What I want my friends to know about Prozac (and other SSRIs)
Hello friends.
Maybe you’ve noticed that in the past couple of years I haven’t been as present. I haven’t returned your calls, and even my emoji game is weak.
Maybe you’ve seen what my husband calls the thousand-yard stare.
If so, let me throw another log on the campfire. It’s the middle of a scorching Austin summer, but work with me, friends.
I want to tell you a story.
A story about Prozac. Which is a member of a crime family known as antidepressants, or SSRIs. Imagine the Sopranos without the overt sociopathy or the great Italian dinners.
Twenty-odd years ago, when I was a semi-young writer and advertising creative, I woke up excessively human a few too many days in a row, and saw Prozac as a solution, So did my doctor, who once interrupted my childhood to reminisce about the hot Pharma reps who slithered through his office offering free samples of the latest antidepressant.
The fact that his decisions about my care may have come from his pants didn’t bother me.
It was all in the name. This Zac fellow was a pro.
And for a while, it was. I was better than myself. That double-dutch jump rope swing that we call life was easier to enter, and I could jump without getting tangled up so much.
Things got better. So much better that I after a few years I tried to tell Zac that I was ready to jump alone.
Prozac, and all its progeny (Celexa, Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro, Lustral. Beautiful siren names that cover a sea-witch reality) aren’t interested in letting you go. Like an aunt of mine, it’s all fun and games until you try to leave.
Every time I attempted to go it alone, eventually there would come a day—weeks, or even months down the road--when I would feel suddenly, terribly miserable, and think, this must be me. My depression, my illness. Here was a lifeline that I was throwing back.
But that is one of the insidious realities that give SSRI’s such a charmed life. You know those cowboy movies where a good guy thinks he’s escaping and is running away and the bad guy just watches him run, then takes careful aim and drops him just as he’s about to vanish into the horizon line? SSRI’s will do that. They’ll take aim at you many weeks or even months down the road, after you’ve even forgotten you were ever on them.
And you’ll drop.
It’s called withdrawal.
As well-read and worldly as I thought I was, I didn’t know about withdrawal until about two years ago, when a gentle holistic psychiatrist from India said the word in his lilting, neo-Freudian voice.
Withdrawal.
I put it on its own line so you’ll remember it, friends. My hope is that you might realize you are not broken. The system is broken. Prozac, and all its sea witch relatives, exist not as a medicine to cure you, but as a means for pharma bros of this great land to use a dim corner of your brain to print money.
Don’t take my word for it. Look up “can’t get off my antidepressant.” Then follow that increasingly wise and gloomy rabbit hole down into the bowels of capitalism.
And have a pill I would advise you to take before any other: The Red Pill.
Because your trust, like my trust, has been violated. That part of you that wants to be better has made many people much, much richer.
Welcome to the world of Prozac withdrawal. My world. In which I first went cold turkey (disaster) then tried again under the auspices of a holistic psychiatrist that tapered me in 2.5 months (disaster, way too fast) then tried to taper over an 18-month period by myself (disaster, from 40 mg down to 4.5 mg and a world of hurt before I started going up again.)
Did I do everything right? No. Was it my fault? No. But it is my fault not to say anything, to remain that silent friend with the thousand-yard stare who used to laugh a lot more.
What’s it like, this withdrawal thing? Imagine being completely well and fine on a Monday, on a Tuesday sick enough to go to an emergency room (except for the fact they will have no idea how to manage it) and then on a Wednesday (if you’re lucky) back to being well, or somewhere in between.
Imagine torturous mental and physical pains.
Imagine dimming down your life, abandoning projects and friends, as you endlessly search for the greatest of ironies -- a cure for the cure.
But, you say, maybe you’re just a depressed person. Maybe this isn’t withdrawal. Maybe you feel terrible because you rejected this drug that has helped you so much.
Try this. A little experiment that may or may not work. Take a Benadryl (also not a great drug BTW). And if you feel much better in a few minutes, ask yourself this: What kind of true depression is mitigated by a Benadryl? And if one exists, just hand me the Benadryl. It’s a lot cheaper.
SSRI’s are also antihistamines. Imagine being on an extremely powerful antihistamine for years, or decades. Then try ripping it away, and you will get an idea of how sick you can get with an illness no one acknowledges.
