars. It was so wide that it is completely incomprehensible how it happened that such a wide street appeared in such a small city. And yurts were set up on the street (this is a national mobile round house of the Kazakhs), they were so scattered that you could walk from one to another. Something was fried, steamed, cooked, sold everywhere. People walked back and forth. And there was such an atmosphere as at a fair from a picture in some old book. I liked all this very much. There was no place for advertising, politics, propaganda, or any other nonsense. Everyone was simply welcoming spring.

This street was also used for the New Year’s Eve, and a central Christmas tree appeared on it (even though there were no peripheral Christmas trees in the city, there was only one, and all the city dwellers went to it), slides, and beautiful snow figures. I remember these figures for their simplicity and warmth. They were made by artisans, lovers of this craft. They did not always succeed smoothly, both in terms of the modeling itself and in terms of painting, but these figures were a living physical embodiment of a New Year’s fairy tale. And there were few buildings made of ice cubes in this snow town, they were rather used as an additional material. I will return to the topic of the central Christmas tree and the building material for building the town later, when I tell you about how New Year is celebrated in Tyumen. In the meantime, I will finish this description with a note for psychiatrists, in case one of you gets your hands on the book.

When I was sledding down an ice slide, that big main slide where all the kids are heading and where a line forms, I stood up after sliding down it and wanted to run away so that I wouldn’t get knocked down, but I didn’t have time. And another boy knocked me down, and it so happened that I hit the back of my head on the ice from my height. It hurt. It’s like something very hard hitting something very hard, but at that time one of them was my head. It even hurt to write. Maybe that fall partly influenced why I started writing this book at all, that is, the development of my depression or autistic traits. End of note. Below I return to describing the city.

The city then had a population of about two hundred thousand. Most of them were Kazakhs and Russians. The Russian population was quite large compared to other cities in the country. Sometimes tensions in the national question were noticeable, but they were rather “general” or “abstract”, and in particular people of different nationalities were friends with each other, families were friends, etc. A city with a small neurosis. But the neurosis was our own, native.

It seems that nothing was built or anything major was opened in the city during my time. It seemed that I had been in every yard in the city, knew every path and their features. And nothing changed there, and if it did, it was minimal, and I always found out about it. Also, it seems that no one gave birth in the city. Of course, I saw pregnant women, mothers with strollers, kindergartens, but there was so little of all this that it was as if it did not exist. In this sense, the city was static. Also, we did not have any of the terrible “1990s” (the difficult time after the collapse of the Soviet Union). Years are like years, life is like life. Both from my point of view, as a child at the time, and from the memories of adults at that time.

Petropavlovsk is the regional center of the North Kazakhstan region. And the region’s economy is predominantly agricultural. That is, there are many fields where something grows, then it is collected, processed and sold. Another part of the economy is because the region is a transit region – the region physically borders on the territory of Russia. The first part of the economy could be easily noticed by turning on the TV, where they almost always say that the sowing campaign begins, the sowing campaign ends, the results of the sowing campaign, and all this is under a video of a row of fields, ears of wheat and combine operators. The second part of the economy is partially reflected in the fact that there are currency exchange points in the city almost at every step. Later, having moved to Tyumen, I was surprised that there were no such points in the city, and in order to exchange currency you had to go to the bank. So official and difficult.

Pentium 1 computers appeared around the beginning of my school years, and mobile phones somewhere in middle school. Computers amazed me with their uniqueness, and gave me the magical ability to move a mouse with a wheel inside and see an arrow move on the screen. Phones also amazed me with something, but I can’t remember what exactly. After all, the wireless communication technology itself already existed. I remember that back then we wrote SMS in Latin, and there were special symbols for those letters of the Russian language that did not have an analogue in the Latin alphabet. For example, the Russian letter “Ч” was written as the number 4. Photos of my childhood are black and white until I was about four years old, of course there are no videos of me as a little boy, there was nothing to shoot with. But when I got a Polaroid camera, I already have such photos. Also, for example, in my childhood, people washed their cars not at car washes, because there weren’t any, but at their dachas, rivers, lakes, using a bucket, or sometimes a hose.

My family consisted of my mother, father, brother, a brother who was five years older than me, and me. My grandparents also played a significant role in my upbringing. I developed normally for my age, I was not observed by “special” doctors, I did not have “complex” diseases. I underwent three operations under general anesthesia. I did not go to kindergarten, since it was possible to leave me with my grandparents. I went to school at the age of 6. And for me, this was a difficult period, since I did not get to “be a child in society”. That is, I did not sit next to someone on the potty, did not pick my nose, did not cry, and did not fall asleep after lunch with a group of children. I immediately had to become a typical well-behaved first-grader. I went to the fourth grade, that is, I did not skip from the third to the fifth. This was the custom in our school. Although in many others they skipped. Changed two schools in Kazakhstan, and one in Russia.

