For me I find that mental illness is extremely complex and you know it’s medications can help sometimes and they can be beneficial but the medications that are out there, they, at least the most effective ones can take the longest to really take effect so there’s a lag, how effective they can be. It can cause other side effects and I mean in the grand scheme of things if you’re trying to get better in anything I think like medication plus therapy is a really powerful combinations. But I do think that sometimes depression issues can be really more of a thought process thing, that may not have to do with the fact that you know you have low serotonin levels or you have low dopamine levels or anything in your brain. You, you legit have a problem accessing happiness period.

It is a biological issue. I mean I’m not saying that I’m for or against one perspective but I do think about those things and I, maybe at one point I may want to consider it if I feel that it’s my depression is debilitating enough that I do need to go down that path. But I have fallen down a lot of times and I’ve kind of made it through and I feel like there could be light at the end, at the end of the tunnel, if I continue to seek help and I continue to be just aware of it. But yeah I mean another medication to you know a list of medications that you know people are already on or that I’m currently taking and everything is just another thing to think about.

I, immediately when I was in my counseling sessions I made it very clear that I just wanted to get help with medication. And, [clears throat] excuse me, it was kind of an odd thing to like, really make clear because that can seem kind of like with the wrong thing in mind or at least that’s what I think. But it’s just because that I knew that talking about it wasn’t going to help and that’s not what I wanted to do. I just wanted to, I just wanted to have my potential with my semester and get on track. So I, I made it very clear I wanted medication and it, through the university health services it was very hard to go about getting medication and that’s kind of unfortunate in my opinion, because not always is it that counseling is going to help people.

I was not taking medication for quite a while actually. I’ve sort of always been anti-medication. I didn’t want to rely on a substance to get me through. I liked the idea of just figuring out what was wrong and fixing it sort of on my own naturally. And then, it, it just wasn’t working even with my, my therapies because my, my depression often manifests as anger and agitation. Some people get you know sad and dysfunctional. I get upset and angry and irritated. And it was, it was hurting my personal relationships, especially my romantic relationships, just getting confrontational and irritable. No one wants to be around that and I wouldn’t want to be around that either. And so when I was single, I didn’t really put much thought into it, because I was just being mad at nobody. Just mad in general, myself, but once I started targeting another person, that’s when I realized that I, that’s not okay, and its kind of derailing relationships so I needed, I needed to get some outside help even if it makes it a little bit uneasy.

I’m kind of worried about any kind of treatment for it because I would prefer not to be on pills. My, my friend is and she can’t leave the house unless she has something in her system and it’s just kind of sad to watch because sometimes she can’t get a prescription for that day you know depending on what she’s taking and I just feel like your brain eventually gets dependent on that sort of thing and then if you can’t get it at that moment it’s just not a really fun way to live. I sometimes try to just deal with my issues head on and sometimes I feel like I’m not necessarily strong enough to defeat whatever issue or resolve whatever issue is going on.

I also think that the problem is that, you know, we’re such like a sort of constant or like problem solution oriented society. I think we want to be like, “You have depression, you take an antidepressant pill, and then you are no longer depressed.” And like, you know, it just makes like this nice, simple logic and I don’t think most people understand that way. No, antidepressants, basically, all they’re meant to do is for people whose depression is caused by unstable brain hormones. It’s meant to stabilize it a little bit so that you can put in the hard work of changing your life such that you are no longer depressed. And that’s the things, like getting out depression is a process and it’s an ongoing one. And I think that a lot of people think that they’re going to take antidepressants, and then they will feel great. And then when that doesn’t happen, they’re like, “Oh, these things don’t work.”

I continue to take my medication, you know the medication did take about a month to get in your system and after that I was, I felt amazing, I was like I cannot believe that this is how I was supposed to feel my entire life but I’ve never felt this way before, I’ve never felt like that cloud wasn’t hanging over me anymore and I finally felt that I was like this is, I was overjoyed.

