Anti-anti

First of all, this is not a funny post.

When I found out this weekend that a young person close to me was recommended for anti-depressants, I had my habitual reaction, which is to freak out a little, demand second opinions that aren’t mine to demand, and rant about how anti-depressants are wildly over-prescribed. It is not that I think there is anything wrong with anti-depressants, per se. Sometimes they save lives. Unfortunately, though, it seems that more often than not they are used to mask the source of the problem. At least, that was my experience.

Right after I turned twenty-five I quit a short-lived, unpleasant job in St. Louis and moved back to my parents’ house in Philly. The plan was to work for my mom for a few months, until I made enough money to move to New York. I wanted to write and I wanted to work in the music business – I didn’t really care how, I would have been happy to answer phones at a record label. I had a plan.

Then, a bunch of stuff happened. My parents’ marriage was disintegrating right in front of me, I met up with an ex-boyfriend with whom I still had a spark, and started escaping to him whenever I could. He asked me to move in with him and I did. Six weeks after we moved in together, my parents separated. A month or so after that I went to the doctor, feeling lousy. I was exhausted all the time, getting dizzy for no reason, had no sex drive, and I would look for any excuse to run errands in the middle of the work day that would allow me to go home and sit on my couch for twenty minutes because I was just so tired. He told me he thought I was depressed, and recommended a low dose of zoloft. He didn’t recommend therapy, or nutritional counseling, or exercise (none of which I was doing), just a drug.

I should have known better, but I was so relieved just to be able to get through the day, that I stuck with the zoloft. I stuck with it right through my ex getting laid off, stuck with it through getting engaged, married, and divorced. When I started having bizarre impulses to throw myself off my balcony, I tried to go off it. I had horrible withdrawal, and after a couple of weeks off the zoloft I couldn’t get off the couch anymore. (This was either right before or right after it went public that sometimes anti-depressants actually increased suicide risk in adolescents, but I don’t remember the exact timing.) I trusted that I was generally sane enough that my good sense would override any bizarre, impulsive side effects from the drug, and went back on it for almost another year. I didn’t have a regular physician when I finally decided that I’d had enough. I went off it cold tofu, went through the withdrawal again, and sucked down a lot of St. John’s Wort to get myself through the experience.

Writing this is the first I have ever given voice to the weird side effects (or any of this, for that matter), but it is far enough in the past now that I am comfortable talking about it, sort of. At the time it was embarrassing, and it freaked me the fuck out. It occurs to me that if I am going to be looking for employment any time soon, I probably should hide this post. And, really, the rest of my blog. But I digress.

I think about this experience whenever I hear of some one I know taking an anti-depressant. In my case, it helped with the physical part of depression, but it compounded the cause. In retrospect, it would have been far more helpful to have a professional demanding an answer about why I snuffed out my dreams. I was in a job that didn’t suit me, in a relationship that didn’t bring out the best in either of us, and dealing with family drama. I probably would have benefited from a breakdown. Sometimes the soul needs everything to fall apart.

That is what has been on my mind today, that sometimes the soul needs a breakdown. Also, I just realized today that the big void of writing in my late twenties matches up to my time on zoloft. I went off it at the end of January or early February of 2004. In April of 2004, I started blogging, and in July I went to the workshop in Iowa.

I am not certain why it is that I feel the need to tell this story now. I am not trying to rally anti-anti-depressant support – like I said, anti-depressants can save lives. I suppose that being reminded of it made me realize that it is far enough in the past now that I can share it, and perhaps it can be of benefit to some one.