We moved three times to larger apartments. And my grandparents lived in the historical center, with a view of the regional drama theater from their windows. And the floor of their apartment was the ceiling for the regional children’s library. There was a third location, not counting the dachas, which we called “fazenda” with a little irony – it was a private house in the foothills of the city. Despite the location, it was almost a full-fledged village. And in winter, it especially turned into a fairy-tale village with frosty air, darkness, snowy landscapes, barking dogs, silence and the smell of lit stoves.

My social circle and interests

There are people who can be friends with one person and always be together, best friends. I have never had this. It’s not that I didn’t want or couldn’t be friends like that, it just happened that way. Probably, there was no need to stick so tightly to one person. I floated from one group to another, some groups already existed, and I joined them, in other cases I was one of those who stood “at the origins”. But, probably, the main ones were two groups, which was in the middle classes, and another – an extended one, which I left when I went to Tyumen. With some guys, our circle of interests included:

– • building various booths (huts),

– • wandering around a small forest untouched by civilization in the center of the city near the old church,

– • playing tag, hide-and-seek,

– • racing around garages, playing ball (including the ball that we, by prior agreement, stole from under the noses of the city football team. Because it was high-quality),

– • fishing (including on a “TV” net (this is a small square net that looks like a TV), which we also, by prior agreement, stole from people we didn’t know),

– • swimming in the river and lake. My interests were in my boundless love for diving. More precisely, diving and trying to touch the bottom with my feet, touch it, and do the same thing several times, each time moving further and further from the shore, into the depths. I also liked swimming underwater, opening my eyes underwater, trying to swim beyond the buoys, swimming on my back. But, unfortunately, I never managed to lie on the water.

– • playing cards in the entrance,

– • going to the football stadium,

– • going to the city park, riding on rides,

– • frying potatoes in the ground,

– • doing the “sun” on a swing – it looked like this: standing with your feet unfastened to anything, make a full turn around the axis of the swing. And when you managed to do one, then you already tried to do as many as possible,

– carrying out technical operations (all according to the same pre-arranged agreement) to pick and eat onions, garlic and berries from the garden of the school for deaf children. The latter was necessary to somehow mask the smell of tobacco and alcohol. We drank cheap wine (brands “Агдам”, “Талас”, “777”), vodka or beer. Cigarettes could be bought individually at kiosks regardless of age. Someone smoked with a stick so that their hands would not smell of tobacco. Someone, especially bold and savvy, smoked with their left hand, claiming that mother would sniff their right hand and calm down. I still don’t know if this is true or not. They threw nasvay behind the lip (it is supposedly chicken droppings, oak bark and lime. The effect is the same as cigarettes). It was sold on street “stalls” from grandmothers selling sunflower seeds, chewing gum, puffed rice. At one time, we tried “breathing gasoline” – this means pouring a little of it into a plastic bottle and intensively inhaling its vapors. The first desired stage of the “high” is when you start hearing the sound “bzzzz…” in your head. It vaguely resembles how silence sounds if you dive underwater and listen to what is happening. Only more intensely from gasoline. At the next stage, hallucinations came, some were big, and some were smaller – visual and/or auditory. It was a novelty, interesting. But soon the “withdrawal” came, I don’t remember exactly, but it seems that my bones ached a lot, well, somehow my whole body was amazed at my action and ached. Therefore, I quickly cooled off to gasoline. It is some kind of “bull high”.

– It was also natural that while living in Kazakhstan, we smoked marijuana. This is a classic – at first it wasn’t funny, then you got a taste, it became funny and you liked it. I can’t say much about my relationship with marijuana, but what’s important is that it will develop in the future.

Well, a strong early teenage experience of getting to know different substances that alter consciousness. But it really was interesting, helped to transfer “outside”, and even served as a means of developing social connections. It’s also good that I was quite picky and “heavy” substances never attracted me in any way. Heavy substances are those that are injected into a vein. Perhaps also because there were people-examples who used it, and even then, watching them, I understood that they were in a terrible dead end, “living corpses”.

With other guys, when I was already a little older, our interests included walks with girls, courtship, love, kisses and other erotic things. There was a girl at school, with a beautiful name and beautiful appearance, half Armenian, half Belarusian origin. At that time, we were dating seriously – we spent a lot of time together in the same company, and even made attempts to kiss like adults. Meetings with her and thoughts about her evoked in my soul exclusively positive feelings of interest, warmth, happiness, and my outlook on life was very bright.

