Other Links:
Confession
thejanechord
Diaryland
notifylist.com
2004-03-23
3:04 p.m.
Apparently, the FDA has recently decided that most antidepressants currently on the market will have to start labeling increased depression and suicidal impulses among their potential side-effects. Rob mentioned this to me last night because he was somewhat surprised by it. He also said he was surprised because he’d never heard of this possibility before, even though he had experienced it himself.
I, on the other hand, was not surprised.
I am not in the LEAST surprised by this news. I have been searching for many, many years for a way to explain how my brain reacted when I first went on antidepressants. The only way it makes sense to me is as follows. When you go on antidepressants, depending on the amount of trauma that was building in your brain for however long it took you to actually start taking them, the drugs will bring all that hidden trauma right to the front of your brain. All of a sudden, you are forced to come to terms with certain aspects of yourself whether or not you are mentally prepared to handle them.
Not everyone is.
When I went on antidepressants, I went through a several-month period of absolute mania where I could not stop writing. Everything I thought went right through my mind and into the computer. It was easily the most productive time period in my life, and it was prompted entirely by drugs. I also became obsessed with the Columbine killers. I became so obsessed with the Columbine killers and lost track of who I was and what I was to such an insane degree that my one roommate at the time sincerely thought I was going to kill her. I will never forgive her for abandoning me -- and not just abandoning, but accusing me -- when I was going through the most difficult time of my life.
But I do understand it.
I understand it because I was crazy. I was absolutely out of my mind. I had no control over my actions. The only reason I am not dead right now is because I didn’t own a gun at the time. I used to have visions of myself mowing people down in the ritziest shopping center in Boston. There was nothing I wanted more than an Uzi. And I grew close to the Columbine killers because I understood them. I also learned that Eric Harris was on Luvox when the Columbine shooting occurred. I understood how he could go through with the killing, and I understood how the medication could have prompted it. I even wrote a letter to former President Clinton, describing to him what these medications can do.
But I didn’t mail it.
It was three pages long and made me sound like such a lunatic that even I wouldn’t have listened to me. But every single word of it was true. Of course, how can you honestly expect someone to listen to you when the basis of your argument is that you’re crazy? Why would anyone listen to your crazy experiences?
It doesn’t make sense to normal people.
I suppose my point today is that the FDA should have done this a long time ago. And I’d like to send out a big fuck you to all the people who didn’t believe that Luvox could have had any effect on Eric Harris’s latent suicidal tendencies and eventual murderous rampage.
Now, let’s think about this realistically.
Rob and I are two people. Granted, this is not a very good cross-section of the American populace, but we are what we are. And we’ve both experienced the effects of antidepressants that make you worse than you were to begin with. That’s two out of two. 100% of our selected panel of participants.
Fucking governmentally funded agencies.
Have you heard that all previous research on Ecstasy has recently been proven wrong? The guy doing the experiments on the government’s dime accidentally tested monkeys with methamphetamine, not MDMA. So, Ecstasy isn’t as bad for you as initially suggested. In other words, my craziness is not completely due to my drug use.
I said not completely.
Once again, I’m going to try and explain this from the very beginning. When you go on antidepressants, you have to expect some sort of backlash. Things do not simply go from bad to good. It just doesn’t work that way.
Let’s think of it in terms of champagne.
If you have a typical bottle of champagne and you go to pop the cork, the cork will fly across the room and everything will be fine. The pressure will be released, but everything will be headed in the right direction for a perfectly wonderful glass of bubbly.
But . . .
If you take that same bottle of champagne and shake it violently before you pop the cork, you will have normal pressure multiplied many hundreds times. Then, when you pop the cork, the cork will go flying, probably hit someone in the head, leaving a bloody welt and permanent indentation in the side of their skull. The champagne will fizz out of control, also flying across the room, splattering all over the walls, ruining your attempt to celebrate. There’s barely enough left in the bottle for one person to take a sip.
So, if an everyday bottle of champagne is your normal, ordinary human being, and the shaken bottle of champagne is the frenzy of suppressed disaster curdling beneath the surface of your average lunatic, it’s no wonder that taking an antidepressant (popping the cork on the pressure) will spill a little champagne.
It’s only common sense.
