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Ok, so last night Aron, Jen and I were watching TV. We've finally gotten
Aron in the habit of muting the commercials, so we were going on visuals
alone when this happened. Commercial: A cartoon woman plods across the screen, dragging along the words "I feel anxious". Next we see this woman on top of, juggling and getting buried by words like "Depression" "Worry" "Anxiety" and, my favorite, "Moody". Then we're presented with a logo, something like "Calmudown". We're to understand that "Calmudown" is a pill, not a strife-ridden word, and, sure enough, the cartoon woman is shown popping a few of these pills. Suddenly, those nasty words aren't so big any more, and the final scene, (oh, this is rich) shows our cartoon lady neatly sweeping up the stressed-out words and dumping them in a trash can. She has an efficient, content smile on her face and those spacey eyes that born-again Christians get when they're talking about their faith. As I mentioned earlier this week, I have two problems with this commercial. I'll start with my beef with anti-depressants in general. There is such a thing as clinical depression. And, for those that suffer from this ailment, drugs such as Prozac are literally a life-saver. For these folks, I'm all for using these drugs (as long as they *want* to take them) to improve their lives. That makes sense to me, despite my own pet fears about how little we know about how such drugs work in our complex, delicate neurostructure. In 1997 I went to the doctor for something minor like a sore throat. During the appointment, I revealed to my doctor some of the stresses in my life at that time - my boyfriend had broken up with me the same day my father was hospitalized and his emphezyma took a turn for the worse. She immediately wrote me a prescription for prozac. She described it as a "safety blanket" that I could use to "get me through the hard times". And, despite my long-standing dislike of such medications, I was persuaded to at least accept her scrawled prescription. I didn't have to get it filled. Right? I spoke to several friends of mine who happened to be working on psych degrees at the time. All the comments were positive; one friend in particular, who had been on one anti-depressant after another, swore to me that taking these drugs truly helped you to focus - that most people feel smarter and more productive after a few weeks of taking the drugs. She cautioned me, though, that the first time I take the pills is the best; if I were to follow my doctor's advice and go off of these in 6 months, the next time I took anti-depressants, the initial surge of intelligence wouldn't be as great. Ok, I'll admit it: I tried them to see if it was true. That description, that it's never as good as your first time, reminded me of the drug lore we were told before the first time we took acid. "Cherish your first trips, man, 'cause, like, your body absorbs the poison, see? and there's antibodies so you never can feel it as strong, as visual..." "Dude, it's true. It's never as good as your first trip..." Ah, hell. Life is for exploring stuff, and I was in the tail end of my "substance" exploration phase. So, I tried prozac for a month. I could still feel my sadness, but it was wrapped in cotton, packed deep down with styrofoam packing peanuts and muffled by soundproofing. I "functioned" normally, except that I was disgustingly blase about my problems. I didn't - couldn't - deal with them, work through them, or even acknowledge their significance. I read my private journals from that time and I see I'm full of "taking back my life" but I don't say from what. I was full of go with no history. I didn't accept my problems, I ignored them. I couldn't laugh as easily or very loudly. I felt like I was fading over the month. I moved more efficiency, but with no feeling, no grace. Eventually, even my orgasms fainted away. Fuck this shit. It scared me enough that, at the end of a month, I went off the pills. A week later, I could finally access and deal with my problems again. It was no big surprise to find that I had made no progress throughout that month - I was back at square one. And I was shaken by the tingling as I woke out of numbness. What prozac had given me was a vacation from reality - a vacation in a little padded room with mittens taped over my hands. At least, that's how it was for me. I didn't need prozac for those problems - I needed counseling. I needed to absorb what had happened to me and what was happening to my father, to figure out how to deal with it and how it would fit into my life. Prozac rendered me unable to do this. I couldn't feel my sadness, how could I work through it? I think our culture has jumped on the anti-depressant band wagon. Increasingly, these drugs are used to treat the symptoms of everyday stresses and, worse, normal life occurances that really do not need such medication. It's normal, natural and healthy to feel upset and anxious when a family member is extremely sick, or to feel raw and hurt when your boyfriend dumps you. Just because I had to deal with both of these things at the same time didn't mean I needed to be shot full of emotional novocaine. I needed to work through those things, but the doctor - at an HMO, I might add - the doctor decided it was more important that I function normally than that I heal normally. In other words, she slapped a band-aid on me and sent me back to work. I'd only taken one day off after I found out my dad was sick. I was just kinda sad at work after it happened. And that's what I'm scared of, with the wide-spread use of anti-depressants. What have we done to society, what do we expect of every citizen that we feel we need to drug up some of them so they'll work more efficiently? What kind of pace are we setting that we have to steal time from grieving to fit everything in? It seems to me that using anti-depressants to "help me through" was more for my employer's sake than my own. Where's the compassion in taking away my right to cry, just so I'll be more focused at my job? What if the use of such drugs became a standard, and everyone had to take them in order to hold down a "normal" work week? I know, it sounds far fetched, but didja read Brave New World? If the masses are a threat, give them a drug that feels good and calms them down. I believe it was called, "Soma", and though it was used differently than from what I'm talking about here, it had a similar effect. A nice, cottony, padded effect. I know originally my slant on this was from the viewpoint of women. I do think these sorts of drugs are marketed more towards women than men, though men do take them. It makes sense: if you have a drug that can be used to induce complacency and acceptance of increasing social demands, you'd want to market that drug to the portion of the population that's going to feel the brunt of it. Why do you think there are liquor stores on every corner in poor and minority neighborhoods? Drunk people don't rise up; they aren't up to the organization that it would take. Women are demanding equal rights. Or, well, we were, but then someone said, "All right - poof - you're equal now." sometime in the eighties and somehow everyone believed that enough to quiet down. What better way to keep the voices quiet than to introduce a pill that "focuses" you and lets you ignore your depression? If women don't feel discontent, they're less likely to notice all the little ways we're still discriminated against. We're going to accept that we have to enter into a world that men have created, rather than going to the bother of changing it to reflect our (just over) half the population. Instead of having a woman's compassion and emotion contribute to the work enviornment, women are given a pill to help them accept the male power structure already in existence. Ok, I know I'm spinning wildly off -topic here, but I want to make this clear: I'm not calling for women to take over. I'm calling for women and men who want to work together as equals to band together. I want those equals to raise their kids as equals and build up communities of equals until there's enough that the equals can take over. I think good people should be somewhat depressed by our society. I think we should be angry. If we're not allowed to see, to think, to feel what's going on around us, then we can't protest or call for change. I know, I'm basing this on my own experience with only one of these drugs. And I know many people who have benefitted greatly from the focus these drugs give them. I'm not suggesting we take these drugs away. But as more and more people are diagnosed with depression and prescribed these pills, I have to wonder if we shouldn't look at why we're all so depressed. What's the common denominator? Maybe we should work on the cause, rather than the symptom, of this mass depression. Life shouldn't be so hard that we have to medicate most of the population just to get through it. | ||
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