And then her parents took her to Russia. And at that age, at least for me, such events seemed to paralyze. After all, I couldn’t run through the airport like in the movies, run up the steps and tell her something like: “Come on, stay, why do you need this Russia, we’ll live together at my place, we’ll go to school together for fun, I also have a cool dog – a beautifully groomed poodle, marry me, and let’s go eat, my mom just made meat à la French.” No. I was simply broken, confused and in a pitch-black mood. How was I supposed to live? It was unclear, and I don’t remember how I got through it.

Life brought us various adventures, which were also accompanied by alcohol, smoking and nasvay. We especially valued drinking. So, when we went to a tourist camp with school, we knew in advance that the teachers were preparing to search us so that we would not take anything sinful with us. The tourist camp was 15 kilometers from the school. And a few days before the event, we went there on bicycles to hide the booze in the bushes.

At that time, it turned out to be one of the most difficult tests in my life, because riding a bicycle for thirty kilometers without preparation, and also riding uphill on the way back was terrible. But the reward was that the teachers searched us and lagged behind. And that vacation at the tourist center was wonderful, including thanks to our ingenuity, persistence and a hiding surprice place in the bushes. Oh, I can sing about bushes, bushes and trees. And when I got a little older, I also often went to that forest in the center of the city, which was not touched by civilization, maybe because it was once a cemetery. We loved to make fires there, especially in late autumn or early spring, when you could look at the fire, warm yourself, throw sticks into it and talk about something with the girls.

In addition to studying altered states of consciousness, we were also interested in mobile phones. We seemed to know everything about them. Then, there was a period when mobile phone technologies were changing at a high speed – from “bricks” without a SIM card to color screens, polyphony, Bluetooth.

It so happened that at first this group of friends were from school, mostly from the same class. And we were active, creative guys. If there were extracurricular activities – that was our call, if there was a newspaper to draw for a holiday – that was our call too, and we often gathered at my house. By that time I was already playing the guitar well and used it too. We even wanted to put together a rock band. We agreed on something with the school, where to rehearse, what instruments we could borrow from them for our purposes. All interests were life-affirming. None of us were nerds, did not strive to “bring A’s to our parents” and be the favorites of boring teachers. Then we were also lucky that we had a very good young class teacher, we affectionately called her Oksana, without a patronymic, but not when addressing her, of course. And it so happened that I had something to compare with, since by the end of school, I had definitely had five class teachers.

The peculiarity of that period was that our initially small company grew, absorbing different people from different places, and it was at least cool and felt powerful. We all had one place to gather – the base – a football “box” near the school, which was not used for its intended purpose, but was used to form and strengthen teenage friendships and romantic relationships.

Personal interests of the young me

My interests also touched on several different spheres. One of my main interests was music, especially playing the guitar. In elementary school, my grandparents gave my brother and me an unexpected gift, giving us an acoustic guitar. And my father’s friend sang and played such a beautiful, but tearful song on the guitar. And my godmother’s son also already played the instrument, and succeeded in this, he definitely had talent. In general, soon we bought an electric guitar, and this was a completely different level for me. And I could sit with the instrument for a very long time, and strum something, learn songs, chords, solos. I did not try to sing, I did not want to, in my head these two skills – playing the instrument and singing – are very different skills, and it is not necessary that if you play the guitar, then you need to sing. That’s why I freed myself for the future from the role of a street teenager-heartthrob who conquers girls with tearful three-chord guitar chants about some army or prison (it is very fashionable at Russian). I wanted to master the instrument for real, so I had serious requirements for the complexity of the performance. Although, of course, playing the guitar gave its pleasant results for communicating with girls.

Speaking about the guitar, it is necessary to clarify what I was listening to then. In my distant childhood, I listened to what everyone was listening to – most often it was foreign popular music, like Ace of Base. And a little later, probably after the release of the film “Brother” (this is a super famous action drama in the post-Soviet space, everyone probably loved it), I began to listen to Russian rock and foreign metal. Then my peers were all divided into two large groups: informals (those who listen to rock music) and rappers.

There may have been more youth groups, but in percentage terms compared to the first two, they were insignificant. I don’t remember there being a group of “classical music kazas”, for example. But I don’t remember pop music, it was generally outside this division, but the informals still treated it with disdain or irritation. I was a real informal. I wore a bandana with the inscription “Nirvana”, “Metallica” T-shirts, a backpack “The King and the Jester” (it is a punk band). Without my parents’ knowledge, I wore a clip in my ear, because they did not allow me to pierce my ear.