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Mental Health
Antidepressants, Ranked
A journey through the medicine I never wanted to take.
In the early aughts, my friend Jenni and I laughed about this Zoloft commercial. It depicts an animated line drawing of what looks like a sad mozzarella ball, unable to bounce around like it usually does. It’s just too sad. The message: if you are sad for more than two weeks, you need drugs.
“Everyone qualifies then!” we snorted in a hipster Brooklyn bar, sipping dirty martinis that tasted like pond water. “Everyone is sad!” we screamed-laughed at each other. “It might as well ask if you are craving a brownie right now,” Jenni leaned over, whispering conspiratorially.
We laughed because we were terrified, but didn’t quite know why. There has always been something vaguely dystopian about the idea that depression — which, again, according the Zoloft advertisers simply meant being sad for more than two weeks — could be “cured,” as if it weren’t simply a normal response to real life, which is often very depressing.
Sitting at the bar, I remembered a scene in the movie Breaking the Waves — or at least I think I remembered it, because I can’t find evidence that it exists now — in which a doctor refuses to give Bess, the deeply religious and very disturbed protagonist, any pain medication or…
