A Candid Conversation About Psychiatric Meds
This article contains topics of suicide and mental illness. This article is not a substitute for the advice of a medical professional. If you are experiencing a mental health emergency, please call 988.
Graphics by Vanessa Vergara.
Psych meds are life-saving. I used to be on Lexapro, and everyone raves about it for good reasons — it stops lots of people from ending their lives. Abilify has already helped me be a more positive thinker, and Prozac has turned me into the energizer bunny.
My basic thoughts on psych meds is that they can’t make you into someone you’re not.
You just end up doing whatever you would do if you had more synapses firing in one area of your brain than the other.
That can mean good things, but it doesn’t change the fact that your brain can get addicted to them, and when you stop taking them, it can be very dangerous. Perhaps you take the wrong cold medication with your Seroquel, and now you haven’t woken up for 16 hours. Or maybe your dose is too high and you have a panic attack at work. Or maybe, you lose your health insurance and have to stop taking your drugs so abruptly that you can’t eat solid food for two weeks, and you pass out from the sheer overwhelm of life.
All of these things have happened to me. The fact that I’m still on the journey to find the right combination of drugs to treat the symptoms I struggle with is immensely frustrating, because I don’t remember what I was like when I wasn’t on medication. I wonder if this is what “better” feels like at every moment, if I’ll ever live a life outside of the dangerous extremes of manic and depressive.
Most of all, I wonder if I should stop taking them for good.
The following is a candid conversation between two close friends in their 20s who have both been on psych meds for years to treat symptoms of depression and anxiety (and ADHD for me). It shows just how life saving and limiting legal drugs for mental health can be.
Me: How much weed were you smoking a day?
Friend: Every day, more than three times a day. In the morning on my way to work, on my break at work, going home from work, in the bathroom at work.
M: The reason I stopped Seroquel was because I felt like it was controlling my life, and that was very frustrating. Versus, if I wanted to smoke to fall asleep, I could control that.
F: When did you take Seroquel?
M: Just at night.
F: I think that's where they fucked up, because I didn't take Seroquel every night. The nurses would literally be like, do you want the Seroquel? Yes or no? I've never heard of anyone taking it like every day.
My friend was recently voluntarily hospitalized for her mental health.
M: The only people who are really supposed to be taking seroquel every day are people who are schizophrenic, basically. I think they think the whole Bipolar Two thing is more severe than I think it is. Um, so I don't know. I thought, if I could take this every other day, or once every three days, maybe I would like it more, because the symptoms do last long.
The problem is, if you take it every day for like two weeks, and then you don't take it for one day, that one day, you will not sleep. You will stay up for 24 hours.
You committed yourself, right?
F: It was really my family, but yes, I did. I agreed to it.
M: Okay, so nobody was forcing you.
F: Nobody was holding a gun to my head or anything. Except me.
M: It’s a good joke, it’s a great joke even… How long were you there for?
F: I was there for eight days.
M: And how did you feel afterwards? Do you feel like it did a lot for you, or was it just like, ‘I’m out now and everything’s the same?’
F: No, I definitely think it did a lot for me — and I don't think I even recognized it, like when I first got out. But after being out and after going through life, situations did come up where I'd be emotional. I used what I learned inside of there, and it actually really helps, and I still use it to this day.
M: What would be an example of that?
F: Majority of those topics were like, how do you overcome suicidal thoughts, and how to manage your emotions, so they're not going into overboard... We talked about how feelings are okay; you're supposed to feel them. You're supposed to have them, but not let them be the driving force of your whole entire life.
And they use this acronym called; I think it was called HALT.
M: Something about therapy is I don't remember none of those acronyms.
F: I use that sometimes, because sometimes I'd be like, ‘Why the fuck am I mad?’ Because I went to sleep at 4am and had not eaten and it's 6pm.
M: You did [take] Zoloft, and I feel like you were on it for mad long and then you stopped, and I want to know why.
F: I stopped it because it was making me anxious and I had never experienced anxiety before;' and nobody was believing me either… When I got to the in-patient thing, they switched me from Zoloft. I'm now taking Lexapro. That seems to be working a lot better for me. I don't get anxious.
M: I would say like in terms of anti-anxiety stuff, that shit is crazy. Like you don't care about anything on Lexapro; you don't care about a single thing. And it's great. But I need to care about shit in order to keep my job. So that was kind of messing me up; it was making my blood pressure really low anyways.
When you got off of [Zoloft] did you have like a lot of withdrawals or were you afraid of that at all?
F: I think my withdrawal is I get headaches. They can be really bad headaches… And obviously when you stop taking those drugs, all your symptoms start to come back. So that was a thing too.
M: Do you ever feel like you should have been on them earlier, or are you glad you did it now that you're an adult and not, you know, a younger teen?
F: I don't think I should have been on them earlier because I don't think I was experiencing — or let me say, paying attention to, or didn't really know what the feelings were of my depression — until after I left Georgia; because in Florida, it was bad. But when I left Georgia, and then I was isolating myself: that's when it got really worse.
So I guess I wish I could get them earlier in the sense that, I wish as soon as I got to Georgia, I was on medication, but I didn't start taking medication until like 2019.
M: Are you of the opinion that like, yeah, if you need to be on psych meds for the rest of your life, that's cool? If it helps, why not? Or no, it should be a temporary thing.
F: I'm on the, ‘if it helps, why not’ train. But personally, no I don't want to be on them forever. But definitely if they make you feel better, if they're doing what they need to do for you, I’m for taking them forever.
M: In your journey with the medication, what empowered you and made you feel better, and what about it limited you?
F: I guess the empowering side is like, everything is not foggy anymore. You can kind of put names on things and compartmentalize.
I feel like they can be limiting on how you have to get them. I definitely say that's a big one because sometimes, at least for me, they wanted me to go to the psychiatrist to get them, which I was fine with.
But the psychiatrist that they gave me from outpatient, I did not like it all. It seemed ‘Okay, are you doing good? Good. Perfect, swipe the card.’ And I don't think people like that or should be like in this industry.
Since this conversation, I have been put on several other medications, fought my bipolar diagnosis, and have no trouble speaking about it, because my silence is what contributes to the healthcare system staying the same.
If you feel like you need to get help, from a therapist or a psychiatrist, please look at all your options, go where you feel comfortable and safe. ASK STUPID QUESTIONS, and set boundaries in advance. Because we’ve been through the worst — and if we didn’t get help, we wouldn’t still be able to be friends to each other.