Why I'm Trying Psych Meds Again
and how I've changed my mind about their critics
I asked for an antidepressant. For most of the year I’ve been feeling like my life is slipping away from me and I can’t get it back. There’s been this frightening sense of finality creeping into my head, totally irrational and unwarranted, unfortunately familiar. I went back to therapy in the summer, at the behest of my partner, who took one look at me after I told them the kind of thoughts I never tell anyone about and said, No one should be suffering that much.
It’s not the first time I’ve asked about antidepressants. I brought it up with my doctor last year but told her I was scared, because I’ve been on the psych med rollercoaster before, and it sucked ass. The stimulants made me angry and mean. The mood stabilizers did not stabilize much of anything. The only ones I like are the benzodiazepines, but I’m not allowed to take those everyday.
She ordered me one of those genetic tests that tells you which drugs you’re likely to metabolize best, to at least narrow it down and spare me some failure, but when I read the privacy policy, it basically said “We can sell your genome to the CIA if we want to!”, so I got paranoid and never sent in my spit.
It took me six months working with a therapist before I got the hang of distinguishing my intrusive thoughts from my valid concerns, and then some practice tolerating a little bit of uncertainty, before I could ask about antidepressants again. Why was I so afraid of them?
Well, partly because I went through a phase of psych med skepticism, informed by some critics who I no longer agree with. Over the last few years, I’ve been changing my mind — I mentioned this briefly in my piece on Sami Timimi’s new book, but I thought a more detailed explanation of how my thinking has evolved over time might be useful for my paid subscribers. (Maybe your ideas have changed too, and we can compare notes.)
It takes a lot for everyone to change their minds, but especially me, because my mind gets stuck on stuff and doesn’t want to let go. The researcher Sarah Stein Lubrano argues that nobody changes their mind just from reading a logically sound argument — actually, it takes experiences.
