From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Thu Aug 17 2000 - 21:51:40 PDT
Short little anecdote that might be humorous. I got married way to early, 22, and subsequently
divorced when I was 26. During the period just after the divorce, I was *convinced* that I was
"depressed." (In fact, I was just kind of stressed and partying way too much to be good for my
brain chemistry.) I went to see a shrink.
After sitting there for an hour listening to *him* tell *me* a hunting story, a fishing story,
and a story about a couple, friends of his, who chased each other through their house in the
middle of the night with shotguns, he essentially said "okay, time's up. You want any drugs?"
I said, "well, what, do you think I need drugs?"
"Oh sure, everybody needs drugs."
"Okay."
"You've heard of Prozac, right? I'm going to give you something like that [that's what he
said] called Zoloft. And I'm going to give you some Xanax. Start out with 1/2 pill twice a
day, then up the dosage to as many as you can tolerate 4 times a day and still function. And
I'm going to give you some Paxil, too, just to calm you down."
Geez. Okay.
So I decided to ease into it. Took the Zoloft. First day I took it, it was *fantastic!* I was
king of the world. Nothing could get me down, I was fan-fucking-tastic. Second day: hey,
everything's pretty cool. Third day: no emotional reaction to anything whatsoever.
Stopped taking it on the fourth day. I figured any turbulence I was going through was
transient and even the extremes were better than total emotional deadness. Played with the
Xanax; helped me sleep on occasion. Never tried the Paxil.
I'm all for better living through chemistry, but I agree with cdale that commercial psychomeds
are overused, especially the SSRIs.
Interestingly, the one of the best and most benign psychotropic drugs I've ever taken for a
problem I might actually need meds for --- insomnia --- was Rohypnol. (Xanax is no good,
really, for that; gives me really fucked up nightmares.) Of course, Rohypnol was too good to
be true: total child-like deep sleep, no weird nightmares, no effect on dreaming at all, wake
up feeling rested and refreshed, even a sort of calm, happy "afterglow" throughout the morning
after. So "they" had to go and make it impossible to obtain legally in the US, or even bring
into the US after obtaining elsewhere. Those bastards! Grrr...
$0.02,
jb
jb
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 17 2000 - 22:18:21 PDT