Without anti-depressants, writes Dichotomy Hubris, his will to live would run out in four months or less.
Originally published at Dichotomy Hubris
A strange thought has been with me as I’ve taken my anti-depressant medication the last few days. I have a beautiful wife whom I love dearly, and for reasons I cannot fathom, loves me back the same way. I have two fantastic children that are a light to my life. Life is good. Yet, if I stop taking these little pills every morning, in about four months time I will literally want to die. All because, for whatever reasons, some stupid chemicals don’t interact properly with some stupid wiring in my head. Everything between now and four months in the future might be exactly the same, yet I will be incapable of feeling happiness, pleasure or joy. Instead I will feel anxiety and fear—about everything, anything and nothing. It will all be too much. I will want to die.
“Why aren’t you happy?”
“Because I have depression.”
“Well then, why are you depressed?”
“Because I can’t feel happy.”
“Couldn’t you try not being depressed?”
“You mean pretend I’m happy even though I’m not and maybe I’ll be able to shake it off?”
“Yeah, why can’t you do that?”
“I tried that once.”
“Did it work?”
“No, it made me feel worse. I ended up sitting in the bottom of my closet measuring bits of cord, just so I knew if they were long enough to hang myself with.”
“Oh.”
“So you can’t just shake this off then?”
“Nope, too depressed.”
“And you can’t feel happy because your depressed?”
“Nope.”
“And you’re depressed because you can’t feel happy?”
“That’s right, you got it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know. That’s okay though. There’s a little piece of me that is glad that you don’t understand and hopes you never do.”
The number of depressed people in your social circle may stagger you. (Especially the number of guys.) And no two may end up dealing with it the same. For me, treatment involved finding the right medication to make the stupid chemicals and stupid wiring work better. These things are not asprin and not to be taken lightly. Medication is a trade-off of the desired positive effects, against undesirable side-effects.
Some people use meditation. Others have ongoing therapy. I had therapy for the first few years after my diagnosis of PTSD to debride the huge amounts of shame and self blame over the years of sexual abuse I suffered. I don’t need the therapy any more. Indeed, I was doing so well there was even thinking I didn’t need the medication any more, but four months later…
So, for me, it’s medication for life. For others it’s something else. It could be looking in the mirror every morning and saying, “I’m a pretty princess.” If that works or you, then great! I envy you.
There is no silver bullet. Pragmatism trumps opinion. If, and I stress, if what you are doing is working for you, then I wish you good fortune, and would never tell you you’re doing it the wrong way.
—Photo credit: altemark/Flickr
About Dichotomy Hubris
Thank you for sharing your story. I am afraid to go off of my antidepressants. I do both drugs and therapy and when I think I finally can be ok, depression rears its ugly head again. As someone who writes about it, I have to say that sometimes writing about my troubles trumps both pills and therapy.
I feel you completely brother. When I first got onto meds that worked for me (Wellbutrin, at the time), and was doing just fine, I made the mistake of asking my doctor how much longer he expected me to need them. His reply was “the rest of your life”. I asked him what was know of the long-term use of these medications. “Not a thing”, he responded. Shortly thereafter I moved to a different city, and decided I would try to give up on medication, because that second answer scared me, badly. It took me something closer to two years to reach bottom again, but I did, without a doubt.
I think it is really difficult (particularly so for men, as we need to feel that we are ‘in control’) to accept that these feelings come from a biochemical cause, and are NOT something which we can ‘just snap out of’ and may not even have a visible causing event in our lives. That is not helped by our society, which tends to view chronic depression as a moral, rather than a medical, issue (in defiance of the mass of scientific fact to the contrary.)
From my experience, I think people should be very wary of antidepressants. I don’t think they work anywhere near as well as advertised (plus the side effects are virtually never mentioned), and it’s absolutely horrific to get off them.
They really epitomise everything that’s wrong with big pharma.
