My grandmother was an irritable, chain smoking, sleeping pill popper until she died. My mother and her two sisters are on at least one anti-depressant each, maybe one or two of the anti-psychotics thrown in there too. My father’s side had a true-life hermit (my great-uncle) who lived off the land in Louisiana’s Mississippi swamps. My father is beginning to resemble a hermit himself, though not a hoarding hermit, PTL. Am I trying to stitch together a pro-medication flag to fly over this blog?
Yes. You so rarely hear someone talk about what they’re taking (when they’re not close friends), but in fact we have progressed to the point, at least, of admitting in a vague way that taking anti-depressants, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medication helps many people avoid terrible plights — or helps to avoid becoming hermits vying with nature every day instead of interacting with other human beings.
I’ve been off and on anti-depressants for about 10 years now, and during roughly half that time I was a miserable wreck. Wrong pills. I wasted a lot of time and money on Effexor and Paxil back when one of my old docs thought I had garden variety depression. Right before I stopped seeing him, he suggested I might be bipolar. My next doctor put me on the Effexor, which made me a little manic and was hell discontinuing (I had the brain zaps intensely for six months, and still will have one every once in a while, like a bad acid flashback). She too suggested bipolar right before I left her. A pattern? Maybe they were trying to hang onto a client (fodder for another post on another day, the dread feeling that they’re just trying to maintain their client list) by offering me a “sexier” diagnosis.
After Dr. Effexor I went cold turkey on medications and therapy for about a year and a half, and started spiraling three months into the experiment. I did not make the connection between discontinuing therapy and meds and my swinging moods, so strong was the feeling that they were a natural part of my life. I thought of myself as fucked up, but not in need of medication because nothing had helped before. I’d taken one anti-psychotic briefly — Geodon — but it made me fall asleep on the subway and tempted me to lie down anywhere (on the sidewalk, why not?) for a little nap.
I was fighting the law that states that those with mental illness must get on some pills, pronto. There’s no talking cure in the world that’ll break through the genetics, neurochemical imbalances and just plain crazy of bipolar. Others disagree, but they protest too much, don’t you think? They’re often like people who brag about not owning a TV. Get over yourselves and take a little something to make the crazy go away. Stop fighting nature so damn hard, like a hermit in the swamps, and come back to civilization.
I believe kids are over medicated, but the rest of the population is under medicated. That psycho boss, partner, mother? Medicate them. My grandfather’s grief over my grandmother’s death that lasted years and reduced him to a shell of a person? Well, he should have been medicated because that was grief turned psychotic.
I finally knew I had to see a doctor when the spirals got so bad that I experienced them in the mornings, too. One morning I looked out my kitchen window and saw, hanging on the next-door neighbors covered patio, two or three plastic clothes hangers. Suddenly and without any prior rumination on this, I was hammered with sadness. I mourned the fact that I could not turn the prosaic vision of those clothes hangers into art, the way, say, Andy Warhol would have done. The thought burst in like a message from God, no ignoring it. And so, before breakfast, I was comparing myself to Warhol and crying. I believe I had to skip work that day. I skipped a few days during that season of crazy, putting truth to the statistic that mental illness causes decreased worker productivity.
Then the paranoia started. People were talking about me. When someone on the street looked at me, it was because they were reading my mind and seeing how miserably crazy I was. Talk about no privacy. I was deathly afraid of seeing my reflection. Like a reverse vampire, I saw my refection everywhere: glass fronts of buildings, shiny metal street vendor carts, and those hellish restaurants that think that putting mirrors up all over the place is chic, or at least makes the place look larger. And don’t even talk to me about getting my hair cut. I still hate it, sitting in front of a mirror and being pressured into making small talk. The craziest thing about the reflection situation is that I was often wrong; it wasn’t me I was terrified of seeing — many times it was just some dude walking or standing next to me. When the vague reflection in a car window moved independently of me I was thoroughly relieved to know it had not been me. I wanted to disappear.
I found another doctor, a guy with a heavy hand on the prescription pad, and my life has taken off since then. I started with Abilify to snuff out the paranoia, then moved up slowly to 300 milligrams of Lamictal (more on what that was like in a later post). Wellbutrin — check. Celexa, most recently. So, a slew of pills, each with its own little job to do, like brain elves. They have not disappointed.
