Hooray for pills

On the lethality of RFK Jr.'s war on psychiatric care

TW: The beast of depression and everything that comes with it.

RFK Jr. wants to ban depression medication, including SSRIs. The reason you are reading this is since I was 19 years old, I have been on depression medication.

In the spring of my sophomore year of college, I was diagnosed with an incurable, painful autoimmune disease and then a few weeks later my boyfriend dumped me.

The heartbreak was bad. The disease was worse. Ulcerative Colitis is a chronic disease where the patient’s immune system attacks the digestive tract in a way that causes the type of abdominal pain that, years later, made 13 hours of unmedicated active labor unnoticeable to the point I doubted I was even in labor (I was 5cm dilated).

Ulcerative colitis is also accompanied by an unsettling amount of bleeding, which felt like a humiliating horror movie about 20 minutes after every time I ate something.

I got into bed and did not get out. I stopped going to class. I stopped eating. I stopped existing.

My mother came up to visit me. I told her, very calmly, that I was not trying to die, but if I somehow did, it would probably be a relief. In the fog of memory from that time, the only thing I remember is her face across the table from me when I said that.

As a parent, I now understand that this was the worst moment of her life. She recommended I talk to a psychiatrist, and definitely, definitely, please take something.

I told her I’d talk to someone, but I absolutely wasn’t fucking taking anything.

I was extremely averse to the idea of taking medication for depression and anxiety. I didn’t want to turn into a lobotomized zombie, smiling like a 1950s housewife, cut off from the ticking core of what made me human. I was a writer! I was developing a COMEDY voice! What if the pills dulled my senses, took away my creativity? I’d rather live in pain than live without feeling anything. Besides, I insisted, this entire “episode” was situational. People survive heartbreak! People get bad medical diagnoses every day! I can muddle my way through without resorting to some kind of brain poison, I insisted.

I went back to my dorm, got back into my bed, and didn’t leave until a very kind dean emailed me, notifying me that I was failing a class that I did not attend. I had forgotten I was even enrolled in it.

And still, as much as I did not want to be crippled by the ashen torpor ghost that seemed to claw at my legs any time I tried to move or think, I did not want to be hobbled by what I saw as a Stepford’s way out of it. I resisted. At this point, because I had forgotten to eat the same way I forgot I was in class, I weighed about 90 pounds. I stopped answering my grandma’s calls. I cancelled my train ticket home for Seder. I stopped writing for my college’s alt weekly, and resigned as Opinion’s editor, the thing I loved most. I started to think about how I would be remembered.

One night, on the floor of the bathroom one excruciating flight of stairs down from my dorm room, in stabbing pain, I made a split decision to save my own life: I took exactly one dose of the medication the psychiatrist at Health Service’s had prescribed. I felt nothing. No zombie. Nothing dulled. And, liars, I thought. I wasn’t happy. “Maybe it’s placebo,” I remember thinking.

The next week, I asked my newspaper friend Alex, who had mentioned to me a few times that his father was a writer for the show The Colbert Report, for the email address of the intern coordinator. I sent a nice man named Adam the following five sentences: “I love your show. I think Stephen Colbert is King Lear’s jester of the Bush Administration. I would like nothing more than to get coffee for your writers for a semester. I will drop out of Brown to do it. My writing is attached.”

Alex and Adam, if you are reading this, you saved my life. You and medicine.

After I took the medicine, something did happen. The swirling, crippling sense of doom and despair and spiraling of anxiety that kept me from being the version of myself that I had lost, quieted down. The neurological pathways that had been blocked and shut and bent into barbed wire around my functional capacity, gradually opened. The medicine didn’t dull a fucking thing. It released me from what has pinning me down. I was my sharpest self, again. Food tasted like food, not ash. It didn’t force a light into the dark, it got me to open the curtains, and let in my own light.

Over time, I was a bit more myself. I was writing. I was still completely heartbroken, but I was convulsively weeping to Fiona Apple with my (tolerant!) best friend instead of rotting like a corpse under an XL Twin duvet cover.

I dropped the class I’d forgotten about, walked out of that semester with solid B minuses, got an official leave of absence for a semester, and due to a faculty kid accommodation, moved much closer to my parents into Columbia Student Housing to intern at The Colbert Report while checking in with my GI doctor every few weeks to monitor the colitis.

I went back to school and gave the graduation speech.

And here I am.

If you have laughed or thought or cried at anything I’ve written since then — my book, my TV jokes, this newsletter — know it was written by a brain on medicine.

And if they weren’t available to me, or harder to access, or if the stigma around them were any more pronounced than it already was, I certainly would not have the life I have now, and maybe wouldn’t have a life at all.

This is all to say, if you are struggling, or someone you love is struggling, I hope you accept whatever help you need. I hope you shut out the simplistic, reductive, anti-science voices like RFK’s who tell us that pills are bad, and suffering is good.

I hope you let in your own light. I’m so glad I did.