Healing
There was always something inherently creepy about medication to me. We were taught to be suspicious of it. My family often discussed it as though we were ingesting the Borg from Star Trek. After this, you will never be the same again. Whatever you are will disappear and be replaced by blind obedience. When we heard about other children taking Ritalin or similar medications, there would be disapproving sounds all around; it was our firm belief that this was done not in the child’s best interest but as part of a larger attempt to push children into being docile via drugs.
Pause: My family are not conspiracy theorists. They are nice, intelligent people who were fiercely concerned about their children. They taught me a lot, including that we live in a world where business feels entitled to human life. Part of their belief, however, manifested in the certainty that the drug industry was actively trying to push unnecessary medication that would keep us sedated. This isn’t a necessarily a left-wing perspective; the idea that something around you is making miss the real issue is fairly common. The problem is when that belief joins with the legitimate criticism of capitalist society. You’ve heard it before. There is no illness. There’s an attempt to make not being able to feel what is the human experience, necessary to create art and change the world. It’s not true.
I am mad, not naive; I have no rose-colored-lenses about the pharmaceutical industry. Yes, there are unethical practices; yes, there are doctors that prescribe medication that shouldn’t be prescribed. Yes, there are parents feeding their children medication so they don’t have to deal with them. Industry behaves like an industry; it wants more clients. I am also a firm believer that the conditions of our world are set by design to hurt people’s mental conditions. I have always dealt with anxiety and depression, but I was not pushed to my worst until I was unemployed for a long period of time.
Mental illness is strangely ceremonial. At the height of my worst depressive episode, I believed there was an amount of physical pain I needed to suffer to compensate for the suffering I was causing others. The suffering was specifically caused by financial conditions: my mind had become obsessed with the fact that keeping me alive was costing my family money. This is not coincidental. We are society that demands that people earn a certain amount to stay alive. If you had told me that, though, it would not have made any difference. I was convinced that I deserved to die because I was, on my own, an emissary of evil on Earth. There is no deep discussion to be had about a better world with someone in my condition; for me there was only a polite solution that I was too cowardly to take.
Even then, the idea of treatment scared me deeply. For years I delayed taking medicine because being a robot of Big Pharma was a sort of death for me; a death of potential, a death of my friends’ love for me, a death of whatever sort of person I was. I pushed myself to the point where others were scared for me and of me so I could, in my head, avoid assimilation. When I started my medication I made a decision: I decided that even if I were to become uncreative and boring, I deserved to live.
The truth is that medication saved my life. There’s no two ways about it; because of the environmental conditions I was in — which include, yes, the capitalist society around me — because of my genetics and because of my history, I was walking slowly toward suicide. When I talk about it, people are embarrassed for me, embarrassed of what they see as my weakness or embarrassed that I decided to tell something so personal. I talk about it anyway; I do it because the least I can do is telling people that mental illness is simply an illness and it can be treated. It has complex causes, of course. It’s not the same for everyone else; I know people that had different experiences. But it’s still just an illness. I am not cursed. I am human.
I stopped taking medication about a year and a half ago. This wasn’t something I celebrated as a personal victory. It didn’t make me feel more normal. Mental illness is a part of me; I manage it how I can. When I told my doctor I was quitting, she looked at me and said “We’ll try”. I am trying. It’s not always easy, because we live in a bad world, even me, someone of relative privilege, and that affects me in specific ways, just like it could affect the physical health of others. That conversation is vital, and must be had. Still, treatment exists, and that includes medication. Nobody — artist, activist, friend — needs to feel miserable to improve the world.
