Some of my thoughts:

October 12, 2006

I was prescribed Prozac in 1995, at the age of eighteen, after a

very brief session with a therapist and psychiatrist (no more than

thirty minutes between the two of them). I continued taking Prozac

and various other anti-depressants over the course of the next eight

years. From roughly 1996 on, all my prescriptions for AD's were

written by a family practitioner, who, as was the case with the

psychiatrist I'd met with first and whom had prescribed the Prozac for

the first few months that I was on it, never informed my of any of the

side-effects I'd suffer from using the SSRI. In fact, the many times

I inquired about the many different side-effects I was suffering from

that were different from those listed with the pills from the

pharmacy, I was repeatedly told by the physician that the SSRI's I had

been given were safe and that I'd probably have to be on them for the

rest of my life. A diagnosis he seemed to have made out of thin air

considering he wasn't a therapist or psychiatrist, and, in general,

spent no more than a few minutes with me every time I came in to see

him. And, if you were ever unfortunate enough to be on an SSRI back

in the mid to late 90's, you know how little information about

side-effects were listed with your prescription from the pharmacy

(nausea, drowsiness, dry mouth and very little else, if I recall

correctly). Inserts and brochures with samples were, not

surprisingly, even less informative about side-effects.

I've been off anti-depressants now for three years and it's only

been within that time that I've come to realize that the effects I'd

been suffering from for those eight years weren't caused by my

depression or some natural defect of mine, but instead the drugs that

were presented to me as being completely safe with no chance of

long-term damage. I was never told about withdrawal and the dangerous

consequences of missing doses or not tapering slowly. I was led to

believe that I had a chemical imbalance and that the way that I felt

and acted on anti-depressants—the good and the bad—was the real me.

My physician seemed to think, and certainly suggested to me, that the

drugs were entirely safe and that whatever I thought was wrong with me

and the medicine were my own paranoid delusions. Maybe because I was

too `drugged', brain-damaged, or optimistic that I'd be able to feel

again the way I did on these drugs when I first started taking them

eight years earlier, that I continued to take them and continued to go

to this dangerously ignorant and thoughtless doctor for more

prescriptions. More likely, it was because every time I tried to stop

taking them--because I was never told about their addictive properties

and, in fact, was told that they had none at all--I'd start to get

really depressed again. Because of the misleading information I was

being fed from my doctor, pharma, etc., I continued to think that the

recurrent depression was, indeed, my natural defective-self sans

drugs, and continued to return to them to " treat " my " disease " . After

nearly seven years of this going on and off the AD's for no more than

three weeks to a month at a time (I was on the blessed, long-lasting

Prozac ninety-percent of the time; all the more reason not to

recognize drug withdrawals as the problem and to instead blame my

misery on the " disease " .), I finally decided I had to take my chances

without the drugs and decreased my dosage over a few months time until

I'd quit completely.

Maybe because I tapered too quickly; maybe because I'm

brain-damaged from eight years on Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro, Wellbutrin,

Remeron; or maybe because I was on these mind-numbing drugs during

eight very formative years of my life (18-26) and didn't develop

properly, but I just don't feel right these days: either mentally or

physically. Nevertheless, I feel (`feel' being the operative word) a

hundred times better than I did ninety-five percent of the time I was

on AD's.

October 12, 2006