Happy 10th Anniversary, Anti-Depressants
Laura thought she’d simplify things and post her Valentine to antidepressants right on her brant. That way, no one has to go looking around for it.
Happy 10th Anniversary, Antidepressants
Laura can’t believe the timing: she’s been waiting for an excuse to commemorate the 10th anniversary of being on anti-depressants and now she has one: May just happens to be one of those made-up ’specially designated’ months called “National Mental Health Month.” Despite the fact that Laura has always hated group activities like team sports and organized religion, she’s decided not to let this stop her. Just because the country has been given permission to think about mental health this month doesn’t mean she has to be infantile and contrary and wait until they stop.
Laura is pretty sure that almost everyone has a moment in time which divides their life into “before” and “after” and for her that moment in time was when she was 34. She had just left New York and moved to Washington — trading her soul-deadening career and her sensory-deprivation-tank studio apartment for a 9-to-5 government job and a big one-bedroom overlooking a park and a zoo — trading her no-life life for an actual life, not to put too fine a point on it, and feeling really good about it — when depression struck. Again. The way it had since second grade. It was then that Laura realized that no matter how hard she tried she would never be able to outrun herself: wherever she went, wherever she moved, however stealthily she tried to sneak away, she would always bring herself with her. And at the thought of that — at the thought of a life sentence with chronic clinical depression as her cell-mate and no chance of parole — she finally knew the jig was up.
Uncle, she cried, at long last. Give me the meds.
Describing what depression feels like is a little like trying to describe what chocolate tastes like or what classical music sounds like or what red looks like, but for Laura, being depressed was like being inside a sealed glass box right in the middle of a big huge party: she could see out and people could see in but that’s about as far as it went. For most of her life Laura knew what she was missing out on — everything — and even though much of the time she was too depressed to care, every once in a while her heart would seize up like a normal person’s and she would grasp, in the flash of an instant, that her life was passing her by. Those times her spirit would float up to the ceiling and look down at herself — claustrophobic, mute, longing for escape — pushing against the glass walls of her box like a frantic mime. But just like every other trapped mime in the history of the world, Laura could never find her way out.
Processing her decision to cave in after a lifetime of resisting “taking the easy way out” was difficult. Laura had always been against medication in the treatment of depression — for herself, not for others — after all, her father had been depressed most of her life and the Valium he’d taken during the 1960s and 70s of her childhood didn’t do much more than give him that I’m-here-but-I’m-not-here look and the thousand-mile stare. Even though she knew now as an adult that it was stupid to prescribe a depressant to a depressive and that the newer generation of drugs were much more effective, giving into it still seemed somehow like cheating.
After she’d gotten past the initial wave of feeling like a failure — a failure at traditional psychotherapy, a failure at coping, a failure at life — take your pick! – Laura had other concerns. This was the mid 1990s and every other week a big article or a big book about anti-depressants in general and Prozac in particular (the phrase “designer drugs” sticks in her mind even after all this time) appeared reporting on the various side effects of psycho-pharmaceuticals. Given her luck — which is to say, given her propensity for bad luck like being born with a ridiculously disproportionate amount of negativity — Laura assumed that she would get none of their positive effects and all of their bad side effects. Which only made her feel more convinced of her decision: even if they helped eliminate just 1% of her aggregate negativity, maybe the frantic mime inside her would stop pounding pathetically on the glass and start feeling around pro-actively for an exit door.
But the mime inside her did more than that: It not only found the door and opened it — it also ditched the white face and black jazz shoes on the way out. Within days, a lifetime of television-screen static and indecision and muteness lifted and was replaced by a focused clarity. Within weeks a new mental energy and ability to concentrate for long periods of time appeared. Before she knew it Laura was able to whip through a week’s to-do list in a single morning, make decisions without agonizing analysis-paralysis, and project herself into the future. Her sock drawer and closets were organized, her big black bag weighed half as much now that several pounds of ATM receipts, shoes, and loose tobacco had been removed, and she even finished rewriting the novel she’d been working on for five years.
And that was only after the first three refills.
Like any relationship, her partnership with medication hasn’t been perfect these past ten years; it’s had its ups and downs. She’s tried a few drugs that worked and a few drugs that didn’t; she’s gone off them a few times and suffered such severe withdrawal symptoms she felt she understood heroin addiction; and she’s gone back on them every time because for Laura there is no question that she is happier — or less unhappy, depending on whether she is in a half-full or half-empty kind of mood — when she is on medication. But despite the life-altering effect they’ve had on her, she accepts that anti-depressants can only go so far: she still hates going to parties, she still feels fat most of her waking hours, and she still worries that one day the sadness will come back and she won’t be able to get out of bed. Just like going through childbirth with an epidural or dental surgery with a local anesthetic, there is still plenty of pain left over even with the drugs.
Which is a good thing, since Laura still likes to go back to her glass box once in a while.
Or maybe that’s just the medication talking.