Don't Shut Up

(A disclaimer:

Nitroglycerin patches act on your heart.  An important organ.  Insulin does what your pancreas can’t.  An important organ.  Albuteral opens up the pathways to your lungs.  Important organs.

Psychotropic medications act on your brain.  The most important of them all.

People need these to balance their neurotransmitters.  Undeniably.  I am the very last person to claim a person doesn’t truly need their medication.)

How the humidity clings to your flesh when the storm seems impossibly and uncomfortably far away…

That’s what it’s like.  To experience depression trapped under the heavy blanket of psychiatric medications. 

Such shame, that the side effects listed have nothing on the actual experience.  Leads you to wonder if it’ll just take more?  Something else altogether?  Something else combined with what you’re on now?  Something stronger?  Electro convulsive therapy?

You see success in the advertisements, hear it touted by this friend or that who knows someone on that very same medication whose life was completely turned around by the pop of one pill, once daily…what they forget is the part where this regimen is followed “for the rest of their life”.  And what they forget is the part where it’s such a very unwelcome topic of conversation that the reality of taking this medication is seldom discussed in polite society.  Afterall… you’re taking that pill to blend in, to conform, to fit the mold of a well-adjusted human being.  Fall in line and keep your mouth shut, just like that medication is telling you to do.  Or, more accurately, what you’re told should happen once your strict treatment with such medication begins.

(Maybe I need…nothing at all?) 

(Quiet that voice, immediately.)

Those of us with a mental health diagnosis (or even more than one) are no strangers to what is called “self-medicating”.  Traditionally, this applies to behaviors such as alcohol use and abuse, illicit drugs and abuse of prescription medications.  All the things we do when we’re off our medications in order to control the barrage of symptoms that set our teeth on edge, that drown us in despair, that send us into tailspins of spending, sex, dangerous exhilaration.

The nasty truth of a psych med is this:

Sometimes the symptoms still lurk just beneath the surface of the fancy name printed on that pill bottle.  Sometimes the thin veil (meant to protect the world from us?  Meant to make us fit for the world?) is even worse than half a bottle of liquor to quiet the mind each night.  Sometimes that veil clings to the outlines of the beast that lurks behind every thought and every word spoken aloud, and hides the details only to those who look on.  But we’re trapped underneath.  We can still feel its hot breath on the back of our necks. Only now, we’re rendered silent.  If we’re lucky, it’s not strong enough to shut us up and we trust our doctors enough to speak. 

It’s a shame that many of us aren’t.  Self-medicating shifts to the unexpected, and it’s only when we’re willing to break through that false placidity to confront what’s happening that it we’re shaken up.

See, it’s hard to admit when something you swear is uplifting, your very joy in life, may be one more tool your clever, clever subconscious wields to control the chemical balance of your brain.

When a small voice from somewhere deep, deep, deep within whispers, “You’re doing it again.”

What?

“This is self-medicating.”

No it isn’t.  Not even close.  I’m normal now.

“Hardly.”

I’m a normal person contributing positively to society while I simultaneously follow my passion and calling in life.

“The joy you seek is nothing but a chemical solution.  A reach for endorphins when something other than your consciousness is willing to admit that you have absolutely no ability to make them rush all on your own.”

…

“You’ve flat-lined.  You’re flailing about in an exhausting pursuit of kick starting that emotional right hemisphere back into sweet life.  Your extremist is showing.  Tuck it back in, then I’ll believe you.”

Leads one to the question…is this solely chemical solution inappropriate for the spiritual problem we’re seeking to address?

Is this society we currently live in unable to support the notion that these pharmaceuticals should be a means to an end, and not the end itself?

A ladder to transcending our symptoms, even if it is a lifelong climb, used in tandem with quiet self reflections, journaling, fucking walks by a lake at five am when the rest of the world sleeps and we have no other choice but to listen to what our soul swears is the eye of the hurricane if we would just take a moment to pay attention?

The problem is this:

That would require a conversation.

That would require the radical notion that reaching out to those beside us struggling to take steps forward toward self-acceptance and self-love is necessary for the evolving of mankind away from the beastly and towards the transcendental godly.

The truth is that everyone’s experience of a psych med varies vastly, based on a wide variety of factors such as diagnoses, age, size, gender, environmental factors, diet, and so on.  What I’ve experienced is not what another knows of the same medication I took at noon today.  What I’ve experienced of the pill I take at 8pm is something someone who takes theirs at 8am may have no concept of.  What I write here may be foreign to a large number of those who take any dosage whatsoever of the same on my list.

But I can almost guarantee there’s others out there…

The pills we’re handed and the attitudes surrounding them are wildly successful at reaching the goal our culture has set that says we won’t have anything to say any longer about such nonsense as mental illness.  Someday, a myth.  Today, a myth?

Because they shut us up, the commercials, the furthering of a foul stigma all shut us up.  The reality is largely invisible to a world who turns its back on the ugly, beautiful truth of mental health.

Meanwhile, all we can do is wait and pray for the storm to break through.