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“I Was Told My Brain Was Broken”

In November, I put up blog entry titled The Repercussions of Going on Antidepressants, and I received a comment on this post the other day that both disturbed me and confirmed what I already knew. I thought it merited its own discussion here.

The woman who wrote the comment calls herself NoRx4Me and left the following information:

I was put on an SSRI at 24 years old during a bad marriage. I needed guidance and support, instead I was told my brain was broken.

SSRI’s led to stimulants, mood stabilizers, SNRI’s, and lithium for a short time. I was a mess. I lost 13 years. I have little memory of those years (especially sad, because I was raising two boys). I didn’t grow as a person at all. I quit dating in 2003 and never developed knew friendships either. I didn’t even realize this was odd until I was off meds.

I probably would have responded like some others on here while I was still under the influence and told you the meds were great. With a clear mind and 20/20 hindsight, I know the facts, my life was destroyed.

And they do cause physical problems; I lost a ton of hair, and my teeth are a mess. I look like I’ve aged 20 years instead of 10.

You probably now understand why I was so bothered by what I read. This woman’s life was ruined, and the fact that she was raising two boys at the time makes it even more troublesome.

I had another reaction to this as well.

While there were only four people who left a comment (myself included) and this is by no means an adequate sample size, the feedback paints an interesting picture.

The people who seemed the most sympathetic to meds were: (1) the man who has been on meds for 4 months; and (2) a woman who is bipolar (she has her own bipolar blog). I don’t know if she is on antidepressants or not but my guess is that she is on some type of medication. I cannot say for sure, however.

The two people adamantly against meds were me and this woman above, NoRx4Me. The common thread that we both have is that we each were on medication for a long time, more than a decade, and both realized how harmful the medication was after we went off the drugs– not when we were on the drugs but after.

In today’s world, we live in a drug culture and doctors are giving out antidepressants as if they were candy. This is absolutely irrefutable — roughly 33 million people or more than 10% of our population take them.

And, a very high percentage of these doctors have no interest whatsoever of taking their patients off of medication because it means that they will no longer have them as paying clients. Additionally, the drugs do improve a person’s mood in the beginning, which lessens the incentive even further for a doctor to take a person off of the medication.

This leads to people being on medication for decades, and long-term usage is where the real carnage takes place.

People tell me all of the time “antidepressants help a lot of individuals” and they expect me to become very sympathetic towards these drugs. I’m sorry, I’m just not.

I say “Find me some people who have been on antidepressants for many years, have gone off of the medication and still think the drug is wonderful.”

The tragic story of NoRx4Me was just more confirmation of what I already knew.

Long-term antidepressant usage wreaks havoc on a person’s life but it is only after someone goes off of them can you get a clear picture of the true damage.

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Living Maxwell

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How Organic Food Played a Crucial Role in My Decision to Quit 11 Years of Antidepressants

In the summer of 2001 and at the urging of my then-girlfriend, I went for an appointment to go see her naturopathic doctor in New York City, the place where we were both living at the time.

Having done acupuncture since high school, I had always been open to alternative medicine and was curious what this woman could do for me.

During our session, she asked me about all of my health and dietary habits – eating, drinking, smoking, drugs, exercise. Everything. In the midst of this conversation, the topic of organic food somehow arose. I remember that I had some notion about what organic food was but wasn’t overly familiar with it.

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Living Maxwell

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Dating Someone Who Drinks, Part II

I put up a post last week about a date I had recently and it generated a good number of responses. During this date, the woman asked if it bothers me to be with someone who drinks.

In that post, one of the things that I said was that I would “deal with it” if all of the other aspects of the relationship were good and that the drinking was kept to a minimum. This response of saying that I would “deal with it” brought an interesting comment from Tancie, and I thought it was worth addressing in its own blog post here.

Tancie stated that the phrase “dealing with it” would bring up resentment and that I should avoid all women who drink if it makes me that uncomfortable.

For me, drinking is a very complicated issue and is not so cut and dry, especially given the fact that I feel so strongly about other things as well — organic food being one of them.

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Living Maxwell

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The Struggles I Faced in College and How I Handled Them

As I wrote about the other day, it was during college when I went on antidepressants. Each day was getting harder than the next. The sky was growing darker and darker. It was a major struggle just to survive.

I was overwhelmed with a variety of responsibilities — school work, in which I seemed to be drowning; the tennis team, which occupied several hours of my time per day, not including constant traveling to other schools for matches and tournaments; and my fraternity, something in which I was very actively involved.

With my voice becoming more heavy during each phone conversation, my parents suggested that I go visit a local psychiatrist to see if he could help. More specifically, they thought that antidepressants were the answer. After a brief chat with the doctor, he diagnosed me with a mild case of depression and believed that Prozac would indeed improve my situation.

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