What it’s like to realise you might need antidepressants

Medication is often the first suggestion someone will bring to the table when told about a mental health problem, and it makes sense.

Medication can cure a lot of other health problems, and if someone had tonsillitis you’d probably suggest antibiotics.

Of course, though, it’s different for mental illnesses.

If you’re considering opting for medication to help you with your depression, it’s crucial to know that there are multiple options available – as well as drug-free options, talking therapies, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and much more.

When I eventually went to the doctor after realising I could be depressed, followingmany late nights spent hoping Google could solve my problems, medication was the first suggestion for me, alongside therapy.

I took the medication hungrily as I was so desperate for anything to make my brain feel better. I had to go through a few periods of trialing different kinds before I found the medicine which was the exact right one for me. Like Goldilocks! Of doom.

There is still a lot of stigma attached to taking medication for mental illness, as medication is seen to just treat the surface of the problem and not solve ‘the real issues’ behind mental health problems.

When a friend went to therapy for his severe anger problems and was prescribed medication, I was quick to slag off the doctor for avoiding ‘the real issue’ and for turning so quickly to pharma. Did the psychiatrist not want to talk about his issues, I wondered? Did the psychiatrist just want to do the easy thing and throw dangerous medication at him, which could bring out all kinds of side effects?

I was projecting the very same stigma that I try to abolish – even those of us who know the benefits and advantages of medication have been conditioned into automatically thinking it’s the devil.

But taking medication for my depression has made me more able to deal with and prepare for depressive episodes, so who’s to say the anger medication won’t do the same for the red mist. You can see it from both sides, really.

There’s nothing bad about taking medication for depression. Even that sentence sounds so obvious you wouldn’t think I had to write it down. The bit that I’m conflicted about is the stage at which meds are introduced to people, and how they are explained and monitored.

I know medication works. If it works for you, keep taking it. I have no plans to come off my medicine and have been taking it for years.

Without the medication I can’t get out of bed. Without the medication I can’t physically or mentally focus on anything apart from the darkness. The only thought rolling around my mind is that this all has to end and how can I make it end and why hasn’t it ended yet (um, because you’re just lying in bed in the dark and not doing anything about it, love). Without the medication, the dizziness and the nausea came back, along with the excruciating headaches and seemingly a complete intolerance to alcohol. I was basically a wobbling, vomiting, head-holding drunk.

The medication didn’t fix my depression at all, but it cleared the road of a whole load of shit I didn’t even realise was in the way before I started taking medication. I was still depressed, but I was less consumed by it.

To continue the weather metaphors, I and others have described the effects of antidepressants as like a fog being lifted; it’s still grey and rainy, but you can actually see the roads ahead of you now rather than having no sight of what’s ahead.

But antidepressants are a bit like the contraceptive pill (or, if you’re a biological male reading this, perhaps I could liken them to getting a Starbucks order exactly right after countless times of adjustments and changes to see what your perfect concoction is).

There are so many types of antidepressants available, they all take a fair whack of time to properly kick in (at least three weeks), and they all have different effects on different people depending on what mixture of brain and body chemistry they’re faced with post-swallow (steady on).

After I’d gone through the tests in the hospital, found nothing and continued to be miserable, I finally conceded to the idea that maybe I might be depressed. Of course, this manifested in the modern way of lying awake in the wee hours of the morning, Googling ‘how to know if you’re depressed’ on my phone, and taking an NHS quiz to try to self-diagnose.

Even the quiz was traumatising, and I found myself in gushes and convulsions of tears as I selected a frequency for how often I experienced things such as ‘feeling bad about yourself, or that you are a failure, or have let yourself or your family down?’ and realising that it was constantly. All the time. All day, every sodding day. It’s quite startling to see it laid out in front of you like that.

After reaching the results screen that essentially said woah hey are you the Grim Reaper? I thought I should probably go to the doctor about it.

My appointment came around the next week. When I got to the doctor’s surgery, I sat in the waiting room feeling waves of shame that didn’t stop crashing. What was I doing, taking up an appointment slot when there are people who actually have real illnesses and need urgent care? What was I going to say, ‘I can’t stop feeling sad’? Why waste the NHS’s valuable and already stretched time with that? Just cheer up.

Surely I’m not actually depressed enough, anyway, and the doctor will tell me to pull myself together and get a grip. Will they think I’m pretending just to get some drugs? Am I pretending? Is this even real?

I was about to leave and stood up just as my name beeped onto the screen. I figured it would be an even bigger waste of their time to actually not go into the appointment I’d booked, so I traipsed to Room 3 and did that performative knock you do even though you know the doctor is expecting you, and you’re not exactly ‘just in the area and thought you would pop by’.

I walked in and sat down, and the doctor asked me why I was here. ‘I… um…’ breathe. ‘I think I’m depressed.’ I said, for the first time ever, out loud.

And then the crying came, and it wouldn’t stop. It was the crying that a child does when it’s fallen over, the kind that makes you sound like a baboon when you try and inhale because you kind of choke on your own breath.

The doctor passed me a box of tissues and I tried, limply, to soak up rivers of tears and snot.

‘And why do you think that?’

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything except cry. It was so shameful, and childlike, and useless, and probably disrespectful to his medical degree, but I just sat in his chair and half hyperventilated and half sobbed.

I managed to get out an ‘I… [sob]… feel… [choke] . . like… [sob]… this… [sob]… everysingledayallthetime.’

He wrote me a prescription for sertraline and I shuffled out of the room, feeling about four years old. Didn’t even get a bloody sticker.

This is an extract from Get A Grip, Love, a self-help guide to recovering from mental illness, out now.

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