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At the hospital, I was asked to remove my clothing and personal items and put them in a plastic bag. I changed into a gown and beige grippy socks in a hallway with a flimsy curtain drawn around an alcove. Stripped of my clothing and my dignity, I was escorted into the hospital psych ward, where I was left on my own for over an hour to stare at the walls and listen to the distressed voices of the other patients. They were elsewhere in their own little rooms, also bare of anything they could use to hurt themselves.
I’m not crazy, right? I mean, I don’t belong here, do I? It was a momentary snap out of the deep depression and spiraling thoughts that I had been experiencing for the previous month. When I had told my mom earlier that day that I was having thoughts of suicide, she called my primary care doctor’s office. They refused to see me and told her to take me directly to the emergency room. There I also told staff I was considering ending my life.
When the psychiatrist arrived, he saw a young woman of 23 who had her prime childbearing years ahead of her. At least, that’s what he must have seen, because what he told me was that I was at risk for postpartum depression, a bizarre observation to make to someone who was most definitely not pregnant.
Worse, that warning was all he would provide. Since I didn’t come in on the heels of a suicide attempt — only with suicidal ideation — there was no place for me in the hospital. He refused to prescribe any medication. I was discharged and sent home with a several thousand dollar ER bill.
Three years prior, I had been prescribed an antidepressant for the first time. I had been experiencing what I now know was depression and anxiety for a number of years. But mental health wasn’t really something that was discussed in my family. And in our conservative Christian circles, where mental health issues were seen as a result of not having enough faith, taking medication was actively disparaged. It was only when my parents saw my paralyzing anxiety growing and heard me crying myself to sleep at night that it was considered as an option.
And antidepressants did help, until several years later when a doctor (who wasn’t a psychiatrist) convinced me I should go off medication. Since I was surrounded by a community and had a boyfriend who stigmatized and shamed me for taking an antidepressant, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The results were devastating. Due to the combination of going off the medication and a breakup with the aforementioned boyfriend, I plunged into a depression and extreme anxiety unlike any I had ever experienced before.
I was at the bottom of a deep, dark hole and couldn’t see my way out. Therapy on its own wasn’t working because the depression felt so oppressive. I couldn’t take advantage of exercise to boost my mood because most days it was an accomplishment to simply get out of bed. I felt so hopeless and filled with self-hatred that I wondered what the point was anymore.
My visit to the ER was my first taste of how broken the mental healthcare system is in our country. You can be begging for help, only to have doctors refuse to see you and others send you home with no resources.
Thankfully, I had people that were in the position to advocate for me and find me help, because I was not in the place to do it myself. I spent two weeks in an outpatient program at a psychiatric hospital. I was numb, simply going through the motions. I can’t really tell you what the benefits of that program were other than it gave me access to prescriptions and an appointment with a psychiatrist to see after the program was over.
Trying to go back on the original antidepressant didn’t work. So I spent months trying to find the appropriate psychiatrist and medications that would allow me to function and actually participate in life again. One of the medications that finally helped was a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI — an antidepressant that increases levels of serotonin in the brain. That SSRI saved my life.
Being on an SSRI didn’t cure me of the depression and anxiety. But it did clear the fog, help manage the symptoms, and give me a light and ladder out of that deep, dark hole I was in. A hole that made me feel worthless and had me questioning whether my life had meaning or whether everyone else would be better off without me.
SSRIs allowed me to function again. I could eat, sleep and concentrate. I could work again: first part time and eventually full time. They got me to a place where I could actually participate in therapy so I could dive into the underlying causes of depression and work on techniques to combat anxiety when it occurred. I could take a walk out in the fresh air without feeling exhausted after five minutes. I could spend time with friends and actually laugh without feeling dead inside. I was hopeful about the future again.
SSRIs are responsible for another life as well — my daughter’s. Without them, I would have never met her father or been able to consider having children. But after her birth, the words that the ER doctor had spoken almost 10 years prior were fulfilled — unfortunately, I did experience postpartum depression (and anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder). And the medication that I had been taking for almost as long stopped working.
A few days after my daughter was born, it really set in. One night, she screamed and fed the entire time. I was tired — so, so tired. I didn’t want to hear her cry anymore. It felt like she was screaming at me that I was a bad mom. I was exhausted, which triggered more anxiety and the feeling of being so nauseous that I couldn’t eat. On one drive home alone from the store, I was weighing the options of just driving away and never coming back or driving into a building and ending it all. I felt like my daughter and husband would be better off without me.
It got so bad that I felt like I was crawling out of my skin. I hadn’t slept in a week; I was hardly eating anything. I called my psychiatrist for help to find a new medication, then called my mom to come help take care of my daughter for the weekend because I felt incapable of even taking care of myself.
While it took months for me to get to a better place, my new antidepressant and other complementary medications are the reason I’m still here six years later. They’re the reason that my daughter has a mom.
So when I read the “Make America Healthy Again” executive order, which states that the current administration will be “assessing the prevalence of and threat posed by” drugs such as SSRIs, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, I wanted to vomit. A friend texted me, “He can’t really take our meds, right?” when she heard that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man with no medical background and a known vaccine skeptic, had been confirmed as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
While the executive order specifically refers to investigating what it believes is the overprescribing of these drugs to children, I am not naive enough to believe that it will stop there.
When Kennedy was asked about his stance on antidepressants during his confirmation hearing, he responded that they are “more difficult to come off than heroin,” which is blatantly false. Last year, he also hypothesized that the rise in school shootings could be related to antidepressant use, a statement that also has no scientific backing. And in his first speech to HHS staff, he directly referenced SSRIs and psychiatric drugs as a factor that will be investigated as a cause for a rise in chronic diseases. This is a man who has expressed the desire to send people like us to “wellness camps” to detox from our meds and treat our mental health problems with farm work and organic vegetables.
As someone who has anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, it is hard not to agonize over even the possibility of access to my medications being denied. But even without outright bans, both Kennedy’s and Donald Trump’s policies and statements make clear that they believe that mentally ill, disabled, neurodivergent and chronically ill individuals are a drain on the United States’ resources. This is concerning and also eerily reminiscent of other times in history when eugenic ideologies prevailed.
Taking medication for mental illness already holds a fair amount of stigma. Many people already feel ashamed for taking medications for their mental health; many more may not even consider medication as an option for fear of being judged or stereotyped as crazy or weak. That is only going to increase as a result of this mindset, along with the stigma surrounding mental illness in general.
Because if you believe that mental illness is not real illness, that depression can be vanquished with a little fresh air and time spent with friends, or that anxiety is a result of “unresolved sin” or not enough faith, then medication is not needed at all.
This will undoubtedly result in fewer individuals seeking out the treatment they need. And like I almost did, people will lose their lives as a result.
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