Anti depressants

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.

 

Feminism: Only strong independent women need apply?

When I first put the call out for this blog several of the women interested in contributing emailed me saying something along the lines of “I don’t talk about my mental health on my feminist blog because I don’t think anyones interested” or “I don’t know how people will react to it”

I think we are really wary of talking about this on our feminist blogs because mental illness is still too often seen by society, even feminists as weakness rather than an illness or a wounding and feminists are not supposed to be weak.

I read over and over again on the internet that “feminists are strong independent women” To me as a woman with serious mental health issues and increasing physical health issues this feels both marginalising and silencing. What about those of us that are neither strong nor independant, does that make us not feminists? Does it make us bad feminists? Does the feminist community as a whole look down on us? Because really that’s what comes across when feminists are characterised like this.

I live with Complex Post traumatic stress disorder, mild to severe depression, occasional dissociative symptoms and encroaching arthritis, so a lot of the time I don’t feel strong, I spend a lot of my time exhausted, in pain, flashbacking, having nightmares or not sleeping, feeling blank and empty, so I am often far from anyone’s definition of strong

And as for independent, I’m not that either, neither emotionally or financially, When I’m sick, when I’m so depressed I can hardly speak or move or think there are people I pull on hard, people that I rely on to get me through, people that I wouldn’t survive without. But I don’t actually understand why that’s an issue, just because patriarchal capitalism is determined to make us as emotionally disconnected from each other as possible that isn’t a good thing and I think as feminists we should actually be resisting that, the extreme individualism that our culture is moving towards is unhealthy for everyone but especially women, because in a society that doesn’t value us we need each other.

I do understand why feminists value financial independence, of course I do and I think every woman should be able to be financially independent, but the fact is some of us aren’t, and some of us cant be, I am dependant on my partner, and If i wasn’t i would be dependant on benefits. I’m currently working towards more financial independence but my mental health history is such that I am under no illusions that I wont have to stop work at some time again in the future when my depression kicks in hard. And I may just have to work part time, so the chances are that I will never be financially independent. This doesn’t make me a bad feminist, it makes me a victim of a system that wounds women and then punishes them for being wounded. It makes me a victim of a system that all women are victims of in someway or another.

And its not just us that get marginalised by the idea of feminists always being “Strong independent women”" it seems to me that the archetype strong independent feminist is a young white middle class able bodied atheist with no children and no mental health issues

Where does that leave all the other women who don’t fit that archetype? Feminism isn’t going to change anything if it leaves most of us behind