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Biotech / Medical : PFE (Pfizer) How high will it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BigKNY3 who wrote (7218)	3/14/1999 8:05:00 PM
From: BigKNY3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9523

George Stephanopoulis on depression: "The pressures of the White House and living on the Clinton roller coaster were overwhelming. Since Vince Foster's suicide, I had been seeing a therapist. Although I wasn't ashamed of seeking treatment, I had instinctively calculated the political fallout. When I told Clinton, he responded perfectly—with a shrug of his shoulders that said it was no big deal for him and a look in his eye that said he was concerned about me. The therapy helped, but there were always worries at work: legislative failures, anxieties about my place in Clinton's world, and even a troubled young woman who stalked me. Health-care reform's slow death in 1994 was particularly disheartening. We fought hard, but were losing. Hillary tried to keep our spirits up. Seeing that I was fluey from fatigue, she sent me a carton of homeopathic cures one day accompanied by a note: "We need you healthy for health care! H." But her echinacea and goldenseal wouldn't cure the case of insomnia I had developed. Ten to 12 times a night, I'd wake up to check the clock. Phew, it's only 2. My eyes were red, and the underside of my skin felt like it had been scrubbed with steel wool. My problems weren't physical: I descended into a real depression. Much of the darkness had lifted by mid-1995, but my nerves were shot, and it had started to show. During June battles on the budget and affirmative action, hives had erupted across my chin. I grew a beard. The rash subsided after an August vacation, but my most pernicious symptom persisted unseen. It was a sound: of fingernails screeching across slate or the tines of a fork scraping a bone-china plate. Several times a day, for up to an hour straight, it would loop around my brain and reverberate through my torso like feedback from an overamplified guitar. My therapist suggested and recommended a specialist in neurology and psychiatry. I resisted. The spartan in me said, "Suck it up"; the spin doctor saw future headlines. But by December I couldn't take it anymore. I sat on the edge of the sofa as the psychiatrist told me what I already knew: I was burned out. A serotonin re-uptake inhibitor like Zoloft, he then explained, would help stop my nerves from flooding my brain with the chemical fueling my compulsive symptoms. Soon I slept four hours straight, then I was up to six. I no longer woke up waiting for the sound to start. The feedback cleared, and I could breathe deeply again. Testing myself, I would see fingernails on a blackboard, hear the soundtrack, then switch it off. The medication stripped away layers of worry, allowing me to remember what it was like to be me—a melancholy nail biter, sure, but not someone consumed by anxiety, not someone who measured himself by his proximity to a president or convinced himself that his words and deeds would make or break a presidency. I still worked hard, but I worried less. I cared about what we could do, but I didn't obsess. Calmer, more detached, I prepared to leave. "" BigKNY3