Hi Ian,
I agree with you that you shouldn’t take them without due consideration. And as I said in the article it is a trade-off of the desired positive effects against the undesirable side-effects (Zoloft gave me a mild tic, scared the hell out of me.) They are also not a magic pill that is going to make all your problems go away and let you live happily ever after. But the right medication can give you the opportunity to be happy.
Unfortunately, finding the right medication that works for you can be a long drawn out process. You really have to try something for four weeks minimum to see how it is working for you, and if you you need to try something else you have to take a week or more to come off it slowly (they are not aspirin) and then do the whole four week process again with next one. It really is awfully hard, especially when you’re gripped in the anguish of depression and you just want some relief NOW. And there’s no guarantee that any of them will work for any one individual. You have to find what works for you, be it therapy, medication, massage, acupuncture, rigorous exercise or dancing a jig, or some combination of them all.
Many people such as yourself have had terrible experiences with medication, and for whatever reasons they are just not going to work for some people while they work well for others. I don’t think we as a society (and hence the medical profession) have spent a lot of time trying to understand and treat depression in its various forms, so in a lot of ways it is still an experimental process and as yet there is no one cure that fits all, unfortunately.
Dic. H.
I probably should add that you should only ever be exploring treatment with medication under the guidance of a mental health professional you trust (I am not a professional in anything concerned with health, mental or otherwise.) So if you think medication may help you you have to suck up that ego and humility and go see a doctor and say, “I think I’m in trouble, I need help.” Don’t wait twenty years like I did.
Thanks for the response! It wasn’t me personally who took antidepressants, my wife did. I believe her GP was too quick to prescribe antidepressants without exploring other treatments (which links in to your comment about the necessity of a mental health professional, GPs are simply not the right people to be prescribing psychopharmaceuticals). She took them for about 6 years. The side effects eventually overran the usefulness of the drug – she had insomnia prior to taking Citalopram, and it was worsened by the drug. To counteract the insomnia they prescribed Zopiclone, which she took occasionally, but she was really self medicating with cannabis or alcohol to get to sleep. She also hated the general feeling of Citalopram, felt like a walking zombie, she couldn’t cry even when she wanted to, sex drive panned out, no motivation, a general “lack of affect” as they call it. She just felt generally bad, and when she went back to the GP they just tried to increase the dosage. On one occasion they changed her prescription to Imipramine without any tapering off Citalopram protocol, and she nearly ran away from home (I had to chase her down, it’s kind of funny in hindsight but at the time it was very worrying, I thought she’d become completely mentally unhinged).
After she started self harming (another side effect in some people), she decided to try to just stop them altogether, and luckily with her work she could take long term sick leave with a phased return to work. I think she needed to take about five or six months’ off overall to get off them. Coming off them was not a simple return to baseline depression – it was much much worse. Ringing ears, lack of balance (physically), vomiting and diahorrea, full on insomnia, massive mood swings (well from bad to awful really, there wasn’t much in the way of positive mood). Eventually it stopped and with around 8 to 10 sessions with a clinical psychologist doing CBT she pretty much resolved her issues and now she’s happy as Larry. It’s two years on from that, and she says she will never touch them again.
My mother has also been taking antidepressants for about 12 years. She went through divorce, crisis, attempted suicide, was sectioned for a short while. They put her on antidepressants, and benzodiazepenes for sleep, and lithium, none of them really worked. What took mum out of her depression was electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She can’t remember much of the time, that’s one of the side effects of ECT, but she maintains that out of all the treatments that was the one that worked. Meanwhile, she’s still on the antidepressants and benzos, mainly because coming off either of them is just too brutal, so she’s pretty much stuck on them for life.
The way I see it is that it’s just too easy for doctors to prescribe them, and probably too expensive for other treatments that involve a bit of effort on the part of both doctors and patient. Much easier to prescribe pills for the patients to pop, and it’s job done. I’m pretty cynical about the whole enterprise really.
