This is an extract from my recent book 10X Happiness, Zero Bullshit. It touches on a very important issue (in my view) which is antidepressant medication, and whether or not you should take it when you are depressed.
As always, keen to hear your thoughts on this so please do let me know in the comments below.
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I sat in the doctor’s office, gazing at the damp green linoleum floor. The chair was comfortable. In front of me was a low table with magazines on it. There was a potted plant beside me. The clock ticked loudly. It was afternoon, and a weak sun poured in through the window, half-heartedly lighting the scene. Chin in my hand, I gazed at the floor.
You know when you have mixed feelings about something? On the one hand I was here with a very deliberate plan in mind. I wanted Prozac. Nothing if not an addict, and I am also nothing if not someone who always craves the next shiny thing. At that time (the early nineties), Prozac was most definitely the next shiny thing. Prozac, you see, had been written up breathlessly in all the magazines and newspapers. It was almost (but not quite) touted as a fashion accessory. Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, an edgy nineties-tinged reboot of The Bell Jar genre by a cool girl from Brookyln perversely only added to the drug’s allure.
I’d been unhappy. I’d been really fucking unhappy. I’d been in bed for days. I’d wanted to commit suicide. I’d contemplated committing suicide. I’d planned committing suicide. I hadn’t washed for days. I’d left my bedclothes on the bed for over a month even after they’d been permanently soaked with my sweat.
Given all of that, could I have ‘pulled myself out of it’, or been pulled out of it, had I undergone talking therapy first? If I’d resisted going onto the hard stuff (antidepressants) quite so quickly, and had I taken a more positive attitude might things have been different?
‘Who knows? I felt manipulative sitting there in that doctor’s surgery. I’d visited a month before and he’d told me ‘Wait a month and see if you feel better.’ I’d known then that I would wait the month out, and come back and tell him the same story. I’d known! I hadn’t made a serious effort. I hadn’t even tried to pull myself together.
Look, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say yes, I did need that fucking medication right then. I needed it. You can second guess and try to trick your mind as much as you like, but it’s a game you will never win. ‘I don’t really need antidepressants, but I’m going to try get them anyway.’ When you step back, who really thinks like that?
The reality is that most normal, well-adjusted people don’t spend their time researching antidepressant medications and then finding ways to get their doctor to prescribe it. Most people have better things to do with their time. I didn’t. In my opinion, at that juncture in my life, the very best, most optimal, use of my time was sitting in a doctor’s surgery trying to get a script.
So while there was this residual feeling of guilt, and of imagined, hyped-up duplicity, there was another feeling that was even more pervasive and it was this: I felt afraid. Because I knew that I had reached a point of no return. My mental illness was now such that it could no longer be kept a secret. It was no longer stuffed in the cupboard under the sink with the vomit-soaked clothes I couldn’t be bothered to wash. It couldn’t be concealed from the world any longer. It was official. I had a mental problem that was such that it required actual medical attention.
It was no longer just a story I’d made up in my head to tell myself I was real.
It was at that precise moment that I successfully smashed through my denial. The rubber hit the road. I could no longer pretend that everything was normal. Yes, I could play mental games with myself. I could tell myself that I was the clever one who’d pulled the wool over my doctor’s eyes. But that wasn’t true. And I knew it.
I went in to see the doctor. He took one look at me and he put me on 40mg of Fluoxetine a day. My life changed forever.
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