I don’t mean to tell you want to do with your body. I really don’t give a shit.

“Nevertheless, I will spend quite a lot of words telling you exactly why I think what you in particular are doing to your body (about which I do not care, honest) is a terrible thing, and subtly implying that you are a moron for doing them. Although that doesn’t count unless I actually call you a moron in plain words. And calling you brain-damaged and lobotomised doesn’t count, because that’s medical and real people have those conditions and what are you, some kind of ableist?”

Cough.

It’s a terrible thing when people prefer to ignore the actual, real, honest experiences of human being who are sitting right there and sharing intimate things in the hope of educating people. But many feel it’s better to go entirely by theory and third-hand information that someone has written a book about than to actually consult the people whose lives they’re trying to save. By jingo, we’ll save them whether they like it or not!

On another note, I was not always so accepting of Prozac and the like – my stepfather was on the drug about 15 years ago, and it didn’t do him so well at all – mentally, he became worse. I worried that that would happen to me if I was on the drug, so I spent a long time listening patiently to the people who told me I must just be premenstrual, or it’s just teenage hormones, or I should just try to not be such an annoying fuck, or whatever. When I was prescribed fluoxetine in 2005 after a particularly bad patch where I was finally accompanied to the doctor after freaking out at some people in the housing association where I lived at the time (I can’t even remember why, I think it was to do with the washing machines), I thought I’d take it for a month – as the doctor recommended – and if I noticed anything freaky, I could stop and tell the doctor it wasn’t going too well after all. But it turns out that the tight throat was the most prominent of the symptoms for me. I have been lucky, I know, but I can say I’ve been helped.

The trouble is, I can write this big long screed about how I came to be taking dangerous chemicals and my own personal experiences, and some people will still carry on with the “just walk it off, drugs do more harm than good, you’re so selfish for thinking you deserve this when people are starving, get over yourself, there’s nothing wrong in your life”. It’s simply the case that some people cannot hear anything but their own voice and what’s going on in their own head. At least, so it seems to me, but I don’t know if I have a book written by a scientist to prove it.

Huh. Must be Wednesday.

Or any other day of the week ending in y.

/Buffy Summers

jessilikewhoa: I actually had the same numbing effect with Zoloft, but low and behold, since you and I are different people, that effect actually was helpful to me for a while. It helped me make progress in therapy, because I wasn’t so overwhelmed all the time. So I wish you good luck in your search for a medication that gives you the effects that you need and a doc who’ll work with you financially. (The doc part goes for you as well, zuzu.)

Big Pharma does suck. But they make some hella useful products. The fact that they push these on people who don’t need them, or often make up syndromes to create demand so they can move product(*cough*erectiledysfunction*cough*) does not mean that the drug itself is bad (assuming it was properly tested), or that the people who are helped by it are weak, deluded, brain-damaged or what have you.

And here’s another news flash: Yes, lifestyle can factor into clinical depression, in that it can exacerbate the symptoms. Case in point: a lot of depressed people self-medicate with alcohol, which is a depressant and just makes matters worse. And yet, when you’re in a pit of despair, you can’t really take those affirmative steps to kick the booze or eat better or get more exercise or daylight because the depression won’t let you. Lift the depression with medication, and you have a chance to make changes that might serve you better next time out.

We shared our experiences with depression and medication and why we’re against anti-depressants. And doing so doesn’t make either of us jerks.

Hey, if that’s a valid argument, let me change around a few of those words and create another valid argument:

“We shared our experiences with women and women’s rights and why we’re against feminism. And doing so doesn’t make either of us jerks.”

OR:

“We shared our experiences with black people and why we’re against affirmative action. And doing so doesn’t make either of us jerks.”

As a number of people have already mentioned, personal experience is utterly meaningless when it comes to discussing antidepressants if you haven’t experienced the chemical imbalance of clinical depression, in the same way that, for example, personal experience is utterly meaningless if you are, say, a middle class white man like myself and you want to understand the issues facing women of color. It’s shocking to me that some people on a feminist website don’t understand this.

-waits eagerly for the next round of sex worker/elective surgery/transgender/high heels n makeup war, that and her next trip to the dentist anyway-

Or the Great Fat Schism!

I think I cost myself unnecessary amounts of time in the bell jar by thinking it was “cheating” to take meds.

A lot of us do that because we fall for the line that we should just snap out of it, or get more exercise, or think of all the really depressed people in China.

Meowser, I can feel negetive emotions days, months, even years after they first occurred. Most of the time I can barely remmember/re-feel my positive emotions in the same day.

Then I hereby dub thee “endogenous,” and bequeath you the magic beans!

I think I cost myself unnecessary amounts of time in the bell jar by thinking it was “cheating” to take meds. Or that doing so would divorce me from my true emotions. I lost out on crucial years, years I could have spent building a career and a life for myself, trying to “talk it out” without drug therapy because I didn’t want to incur the disapproval of New Age types who had no idea what it was like to become completely unglued over the tiniest stressors every single day. (This was before there was Prozac; the drugs they prescribed back then, MAOIs and tricyclics, were pretty heavy-duty shit.) I’d probably have had to have my therapist move in with me and take over my life, Eugene Landy-style, in order for that approach to have done me any good.

I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else. So I say, if you have something that works for you, keep doing it — unless and until it doesn’t work for you anymore.

SNORT