Of course, all the reasons why it makes you so sick are still as mysterious as your mind, that complex and beautiful universe, a trillion sparkles that work together like some brilliant, vast and glorious prairie dog village. But the antihistamine theory is a good place to start.
Worth noting: there are other ways of distinguishing withdrawal from a return of symptoms. You’re smart. That’s why you’re my friend. You’ll find them. You’ll do what is frantically un-advised in this fallen world of ours. You’ll come to your own conclusions.
How long can this chemical illness go on? If you “reinstate” (such a kind and compassionate word!) maybe not long. Or, depending on many factors, some of which are still unknown, you can have continued withdrawals for months or years whether you reinstate or not.
If you withdraw from heroin, fentanyl, meth or alcohol, you will be given a cot and an IV full of palliative drugs in your arm.
If you withdraw from SSRI’s—sometimes equal to the physical and mental pain of going off the substances stated above--you will be given a journal, some chamomile tea, and Yoga with Adrienne. Because in a country where a drug’s harm goes unacknowledged, that’s what you get. Not that these don’t help.
But I’ve been through it. I am in it. And I want that damn IV.
Take heart, though, friends, as I have. There are new modalities that come up every day. There are heroes (like mine, David Healy) fighting the good fight and learning new things every day they can’t wait to share. And good hours and days have a crazy way about making me forget about the bad ones.
The campfire is getting low. Your smores have a red pill in them, but only because I care about you. Only because I can hear the distant yips of the dingos you can’t quite hear just yet, and I want to protect you.
Now if you’ve never been on an antidepressant, and it’s offered to you, I’m not going to say you don’t need it. Unlike Prozac, life has given me some humility and I can say with great conviction that I don’t know shit.
But what else are you being offered? America is a land in which options have dwindled into one solution, be it Uber or Amazon or the vaccine or the one party that masquerades as two. Is anyone mentioning exercise, meditation, community, Niacin, energy medicine?
Please don’t be mad at me because it sounds like I’m minimizing your condition, that or someone you care about.
I’m just trying to help on a day where my stomach doesn’t hurt and neither does the stomach of my husband, who is enjoying a second career as caretaker.
If you choose to get on these drugs, please do so as a last resort and have a plan for getting off (be prepared for your doctor to look bewildered. He was never taught how to get people off SSRI’s in med school. Just how to get people on them. Don’t take my word for it. Look it up.)
If you’re already on these drugs but wonder if long term they are doing damage to your body (they are) your mind (they are) and your personal sovereignty (they are), I don’t want to scare you. You’ll find your way either living without them or, like me, still gently trying to sneak away from basecamp as they sleep.
Maybe you tried to leave your own aunt and days, weeks or even months later you suddenly felt increasingly terrible, I want to give you an option besides that paternal voice, possibly attached to a doctor who is listening to another voice in his pants, telling you that your antidepressant is like insulin and you need it for life.
I’ll just say, arm yourself with information. Look up Eli Lilly Prozac lawsuit. And go from there.
Or join the Facebook group, Lexapro Should be Illegal. And go from there.
Or go to the brave and defiant website, Surviving Antidepressants, and go from there. Or Mad in America, or read further on this website, RXisk.
Within this fallen world, there is a new world rising. A world where people demand real solutions for mental health, not dangerous drugs masquerading as defenders.
I’ll be all right. The pharmaceutical companies and their pals in the FDA never intended this, but Prozac has made me a better person. Not in being on it, but in realizing my strength in trying (so far unsuccessfully, but it’s a long damn life) to get off it.
And I forgive them.
I picture a bunch of pharma bros all on the deck of a yacht that looks suspiciously like the one from The Wolf of Wall Street, seagulls dizzily circling because they’ve been throwing them mollies and laughing at my forgiveness, but I offer it still, because weirdly enough, that insane, love-bombing and ultimately toxic aunt known as Prozac taught me that forgiveness is a power no one can take away.
Let me whisper this now, by fading campfire light and rising sun, so that pharma companies won’t outlaw it, tinker with its formula and then market it as a new drug you can’t afford:
Forgiveness is an opiate.
So is hope.
So is friendship.
So is love.
Something I can offer you that Big Pharma never can.
I love you.
Let’s put out the fire and go back home.
It’s dawn.
