To Medicate, or not to Medicate?

Imagine that you're in a well. You're in a deep dark well and you can't swim. You're gulping for air and thrashing about in panic but there's no hope-you're drowning. 

Suddenly, a figure comes into view at the top of the well. The sound is muffled. You scream for help through choking mouthfuls of water, gasping and spluttering and frantically waving your hands to try and get the figure to notice you; "Help, help, save me, I'm drowning, please save me".

The person at the top of the well talks to you very calmly, "Don't panic, just swim to the edge, grab hold of the walls and climb up, it's easy, all you have to do is swim to the wall, you'll be fine" You flail and flap and kick and claw, you really want to swim and climb out-but what use is it? You don't know how to swim. You have no strength to climb. "Just grab the wall and pull yourself out" 

You're exhausted. No words of encouragement that anyone can give you will get you out of this well. What use is "just swim" or "climb out", your lungs are filling up with water, your limbs ache and you can barely see in this dark cold pit. You need physical intervention, a life guard, a buoy, a helicopter-anything! You'd give anything to stop drowning....

This is how my GP explained medication to me. Anti-depressant medication. He could see the immediate horror on my face when he announced his intended treatment for my bad spell. "Think of it as the rescue from the well, the counselling will bring you away from the well's edge". 

There was sense in what he was saying. I logically could see that, however, I was terrified at what this meant. "Crazy pills"; I thought, "He wants me to take crazy pills". Now don't get me wrong, it's not that I thought that only "crazy people" take anti-depressants, in fact, I wasn't thinking of what I'd think of anyone else on anti-depressants at all! All I knew was the dread and horror and shame that they made me feel-like I wasn't capable of controlling my own head, therefore I needed a pill to do it for me. I felt gutted. 

"Crazy" is not a term I condone. I would never have thought less of a person for taking anti-depressants before. I know plenty of people close to me on them, it's just never discussed. It just felt so horribly life-changing, so horribly final when it happened to me. I came home from the doctor's, turned up the radio and sobbed helplessly to myself for an hour. 

I took a full week to decide what I wanted to do-still feeling miserable, I was coming around to the idea that I really would do anything to feel like myself again. I talked to my mother. She voiced the concern that I had had-"what if I need to take these forever?" I called my aunt-she's a doctor and our "go-to" woman when it comes to any of our family medical concerns. She was very supportive and very much in favour of the medication. "Aren't you on a nose spray indefinitely?" she asked "So-and-so is on constant migraine medication, this other person is taking medication for something else or other. If this works and keeps you healthy, then there's nothing to be worried about. It can only be a good thing".

I know that medication doesn't work for everyone. A friend of mine also reluctantly started a course of anti-depressants and found that she felt dopey and distant on them, like she was sedated rather than lifted out out of her depression. It effects everyone differently and some may need to try a few different medications before they find the right one for them. But for me, I'll never look back. After the 2-3 weeks of side effects (tiredness, no appetite, constant sweating) I finally began to feel more balanced, more calm, stronger to deal with life, rescued from that deep, dark well of doom. The counselling helped me progress, no question, but I'd not have been able for it had the black cloud above me not been alleviated first.

On the medical side of things, there are many benefits to medication for depression. Dr Patrick McKeon says in his book, "Coping with Depression and Elation", that they allow us to "speed up the natural recovery process and see the person safely through a most incapacitating illness with a minimum hurt." Depression does eventually come to an end of it's own accord, he says, but it is never known how long it could take-weeks, months even years. The anti-depressants mean that we no longer have to sit under that black cloud wondering just when it is all going to get better. 

There are many reservations about medication, this I know myself-What about addiction? Am I really happy on these pills or is it a false feeling? As research in the field also progresses, there are many safer forms of anti-depressant on the market, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), like mine, Citalopram, that reduce the risk of addiction, side-effects and overdose. 

Sweetly, my very enthusiastic bio-med cousin delightedly informed me that anti-depressants really are a great thing and put the medical jargon into simple terms for me; "they are bad feeling inhibitors, rather than good feeling promoters". It gave me some relief knowing that as I got happier, I really was feeling just that! Happy! 

So there you have it. I am not crazy. I am not on a false high or in a sedate state. My life is not effected my my medication in anyway-I barely notice, it has just become another daily routine like brushing my teeth. I may only have to stay on the medication for a year, maybe more, it doesn't bother me at all as long as I'm feeling healthy. 

Just last month, I decided to reduce my dose and see if I could wean myself off the drug. Breathlessness, fatigue, bad sleeping patterns, anxiety all crept back. I went back to the original dose with an even more optimistic mindset than before. Depression really is a chemical imbalance, it really is an illness that can be treated like hay-fever, migrane or strep throat (which, as bad luck would have it, I have at the moment while writing this from bed!) Get a spray. Get a tablet. Get an antibiotic. Get an anti-depressant. Just be healthy and happy and do whatever you have to do to make that happen.