Ozy Frantz wants to go back in time and say “Just take the meds.”
This is the third in a series of essays on depression by some of the Good Men Project’s most valued voices. The first two parts are here and here.
Dear Teenage Self,
First things first: soon you will stumble across the most fabulous pair of boots in the world. Black leather, knee high, high-heeled, just your size, and on sale for twenty dollars. Buy them. Seriously, you will be kicking yourself for that every time you put on shoes for the rest of your life. And with some of the shoes you’ll own, kicking yourself will really hurt.
Also, right now, you think you’re lazy, unmotivated, and probably a little stupid. You never have the energy for anything other than aimlessly looking at cat pictures. Even though you enjoy reading or talking to friends sometimes and are maybe even happy, everything you do seems to be suffused with this endless dull gray mist. Sometimes you feel like getting on a bus and going somewhere– anywhere– as long as it hurts less than this. The only thing that stops you is that anywhere you go you’ll still be there. Sometimes you think that there’s one thing that you can do to make sure you aren’t there anymore. A lot of times.
As it turns out, you’ve been suicidally depressed since you were seven years old. That’s not a mood, it’s a medical condition, and you will be better off if you start treating it like one.
If you’ve thought of medication, you’ve only thought of it in terms like “never” and “oh god no.” Your parents are fond enough of talking about how popping pills is turning America into a nation of ever-smiling zombies. Breathless articles in news magazines ask whether we’re medicating away authentic emotions and drugging people into happiness. That’s not nearly as awful as it’s going to get, by the way: in the year I’m writing this from, Naomi Wolf (you’ll learn about her later) wrote a book in which she explained that men invented SSRIs to keep women from overthrowing the patriarchy with their orgasms.
It’s particularly bad for you, because you’re severely drugphobic. You would think that your parents would notice when you refused to take painkillers after you got your wisdom teeth removed or to touch a wineglass for fear of it contaminating you, but then if your parents were terribly observant they’d have noticed the suicidally depressed thing and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Remember your acquaintance, the one who attempted suicide by overdosing on her antidepressants? Even now I’m about as able to forget the fatal dose of Prozac as I am my own name. That kind of thing scares you, I know. I understand.
Nevertheless, I would like to say to you right now: take the meds.
Your parents will stop disapproving after a while. Taking the first pill will make you almost cry with fear, and taking the second will feel like a stab in the gut; but the third will be easier, and by the fourth you’ll barely remember being afraid of it at all. And you can talk about your fears of suicide with your psychiatrist; they’ll prescribe you some medication gentle enough that it’s easier to fatally overdose on water.
Antidepressants leave me exactly the same as I was before, except not sad all the time. Authentic emotion? I think my current range of emotion– sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes angry, often filled with the boundless joy of simply being alive– is a hell of a lot more authentic than wanting to kill myself because I can’t stir a jar of peanut butter. I see no reason why the latter state gets elevated over the former just because it was the one I happened to be born with. And as for confronting the actual problems making me sad…
Long-term depression is like running a race. Everyone seems to be pulling ahead of you and you don’t know why; everyone seems to be talking and laughing and having fun, while you’re barely managing to not collapse. And then it turns out you were dragging a giant rock, probably ten or twenty pounds, chained to your leg the whole time. If you go on antidepressants, you’re still running the race, you’re just running it without a bloody great boulder attached to your foot.
Take the meds. For both of us.
–Ozy
P. S. I was completely serious about those fucking boots.
Photo—e-MagineArt.com/Flickr
Never felt like I got benefits out of meds during the time I took them. I know a lot of people have. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if meds had helped me, when I finally broke down and tried them. I was terrified. I’d had depression from about the age of 7 on, but it could have started earlier. I’d had suicidal urges off and on starting at the age of 9, and they remained common until I was about 22 or 23. I was 26 and in graduate school for biochemistry when I first turned… Read more »
When I hear people who should know better speak out against meds, I get seriously angry. People on meds are not zombies, nor are they hiding from their problems, thy do not need to just talk it out, and they certainly do not need to just chill out and smoke some weed.
