the crazy

I stumbled upon an interesting blog post and set of responses to it yesterday when clicking on links from links from links. The original writer's point was about people being made to feel guilty or ashamed for taking medication, whether pain meds, sleep aids, or antidepressants, and the puritanical "oh, it's just a crutch!" attitude. Yeah, well, no matter what you think of the pharmaceutical industry--and you all know I think it's a deeply problematic business, despite my sucking at the teat of free pens, sticky notes, and chicken kabob salads at work, or those business trips to the Caribbean I tagged along on with the ex who worked for a major drug company--the fact remains that if you break a leg, you need a crutch, and if you go a few weeks having three or four hours sleep a night and see what that fucking feels like, physically and emotionally, you'd be happy for a "crutch" for that too while you work on what the root cause might be.

But what I really want to talk about is the rabidly anti-antidepressant people who come out of the woodwork whenever discussions like this come up, mostly people who have tried them themselves, hated them, came off them, and now insist that they're bad bad bad and no one should take them. Which is so silly, really. To say that because something was worthless for you, it's worthless for everyone--especially in the face of people specifically telling you, no, Prozac saved my life--is, like, the height of arrogance and dismissiveness. And what I find fascinating is the people who say, antidepressants (or other psychiatric drugs) "changed their personalities." This was ably addressed in part by a bunch of other blog commenters who agreed, yeah! they changed my personality, too, and I'm glad, because before I was a miserable mood-swingy bitch or a crying-at-the-drop-of-a-hat basketcase (or whatever.)

Well, it's no secret that I've been on antidepressants and off antidepressants over the past twelve years. And while Unmedicated Depressed Andrea is a different person than Medicated Andrea, Medicated Andrea is *not* a different person than Unmedicated Non-Depressed Andrea. But I'll say this: Unmedicated maybe-a-little-depressed-and-anxious Andrea in 2008 *is* a totally different person than the Unmedicated Andrea of, say, 1990, simply because of the "crutch" effect. Having experienced what being not-crazy on drugs feels like has enabled me to deal better with the crazy, on or off drugs. It's like, when you're a little paranoid and over-sensitive and not-quite-rational, you don't realize it; once it's been taken away pharmaceutically, you can see that it wasn't quite rational, and in the future, you can (or, okay, *I* can) recognize that feeling again, and go, oh! yeah! not thinking right! emotions not quite in synch with reality!

I think that's kinda the idea of CBT, but never having had CBT, only having figured it out my own self, I couldn't tell you for sure. But having had that crutch drug when I needed it, has made me able to make changes with or without it.

I'll also say this, about D. I cannot tell whether it's the illness, having the illness properly medicated, or just the maturation process, but his personality has changed in some ways. He's always had a sort of underlying sweetness and sensitivity to his nature, but especially when he was a teenager, that was covered up with a layer of macho bullshit. Whether it was being really sick, or being really sick and getting better, or growing up, or maybe just being out of his peer group, but that's been stripped away. In a way, it's wonderful; I see his kindness and his consideration to other people and I'm proud of him, of his basic niceness. And in a way it's worrisome; I hope he is out there in the world again someday, but if he's going to be, he's going to have to relearn those walls.

Holy digression, Batman! You all will have to pretend I tied this one up into a cohesive thesis. Or, y'know, not.

xoxo