I guess I didn’t know anything about medications when I started out so he just picked one that he thought would work for me and it wouldn’t be like too crazy to start out with but it’s really, I guess it’s more me deciding things than him like what I feel is working and I tell him how I’m feeling on it and then he won’t, I was worried that he would be like pushing things on me but he’s really open about sort of switching up medications if something’s not working or like trying different combinations. Yeah, so I would try something for I think four or five or six weeks I would say and then come back and check in to see how that’s working. If it’s not working switch to something else, take it for a while and see what’s going on and, yeah, we did that for a while until we found what I’m taking now.

What do you think about that kind of negotiating with your doctor to

Yeah, I think that’s a good thing, I think it’s important to sort of be able to like talk to them freely whenever something’s not working or whenever something is working. Being comfortable I think is important.

Because I was on a lot of different medications before I found the right one and it took a long time to find the right one, but when I did, it helps so much. Like, it really does.

How did you know the medications were wrong when they were wrong?

I just didn’t feel like myself and I didn’t like the way I was feeling. So I wasn’t, I wouldn’t take it. I stopped taking it after like 6 months, 7 months because I, that’s I’m not acting like myself. I’m not going to take something that makes me not me. And the doctor was like, Oh we tried so many different medications, something has to work. And that, she didn’t give up. Which is, was good because some doctors will just give up be like, If you can’t take this, this is all you can take now.

I was like, Oh great, another medication that’s not working, And the doctor’s like, Well this is a really high dose for you, so let’s lower your dose. So they cut my dose in half and it ended up being the perfect amount. So I was almost about to give up on it, but she was like, Please don’t, please don’t, because this medication works differently the way it works. She was like, We started you at a high dose, so let’s cut it down and see how it goes. And I did, I listened to her, which I didn’t listen the last time [laughter].

But I did this time and it was the right medication. It worked. Half the dose worked. So, I guess the dosing helps. Like, too high of a dose could be not affecting me the right way too.

Right.

Which I didn’t try with other medications, I just stopped taking them.

Yeah.

So I gave this a try with the dose.

That was one of the reasons that I got, or that I had to get off the medication was that there was some creative block or like, it wasn’t even like I couldn’t be creative because I could make music that sounded good but it did like nothing for me. Like, it was just like, yeah. I was just like, yeah I guess it was because the, well the emotional spectrum. It like elevates it, but it like constricts it so instead of feeling like this, you feel like this, but this happens to be like, you know, there’s all this that you don’t have to like deal with and compared to being depressed, it’s like this is the high end of the spectrum. But yeah, I don’t know. Depression is not good for music. I need like a variation in in emotions or a perceived variation in emotions but it was like, I was not making, in my eyes not creating good art when I was depressed. It was all just kind of like slow and the same and like, yeah. There’s just no variety to it, it was all just kind of came back to the same thing, where it was just like meh.

Kind of sad but kind of you know, optimistic and I don’t know, just. I prefer a broader range of feelings.

I hated being on it.

What did you hate about it?

I felt like. It just, it evened me out too much in the sense that, previously I had a lot of highs and a lot of lows, and I, I was just even. I didn’t have the highs that I had anymore. I didn’t feel much of anything, and I sort of felt numb. My parents really liked it and they didn’t want me to go off of it because I was no longer being disagreeable. I was just sort of going through the motions and doing what they told me to do, and that was great for them, and I can see that now, but I hated it. And I just stopped taking it at a certain point.

When I got to college, I stopped. I went off of my medication for, you know, good reasons. I thought by the end of my senior year of school, I was feeling better. I didn’t think I needed medication and my parents were ok with me going off of it. It took me a long time to take it seriously at first because I thought it meant there was something wrong with me. And it’s not, it wasn’t anything wrong with me, it was just a neurochemical imbalance. It’s like having a cold-nose, like a stuffy nose, except it’s in your brain. And it was just hard to realize that it wasn’t me personally. And, you know after, after experiencing severe depression in college, having gone off my medications, I realized what a big difference it makes to be on them. Because I can’t, can’t be myself, like who I want to be without my medications at this point and time. If I don’t take my medications, I’m just not functional at all. Not functional, like couldn’t go to work if I didn’t take my medication now so I’m really happy that I do take medication.