An endless ark of medication: Here's how I endured a voyage through psychiatric drugs
It all began with a single antidepressant
This column is a first-person essay by Anthony Brenton, a novelist and poet.
I took my first dose of psychotropic medication the night before beginning university, at the turn of the century.
Back then, at what I call apothecaries' evil dawn, I lived in a cold, warped house where the weather came in under the windows, and where the frames and glass, always timid, never kept it at bay.
I walked to campus the following morning, a burgeoning English major at Memorial University, with the ground pulsing under my feet. My mind bounced around like a blue-arsed fly.
Seated in that first class, gushes of euphoria shot through me as I stretched my quaking muscles. My teeth audibly chattered as I clung to the edge of my desk.
Brushing wet hair out of my face, I noticed several students looking at me with a nervous confusion.
Within a few days, my body adapted to the antidepressant. The shaking and white-knuckling drained away.
Ultimately, though, the meds didn't work on their target.
Some time later, and after heightening mania and delusions, doctors prescribed a potent tranquilizer and an antipsychotic, under strict instructions to eat them three times a day, which knocked me nearly unconscious for 18 months.
Finally, after all that hazy time, I weaned myself off the strong and addictive meds, but this only made things worse.
Rocking upon a nauseous sea
Despite the best intentions of doctors and the endless ark of medication, I had an anxiety attack that lasted an entire year. I watched Noah's massive boat — filled with all description of pill and capsule — rock upon a nauseous sea.
My mind endured unending seasick panic, a ceaseless onslaught of madness. Only the promise of more medication was certain.
I became a hermit, unable to read or watch TV, unable to play music or to write. Totally antisocial and agoraphobic. Through hospital stays and years over a rainbow of gibberish, I watched in awe at the insomniac sun. Rising and falling, rising, falling, then all over again until inevitable collapse.
***
Like traditional psychedelics, psychotropics alter one's perspective, especially by the combination of two or more drugs. Ballooning a vast expanse of a boundless skull and warping the day-to-day mind.
New medications seemed to shift reality and spark random associations: the bus was a giant prison roaring at me, while street signs mapped out conversations that lay ahead.
16 pills a day
At the height of all this, I was eating 16 pills a day: antipsychotics, antianxiety medication, antidepressants and mood stabilizers.
By this lootbag I fell into a hopeless terror. The elastic nails of pharmaceuticals took hold of my mind and knocked me over, loaded, so far gone I started taking the wrong pills at the wrong times. Often forgetting entirely.
By this failure in dosing, the detoxification process would entail sweating, aching trembling muscles and a runny nose. Visual distortions would begin immediately: a wall of tiny spinning octopuses, crawling about in yellow waves. I would roll out of bed and stagger into the horrible day, high on depression, fear, terrible introspection, skewed perception, doubt in reality, and pathetic hopelessness.
During the inevitable hospitalization it became clear that I was totally unresponsive to heavy antidepressants. Nothing helped. So, after weighing the risks and benefits of our options, my doctor and I agreed on electroconvulsive therapy.
In the early morning I gowned and was ushered off to the operating room. Nurses shot me in the arm, leaving me to tumble in a crystalline blackness where time and space fell into useless abstraction.
My mind being induced into seizures, various professionals surrounded me, voltage at the ready. Dosage and duration calculated, electrodes were placed upon me for the procedure. I am monitored, by man and by machine, to ensure the utmost safety.
Memories are gone, as if they never happened
This went on for a week.
It might be controversial, but I believe my memory was negatively affected by the therapy. It seems to me that after a lifetime of musicianship, I'd lost all ability to remember compositions. The guitar and bass fell as silent as a tomb. My voice, only a scratchy yell delivering inaudible poetry.
Sections of my memory, short and long term, seem to have been altered also. Massive amounts of time simply vanished from my hippocampus. Many stories and times gone, as if they had never happened.
I had only a dozen or so electrical shots before I talked my way out of it. Doctors put me back on page after page of terrible prescriptions that led me about like a man on a strange chain, yanked around in a dim hell.
***
Whittling down those handfuls of pills to just a few tabs has taken years of experimentation, chicken scratching, and dice-rolling. It's been a gruelling process. I suspect that it's damaged my mind for good.
I sometimes try to remember what life was like before the treatments, to analyze my childhood mind. But, like thumbing through cracked and yellowed photographs in an old album, I'm left with only choice glances of the whole story.
Had I toughened up and rejected all those pills, would I sit here now a twisted and deranged man? Could my mind have been left intact by psychotherapy, in Vienna with Freud, smoking cigars … just talking it out rather than diving headfirst into a prescription pad?
On the contrary, maybe I would have ended up at the wrong end of a funeral without the lifesaving measures of acute care and careful dosing.
I'm not sure where I would be, had I never heard the rattling of a nurse's cup. Or the squeaking wheels of the ward's medication trolly. Where without the expert professionals who cared deeply for my mind-in-crisis situations?
Was it necessary, the whole calamity?
Most likely.
For the last 20 years I've haunted pharmacies, and today, I've trimmed myself down to two medications. But perhaps I have fallen only temporarily into this minimalism. A low tide where I gasp for breath against the inevitable rise.
The great deluge!
Where Noah's solid ark, as a saving grace, reels upon a great ocean, full of medication and awaiting the scratchy ink of my physician's masterpiece.
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