Antidepressants, With a Side of Life

“I’m depressed. I want to go on pills. Do you know a good therapist?”

She said it the way a bored teenager says, “I’m hungry, let’s get some French fries.” She made it seem like going on psychotropic drugs was as casual as making a detour to McDonald’s on the way home. There’s a comfort in casually succumbing to something that will, without much effort, dull our pain. But when what’s easy also radically alters your brain chemistry, it ought to be taken more seriously than an impulse purchase at Walgreen’s.

“Just the shampoo, ma’am?”
“Actually, gimme these cinnamon tic-tacs…and a pack of Zoloft too.”

I told her, “Don’t do it. Don’t go on drugs.” Maybe this was intrusive. She was a new acquaintance and she wasn’t talking to me, just happened to be in my earshot. Who was I to tell her not to go on drugs? I didn’t know her situation - what difficulty she might be suffering. But I did know she was financially secure, did not have to work and could pursue an acting career unfettered. She had the wherewithal to get up on stage, look good and be funny. And yes, this doesn’t mean she wasn’t hurting on the inside. There are the archetypes of the sad clown…Lenny Bruce…and the melancholy beauty Greta Garbo. But sadness alone doesn’t demand medication. Medication covers sadness as though it were an ugly stain needing a good coat of paint. But sadness, like all emotions, is actually a necessary tool. When we medicate, we dull the sharpness of that tool and in turn diminish our potential to learn and grow.

A few years ago, during the summer between my first and second year of graduate school, I found myself deeply depressed. I was living at the bottom of a dark, lonely well that even my voice couldn’t make its way out of. I thought, “If this goes on, I will look into medication.” I went to a therapist and talked about the source of my pain, a broken relationship. But I felt that she too was unable to hear my voice. I became my only friend. I would sit on my bedroom floor and hug myself while rocking back and forth. Often my mind would spiral down to self-destructive, repetitive thoughts. I’d fixate on the image of the knife I used to cut vegetables and not be able to let go. I felt weak and shaky all day long as though my world were melting and I could not keep my footing in it. One morning in bed, I lay there unable to get up. Then I asked myself, “how will I ever feel better unless I make myself feel better?” I was at rock bottom and had to make a choice. Either I would give up or I would try to make it better. I decided to try to make it better. A few months later, I felt a strange emotion - happiness.

People who are prone to depression are often the people I most love and respect. Not because they are depressed but because of why they are depressed. They were born with and preserve within themselves great emotional sensitivity, keen perception and intuition. They’ve been carried on waves of emotion that have lifted them up very high, but later crashed them upon the shore. Because they feel so intensely, they misperceive the crash as an ending. They believe they are now stuck forever on the barren shore. “The ocean is for those others, those lucky ones, those stronger ones who are better equipped to handle its highs and lows.”

I ask people I care about not to go on medication because we need them out there in the ocean - as they are. We need their deep feeling and keen perception. If they must take drugs to get out on it again, they might as well be swimming in the kiddie pool. By taking them, they will be convinced of a certain level of impotence which leads to self-fulfilling limitation. They will not get really, deeply sad again, a feeling which is every human’s ongoing right to experience, not to run from or be ashamed of. I’ve heard people on antidepressants tell me they can’t cry anymore as though it’s a kind of victory. Whose victory?

Antidepressants help people fit into a society that demands everything be very neat and clean and consistent and up. But such a world belongs to television, not to real human life. We are here to rage and cry and scream and be wooed and be lost and hit rock bottom and be found and do it all again. By these extremities, we come to know ourselves. But by taking medication to make our day-to-day feelings “even” and “up”, we are diminishing the potential of our experiences. Those who feel each crash as lead in their bones and each bliss as fizzy water in their veins are blessed. They should not feel shame or guilt but be grateful for their potential to learn so much from life.

I understand that some extreme emotional states can be chronic and dangerous and I do not protest the use of medication for the chronically mentally ill. A schizophrenic or diagnosed bipolar is not able to live and learn through the extremity of their experience, and can hurt herself or others irreparably without medication. I protest the use of anti-depressants by those who are actually healthy, but stuck in a rut or miseducated about what is a “normal” emotional state. I believe there are so many tough things that we have the strength to pull ourselves out of. And if we save ourselves, we also gain a strength that will help us the rest of our lives.

All of society seems conspiring to get us swimming in the kiddie pool. TV and movies and antidepressant ads all try to convince us that that’s where we ought to be. But life is not lived in the kiddie pool, it is lived in the ocean. What my seeking acquaintance needs is not a pill, but courage.

Let’s buy our French fries now and again, let’s buy our tic-tacs and our trashy magazines, too. But let’s not casually swallow the sales pitch that we need pills to cope with our “difficult” emotions. If you are sad and mad at the world, scream and cry and tell people how you feel. And then tie yourself to the mast and weather the storm. Feel every lash of the wind, every frozen drop and know that you will be alive when it is over. And the world will be lucky to have such a brave and feeling one sailing undiminished in her midst.