Antidepressants

If you could take a pill that would make you happier, would you do it? Easy question, right? We do this every day, from vitamins to allergy medication to sleeping pills to ... antidepressants. And yet while I've never seen anything weird about taking vitamins or allergy medication and concede that my unease about sleeping pills is an idiosyncrasy, I think I'm not the only one to view antidepressants in a different light.

For the vast majority of my life, I've been entirely unwilling to take these, despite the fact that I certainly fit the profile of someone they could help. I'm a very emotional person who goes through dizzying ups and terrifying downs, having emotional breakdowns every now and then and being depressed for medium to long stretches of time every now and then (okay, more rare than the emotional breakdowns.) Certainly readers of this website will not be surprised by any of this.

And I'm sure I could easily have been prescribed happiness pills, and yet I have this hang-up about it. I know exactly where it comes from, and I thought I'd make those points, each of which you may well find easily refutable:

I will feel a great deal of accomplishment if I manage, solely through my own force of will and intelligence and actions (i.e. figuring out what triggers depression and avoiding it), to beat this. (This is different from something like allergies where since it isn't mental, concentration probably won't do the trick.)
I am worried that these things will change who I am. No, scratch that: these things will certainly change who I am, since that's the point. I'm worried that they'll change (mediate) the bad me, but they'll also change (mediate) the good me. To be succinct, I'm worried that the completely-on mode will be a bit less sharp and brilliant, a bit more dulled, than before.
In some sense, I like the lows; they make me more human and make the highs seem better. Since for some bizarre reason I am still an optimist at heart (?!), I still plan to end on a high, which will feel like less of a high if my life to that point has been better. (This objection is obviously silly.)
I feel like I am defeating evolution. The mental illness is probably in my genes, triggered by environment. I diagnosed myself (a diagnosis rejected by my psychiatrist) with either manic depressiveness or bipolar disorder. These things emerge in your early 20s (as my recent problems have), triggered by things, etc., etc.. If I take pills which allow me to be more functional, then this will probably increase my reproductive fitness, just spawning more children with the same problem. It's not that I bear any great fondness for society at large, but I do really like the theory of natural selection and can't help but feel a little sad about the potential to subvet it.
I like the idea of not being dependent on drugs. Now, I wouldn't (probably) die without antidepressants, but I like the idea that I could survive in the wild without the aid of pharmaceuticals, whether it's because I've made the decision to simplify my life or because of the apocalypse rendering modern technology non-existent a la Dark Angel. In this vein, I would feel equally bad about being dependent on (say) insulin or a blood thinner or whatever.
I like the idea of I-can-do-anything. I honestly do think I'm invincible and Superman (outside of the periods of down; of course, maybe the periods of down are the real me and the invincible Superman delusions are the passing episodes.) Taking fix-me drugs is a concession that I can't do that, which threatens to shatter my entire worldview (melodrama alert).
There is something unfair about happiness pills. Suppose that people are distributed evenly in ten deciles of intrinsic happiness, 0123456789. Suppose that a happiness level of 3 or less is sufficient to get antidepressants prescribed, and suppose that the antidepressants increase your happiness by 3. All of a sudden your ten deciles become 3456456789, and the intrinsic-4's (and to a lesser extent 5's and 6's) get totally screwed in the transaction. Why should happiness pills be available only to sad people? Why shouldn't happy people be allowed to be happier? What happens when you give SSRI's to perfectly healthy people? For ethical reasons, I think these results are unknown.
If I beat my problems, I'll never know if it was me beating it or the drugs (much like affirmative action.)

Anyway, it's a pretty long list of things that I find somewhat persuasive. I never thought I'd take antidepressants, but I seem to have fallen down a pretty slippery slope. I've had a kind of rough emotional month, which has resulted in anti-anxiety pills, which I've been on for a week. To be honest, I should have written this essay before, because I'm sure those have affected my mood too, but anyway, they seem not to have been enough. My psychiatrist is a very smart woman who seems to get me, and I trust her, and I do want to be happy. And I have tried so hard over the past month to fix this with just-me and even friends and all of that. And I've made progress, but maybe not enough progress? I don't know.

And I think I might be talking myself out of it. You see, I made the decision that I'd write one last essay as me (anti-anxiety pills aside) and then start taking the drugs, but reading all of the objections, reading that I've made progress without them (true), gives me pause.

But no. In the name of science, to see what they do to me, and because many people believe that they can help me a lot, here we go. Here we go, assuming all the mild self-loathing that comes from the list above, assuming the stigma that comes from having taken pills, out here in the open. I won't have perspective. I won't be able to tell if I'm as brilliant as before, probably. I hope so. I do hope you'll tell me if the pills are screwing me up, but I don't expect you to.

Deep breath, glass of water, here we go.