Anti depressants
April 10, 2008 by nectarine
In Marytraceys9’s post Anti depressants from hell she wrote about her reactions to and feelings abut prozac, because this is a group blog we as well as our readers are going to have different opinions on things so I wanted to lay out my feelings on anti depressants.
I have real issues with the psycho pharmacology industry not least because it is all about capitalism in that one of its aims is to make money and another of its aims is to shut people up and keep them docile. I don’t think it has the best interest of those with mental health issues at heart. This article about how a drug company knew their product made children suicidal but withheld the information is an example of this.
I do think psychiatric drugs are given out too often when often other support is needed, I hate that psychiatric illnesses are assumed to be genetic and that medication is seen as a cure for bad genes. I find it bizarre that the same medication is expected to work for completely different people.
I hate that we live in a society that damages us so badly that so many of us end up with mental health issues.
Most of all I hate that I take anti depressants, I hate that I have been so wounded by patriarchy that my brain broke and probably isn’t going to mend well enough that I will be able to function without them
There were recently a whole load of articles with headlines along the lines of
prozac, used by 40milion people, does not work
But that headline is misleading if you read the whole article it says
The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients,
The word depression gets blurred at the edges, comes to mean, run down, fed up, bored with life. but for me it still means, too tired to think, to walk across a room, to construct a coherent sentence, to think about food, to wash my hair, with the taste of metal in my mouth and thoughts of sharp edged instruments, where dying is a release and a reprieve. This is what my life is like without prozac.
Although I know this is not a wrong shaped brain thing, it is a wrong shaped world thing and I know my mental health issues are caused by layer upon layer upon layer of abandonment, betrayal, loss, trauma, body shock, packed down and calcified and not enough time not enough space not enough silence not enough love to say it in.. All the damage that could be dealt with has been dealt with but I’m still wounded and always will be
I have tried and tried to live without prozac and I can’t, it is essential to my survival, and I think anything that helps women survive even if it comes with patriarchal capitalist baggage is okay, is even an act of resistance.
And I think we need to be careful, there is a lot of anti psych med feeling in left wing and feminist spaces, but telling people who have been wounded by patriarchy that taking medication to survive that wounding is somehow selling out or supporting the patriarchy can be wounding them again when we should be supporting each other in dealing with our wounds in the way that is best for us,
society already stigmatises us and tells us we are weak and worthless, we don’t need to do it to each other even inadvertently.
I would love to live in a society where anti depressants didn’t exist because they didn’t need to exist, because we didn’t get so wounded and when wounding happened we were able to heal there and then and had the time and resources to support each other through severe emotional crises. But we don’t live in that society yet and to survive the one we do live in I need to take my tablets every day.
This is an important point. I was on Prozac for almost a year and although it didn’t do much for me, it made enough of a difference at the time for me to keep taking it. I caught a lot of flak for it, even from my closest friends. It’s important we get a full understanding of anti-depressants and the way they work before we judge people for taking them. After all, what you dismiss might be the difference between someone coping and not coping…
My point wasn’t to claim that anti-depressants work or don’t work. What I was trying to point out was society’s NEED to have an instant, quick and easy CURE for something like depression, bonus points if a multi billion industry can be created from it. Something that doesn’t require society to change anything. And something society can brandish in front of sick people to blame them for remaining sick.
I am fully aware that anti-depressants do help a lot of people. Hell, they have helped ME and I’m on them right now. But what I have a problem with is society’s belief that depression ends with anti-depressants. It doesn’t. They merely attack the symptoms of a much deeper problem. And NO ONE is allowed to say this.
To people who know me I may appear anti medication but this is because I believe everybody has the right to make fully informed decisions about their treatment and I think psychiatry denies people this.
The vast majority of women only have access to the psychiatric “it’s a chemical imbalance” narrative as an explanation for their mental health problems. And if perchance they have read a nice feminist analysis on the relationship between eating disorders and mother-daughter relationships or agoraphobia and bodily boundaries, and it’s resonanted with them and they would like some psychodynamic psycotherapy. Well! It’s not available on the NHS anyway!
I think the lack of provision of alternative treatments but most importantly alternative narratives means that people are NOT being given the opportunity to make FULLY INFORMED DECISIONS about how to proceed.