That all sounds really horrible. It’s awful that you all ended up going through that. I’ve been really fortunate overall with the health care I’ve received (in Australia). My GP started me off on trying a couple of different medications, which were having varying degrees of success but were never really quite “doing it”. At the point where he reached the end of his expertise he referred me to a psychologist he had faith in, and he was able to get me better sorted out.
I still needed therapy as well for a while to deal with everything.
After several years after I had completed therapy and was just trucking along with the medication, I thought I’d better touch base on my ongoing treatment. Unfortunately the original psychologist had retired in the interim and I got bad advice from his replacement (who I later found out from others had a bad rep) to go off the medication without really fully discussing the possible consequences. We went slowly, and took about a month to completely come off the medication, reducing amounts weekly and all that, and was fine for a while. I was told I was cured and to go out and live a normal life.
That lasted about three months or so, but then over the space of a few weeks I went from, “I’m okay”, to “I think I’m okay”, to “Nah, I’m just having a bad week”, to “oh shit I can’t deal with this again.” My wife and my GP are my heroes who nursed me through recovery from this. The GP saw me every day for five days straight (including Saturday, Sunday and his day off), prescribing anti-anxiety pills to get through the immediate crisis, giving my wife precise instructions on when to give them to me, and when and how much I was allowed to sleep and all the rest I was in no real shape to take note of or follow myself, and got me into the office of another head-shrinker he had confidence in. It took about twelve months to really get to the point where I felt I had recovered. Most if it is pretty blurry and I was sleeping about ten to twelve hours a day instead of my usual six or seven for months.
All that said, I still think I’ve had a pretty good run with the health industry. You need to find professionals you can trust though, before putting your life in their hands.
Just a note that you cannot _ever_ stop antidepressants cold turkey, even if they are driving you batshit. You have to ease off them gradually under supervision or else the slingshot effect will make even the bats think you’re batshit.
I’m so glad your wife and mother are doing well now, and found what is working for them. It’s scary and bloody hard, but it beats the alternative. Too many people don’t get the help they need for one reason or another.
Dic. H.
I wish I could give this article to everyone who talks about antidepressants as “happy pills” that zombify people. The fact is that people *do* need this medication, and that sometimes the reactions are downright cruel. If you have juvenile diabetes, you’re on insulin for life, and it would be evil to suggest that diabetics “don’t need it.” Hell, even other mental illnesses which require lifelong medication are treated more fairly.
Hi DP,
If an antidepressant is making you a zombie, then it is not doing what it is suppose to be doing. Find a mental health professional you can trust and explore other options with them. There is no one treatment that works for everyone, so avoid advice people who make blanket statements about “happy pills”.
Dic. H.
P.S. I am not a mental health professional, so feel free to avoid my advice as well.
Its not that I feel zombified; I was referring to my frustration with people’s perceptions.
I understand. The, “if an antidepressant is making you a zombie, then it is not doing what it is suppose to be doing,” argument is also something you can point out to the happy pill crowd if you feel they are worth educating.
This line is great and really summarizes how insightful your approach really is “Pragmatism trumps opinion. If, and I stress, if what you are doing is working for you, then I wish you good fortune, and would never tell you you’re doing it the wrong way.”
I have to take my meds (for Bipolar Disorder) for the rest of my life too. The stigma is still strong.
I know where you’re coming from. A few years ago I was put on anti-depressants and things were working fine….and I got bold and decided I didn’t need them anymore. Boy was that a mistake. But even after realizing that I didn’t want to go back on them.
What made me finally go back on them was I was talking to a coworker about anti-depressants and I told her I had been on them but stopped taking them. No date or time line. I just told her I stopped taking them. (For clarity this conversation was in October, 2010 I think.) Her response:
“Damn so that’s what changed in you back in August.”
With no clue as to when I stopped taking them she called me out dead on the money when I stopped taking them. That’s how much I changed after I stopped.
learn how to meditate, author of this article, or for anyone in need of help. It will change everything for you