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SALON OFFERS A WEEK'S WORTH OF SPECIAL FEATURES ON LEGAL DRUGS. HERE'S THE LINEUP: MONDAY, JULY 14, 1997:
IN DRUGS WE TRUST
TAKE THE PILLS, GUYS
TUESDAY, JULY 15, 1997:
FIGHTING THE BIG MONSTER
>GEN RX
MELATONIN MANIA
WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 1997:
READIN', RITIN' AND RITALIN
MEDITATION VS. MEDICATION
THURSDAY, JULY 17, 1997:
NO SEX PLEASE, WE'RE MEDICATED
FRIDAY, JULY 18, 1997:
THE COFFEE CONNECTION
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Like everyone else, I've heard all the stories about the wild drug culture that flourished on campus in the '60s -- that fabled era when a giddy generation blew its collective mind on any and every mind-altering substance it could get its hands on. My experience, during my recent college years, was completely different. Oh, there were drugs, and drunken nights, and the occasional experimentation with hallucinogens. But most of the drugs my friends and I took were prescribed by physicians and usually included a 12-week session with a university-insured therapist-in-training. Our drug of choice -- and necessity -- was Prozac. I attended college at the height of the slacker myth, according to which my friends and I were ambitionless zombies who would end up in dead-end jobs after receiving our useless philosophy degrees. It was a load of bullshit, but it was frightening, and my friends and I tried desperately to avoid it. So we worked. We worked days and nights -- honors and graduate classes, internships, jobs. We worked 40 hours a week, plus classes, plus homework. We were ambitious, creative, artsy types, but we differed from those of similar constitution before us. Instead of pushing the limits of our sanity by taking hallucinogenic drugs, we took Prozac to keep our grip. I was prescribed the anti-depressant in college after my structured life twisted itself into a confusing knot. It started with my body. I shed 20 pounds in about two months without altering my eating or exercise patterns. When I hit 98 pounds, I started having heart palpitations. I'd be sitting still, working or talking, and suddenly my heart would start beating against my chest. My pulse, usually a healthy 68 beats a minute, shot up to 120 reverberating heart echoes. Then came the fainting. Trips to the emergency room where I swore up and down I wasn't anorexic, pregnant or suffering from thyroid problems. Tests ruled out two of the three. I went to see a university cardiologist. Within 15 minutes I had received a prescription for Prozac and had made an appointment with a counselor to discuss my "stress issues." I was diagnosed with an extreme case of "panic-stress disorder." At about the same time, many of my friends and associates started taking Prozac, too. Kate (names of people in this story have been changed ) started taking it after she was sexually assaulted. (Her father, a doctor, prescribed it.) Vanessa had manic depression, and had been on and off the drug for years. Tim took Zoloft because Prozac made him sexually dysfunctional. (See Lori Leibovich's Salon story on Thursday, July 17.) Julie took it because she was too happy -- unnaturally, excessively and constantly chipper. Mandy was prescribed it for her stress-induced migraine headaches, but declined because she didn't believe in chemicals other than pain killers and stomach acid relievers. Alysha wanted it for chronic fatigue and depression; we all gave her pointers on how to get the doctor to prescribe it. She was visibly upset when turned down. According to a pharmacist at a large university (who asked that his name and affiliation not be used), anti-depressants top the list of drugs prescribed to college students next to oral contraception, antibiotics and allergy medication. It seemed like everyone I knew was on Prozac or some related drug, or at least knew someone who was taking it -- and new members kept coming in. I felt like we were part of some sort of elite "society": We were taking the LSD of our much-maligned generation. But the goal of drug use had changed drastically since those days. For the '60s generation, LSD was a tool: It opened the mind to extreme experiences, allowed one to flirt briefly (and sometimes not so briefly) with madness. But we didn't want to come within screaming distance of madness -- it would limit our possibilities, screw up our portfolios. Sure, we wanted to be creative, but above all we needed to produce. So were we just a bunch of mental wimps, clinging to stability at the cost of adventure? I don't think so. Maybe at times we exaggerated our problems, but they were real, and we were right to address them. The collegiate landscape, in the '60s and now, is littered with casualties -- suicides, drop-outs, people who "never came back." I met one of them, a boy named Brian who decided one day to draw a line in his room: One side represented evil, the other good. He decided to spend all his time on the evil side; he wound up in a mental hospital. I met him after all this had occurred. His lithium cocktails made him barely functional. He had been a promising student once. He had no future. Ah, Prozac. I loved the stuff. I still have days when I long for my sunshine in a bottle. The first day I took it my heart beat softly and I couldn't stop smiling. An experience I had more than once sums up what it felt like for me (it's different for everyone). I was holding a glass of wine and watched without reaction as it slipped from my hand and shattered on the floor. This was far more interesting than trying to catch it. I scooped it up, threw the rubbish away and poured myself a new one in a new glass. Since my roommate was also on Prozac, we broke an entire set of glasses in a year. That glass is an apt metaphor for the action of anti-depressants. They don't postpone the inevitable crash; they simply enable you to function while avoiding thinking about it. Prozac allowed my friends and I to work full time at various internships and job assignments, get straight A's in our course work and go out most nights, all without feeling like our brains were hanging by a thread (except in our once-a-week therapy sessions). If our sanity was in danger, we would never really know it. But it wasn't just maintenance. Prozac had its fun side, too. An appetite suppressant, Prozac kept me fashionably underweight long after my other symptoms had passed. And it was a good joke topic. We even took silly photographs of ourselves taking Prozac in the morning -- like those look-ma-I'm-smoking-a-bong pictures beloved of high school students. Although we were all strictly warned not to touch alcohol while on seratonin reuptake inhibitors, we quickly learned that a Prozac drunk was a blast -- and cheap, since it only took a couple beers or cocktails to send us reeling. Of course, five or six drinks would land us in the bathtub with razor to wrist, weeping uncontrollably. We rarely discussed that. In fact, we rarely talked about anything of the sort. I was quite open about the fact that I took Prozac, but few people in our chemically fueled circle discussed why we were on the drugs. The subject was a little too touchy. Lots of people outside the circle thought that we were simply weak. One therapist threw me out of her office, claiming that I simply wanted a quick fix and had no real desire to understand the cause of my anxiety. A critical co-worker approached me one day with a question: Is it right to make the unhappy happy and acceptable? Is it easier for the mainstream to swallow? A typical slacker, he then wandered off into a tangent on Van Gogh's madness/brilliance. In one sense, his question was completely irrelevant: Prozac might have saved my life. But still, it stuck with me. I stopped taking Prozac during my senior year. I also quit my job, whittled my class load down to two hours a week, gained 10 pounds, wrote my thesis and slept a lot. During the same period, my roommate lost her prescription and couldn't afford her little happy pills anymore. She dropped out of her grad program a month before completion and spiraled into some sort of madness that involved interminable sessions of babbling, chain smoking and frantic pacing. I needed the drug to stave off a breakdown; she needed it to function.
Most of my friends are out of college and off Prozac now. Occasionally I wonder what would have happened if we'd taken a different path. What if we'd taken hallucinogens, thrown caution to the winds? My guess is that a lot of us would be dead or rotting in some institution. Maybe some great imaginative work would have arisen from our madness. But I doubt it.
Do anti-depressants inhibit creativity or enable creative minds to think clearly and work productively? Join the discussion in Table Talk. |
