*This post is 100% my own thoughts, feelings, and experience, and does not legitimize or delegitimize any other persons’ decisions or feelings about their own mental health.
Well y’all. I had a good run (18 months) of managing my mental health without antidepressants. And while I’m not at the crisis point I’ve been at other times in my life, I certainly wouldn’t say that I’m feeling my best. (I am aware that none of us are.) By most societal standards, I’m still “managing” pretty well, which is to say that I am producing well at my job, I shower and show up for work (in front of my computer) each day, and I do not go off on people for no reason (or for good reason, at that).
However, performing for other people does not meet my criteria for actual well being. So, I’m consulting with a doctor about going back on antidepressants.
To be honest, I’m extremely unhappy about it. It feels like I’ve lost a battle. Like I’ve acquiesced to a mental health model that I believe in less and less, and I say this as someone with a social work degree, and as someone in close community with people who are mental health professionals. I am not a mental health practitioner — I am someone who has received mental health treatment for acute and chronic challenges, and I must say that our societal models for mental health diagnosis and treatment feel, to me, wholly insufficient and sometimes harmful. I believe that we generally pathologize the wrong part of the equation. I don’t believe that the root cause of my depression or anxiety is a biochemical imbalance in my brain. I think that racism and sexism and capitalism are fucked up, and they fuck up my life on the regular. I feel fucked up everyday that I am pressured to interact with these systems as though they are normal and acceptable. I would rather be maladjusted to a society that glorifies productivity and demeans care, than lift up my ability to survive under dehumanizing conditions as a badge of honor.
However. I am so fiercely committed to my well being, so fiercely committed to joy, so fiercely committed to building a better world, to the fight for better working conditions, for movements that are sustainable and liberatory, that I’m swallowing my [pride is not the right word], and taking the meds, with the desperate, and hopefully not futile, expectation that they will grant me a wider margin to fight for the things above.
Let me be as clear as I can: there is nothing shameful about taking medication for mental health. It is such a personal decision, and a lifesaving one for many. I respect any one who chooses to, and I respect any one who chooses not to. For me, inside of my experiences of depression and anxiety, I have felt better during this year and a half not taking medication than I did the two and a half years prior when I was taking medication. In that year and half, I reconnected to my body and cared for her with more intention than I have since I was diagnosed with cancer after I’d lived 29 years doing all the doctor-recommended health behaviors, at which point I realized that health is not a merit-based system. I began a spiritual practice for the first time in SEVEN years. I went for long walks everyday that I could. I drank water. I slept. I did my best to be present with my body. I was also working only part time and could go to a gym class at 4pm, and take mid-day naps whenever I wanted. After 8 months of working full time during this pandemic, at a job that has not ramped down at all, during the most stressful election cycle I’ve known in my lifetime, while sustained uprisings for Black lives continued across the country… I‘m tired.
I’m SO tired, y’all. And personally, I don’t believe I should feel like I have to take antidepressants to keep up the energy for the fight. I wish that authentic care and extended rest felt like viable options, broadly accessible to all of us. But it is what is, and we are where we are, and I do believe we are headed somewhere better IF we can all get on the same damn team and decide we really wanna get free together.
I feel like I failed even though I know I haven’t. I don’t have a tidy package or quippy ending. I just want someone to hear me talk openly about my experience, so they can feel permission to do the same if they choose.
Each Little Spark 