God, I hate people sometimes.
I’m glad you’re finally on medication that’s making you feel better. And, knowing that, I’d agree with your letter to your younger self. On the other hand, if I were writing a letter to my younger self, my advice would be different. I don’t think I had as large, or at least as persistent, a problem as you, but it was serious enough to attempt suicide. Seeing a psychologist certainly helped, and if I could write one to myself before my suicide attempt and the events that lead up to it, I’d certainly recommend that I talk to someone about… Read more »
Ozy, this is great. Thank you.
I was diagnosed with depression several years ago, and learning more about depression has put a lot of things in perspective. (“Oh, no wonder I did that.”) In some ways, it’s sad to hear that you’ve been diagnosed with depression, and in some ways it can be a relief. Ironically, I realized, “I’m not crazy after all; I just have depression!” There is still a lot of stigma around psychological disorders, and that may never go away completely. Sure, I could think of my mild antidepressant as evidence that I’m deeply flawed or that I’ve given up or something. But,… Read more »
This made me tear up. It’s what people have been telling me recently, when I ask questions like ‘how come every one else is able to manage a full time job and just doing part time hours leaves me severely exhausted?’ I couldn’t figure that out and I hated myself for it. But maybe it’s not because I’m just worse than everyone else, maybe it’s connected to the depression thing. I have a friend who is suicidally depressed, and also severely drug-phobic. Well, more like pill-phobic really, she had such bad anaemia that it’s landed her in the hospital at… Read more »
It makes me so very, very sad to hear about anyone struggling with themselves, or those around them, over the “but I don’t want one of these masses on prozac! I don’t want to just take a pill to be happy like some kind of zombie!” It is tragic. And not to say that there aren’t folks with depression who do better without medication, or those that medications help but the side effects are intolerable, it happens. Sometimes there is depression that nothing helps. But to be suffering, to be miserable, and to have something that helps and works well,… Read more »
Ozy,
As someone who feels like I’m dragging a huge boulder myself (granted: it doesn’t feel like my boulder is as big as yours was/is), what would you recommend if I told you that I think my arguments for why I’m a worthless human being are so logical and fact-based that I don’t think meds would help?
My experience has been that, after beginning to take medication, things that sucked before were still every bit as awful, except that I now felt cheerful instead of miserable.
Medication won’t fix everything, but it might help you get into a state of mind that will let you start to change whatever it is that about yourself and your situation that makes you consider yourself worthless.
Gaius, I’ve met a lot of people who are depressed. I’ve met a lot of people who are not good at a lot of things. But I’m yet to meet anyone I would consider worthless. Some people are not good at some things. Some people are so not good at so many things that they require constant assistance. But I’ve never met someone who was worthless.
“what would you recommend if I told you that I think my arguments for why I’m a worthless human being are so logical and fact-based that I don’t think meds would help?” I would accept your argument. After all you know yourself a hell of a lot better than I do. You probably are a worthless human being! But now I have a question for you. Not about the question of whether your are a worthless human being or not. We’ve already finished with that. My question is…Is the idea that you are a worthless human being helping you? Is… Read more »
Well, I regularly have spells of depression (I don’t know if it’s a medical condition but I’m getting better at handling it so I’m staying away from help for the moment), and this is what I’ve come to understand: logic is a ridiculously unreliable thing; it always depends on often unexamined premises and is deeply influenced by your concerns/motivations in exploring the given line of reasoning – given a system as complex as life and reasoning that is essentially linear, you are always leaving some path unexplored. While the usefulness argument can seem a bit of a cop-out to you,… Read more »
Gaius: Personally? I would tell you that as human beings, we don’t just “have” brains. We “are” brains. Your beautiful logic that you have been using to assess the situation may be coming from a brain that isn’t operating correctly. Your logic may be correct, but your perception is distorted by depression, and thus the inputs that FEED that logic result in faulty output. Meta-cognition gets wonky. When you think about how you think, if your thinker isn’t working quite right, how can you make an adequate assessment of how good of a job it’s doing at analyzing your situation?… Read more »