RFK Jr. wants to ban the drugs that saved my life
I hate to overshare, but this is going to get a little personal. Mental health is something I struggled with for a long time before I finally got it under control, so it’s a very personal subject for me.
About 15 years ago, I had nowhere left to couch surf, so I had to move in with my mom. I hadn’t lived with her since I was around 11; my dad had custody for most of my childhood. But now I was 19 years old, unemployed and had nowhere else to go.
I remained unemployed for the first few months. I simply had no direction in life and no motivation whatsoever, and I really didn’t care. I’d been drinking pretty regularly since I was about 15, and later in high school I started experimenting with drugs. Ever since then I made it my job to be trashed 24/7.
I didn’t know it yet, but it wasn’t the high I enjoyed, so much as the short windows of anxiety relief the drugs granted me. I suddenly had confidence, and I wasn’t stressing out about every detail of every possible outcome of every situation. My mind was calm.
Everyone knows how that goes though. It’s not sustainable in any way shape or form. I’ll save you the boring details, but I was reckless as hell for the last few years of my high school career, and I carried that into adulthood.
That brings us back at the beginning of this post; I’m living at my mom’s house at this point.
Living the ‘merican dream.
After a while, I finally went to a temp agency and got a factory job. Needless to say, that didn’t do wonders for my sanity or self confidence. I stood at a machine that cut and folded junk mail into letters that I then packed into plastic US Postal Service mail trays. Whenever I finished a skid of those, the material handler would come and bring them to the people up front, who inserted them into envelopes to be shipped out to you.
It was the same painfully boring thing over and over again, sometimes for 16 hours a day. Sometimes seven days a week. And no matter how hard I worked, or how loyal I was to the company, I wasn’t making the world any better. I was actually making it worse by killing trees, burning electricity and sacrificing my sanity – all for something that will go straight from the mailbox to the trash can.
At some point, I started having panic attacks out of nowhere. They started getting so bad I had to leave work on a few separate occasions. Eventually, I made a trip to the family doctor and explained what was going on.
He diagnosed me with social anxiety disorder and depression, and he put me on a low dose of the SSRI Paxil.
My entire fucking life changed.
Suddenly I was getting the relief I’d only found with hard drugs, but without all of the sweating, bouts of rage and apathy, puking, dope sickness when I inevitably ran out; you get the point.
I was finally starting to get a grip on the thing I had been putting filthy, ragged bandages on for so long. I finally had some hope for the future – literally for the first time since I was a kid.
My life has become unrecognizable from those darker times, and I have SSRI’s to thank. I’ve switched to a couple different ones over the years; I’m now on Lexapro. But without them, I would probably either be dead or worse: still working in a soul crushing factory.
I went from factory to warehouse, and from warehouse to retail sales, and from retail sales to management. Before the antidepressants, I didn’t even have the confidence to go to my supervisor and request vacation time that I had earned. Why would they let me take vacation anyway? Why would I even ask? There’s mandatory overtime every day of the week. I’m just being selfish.
That’s how I used to think. I used to struggle with even working up the confidence to go into a gas station and buy a bag of chips.
Now I’m working face to face with people, putting together finance deals and negotiating big ticket sales orders. That’s no dream job by any means, but I’m finally making a living wage. I can finally wake up and not spiral all day about something dumb I said five years ago, something embarrassing I did yesterday, or something I might fuck up next week.
I can afford to blow money on something stupid every once in a while if I want to. And I’m not slaving away from dusk to dawn to get it.
Most importantly though, I’m not afraid of the world anymore. I have the drive and sanity to go out and face – and overcome – whatever life throws at me. I feel alive, and I have ever since then.
I’m not saying my life is perfect; it’s very far from it. But at least I have some kind of quality of life. Of course it has its curve balls, and antidepressants aren’t an end all be all for bad mental health, but without them people like me wouldn’t stand a chance at living a normal, fulfilling life.
What do I have in common with RFK Jr?
Just the past heroin use, unfortunately. But now, he wants to take SSRI’s away from people and force us to work in labor camps to Make America Healthy Again.
Fucking brain dead. I think he’s mostly bark and not much bite, but honestly I don’t so easily dismiss absolutely unhinged, harmful rhetoric from the government anymore. Not when we have literal concentration camps for legal immigrants. Not when dictators are being invited into the country with literal red carpet treatment. Not when transgender citizens are being treated like they’re less than second class. Not when the internet is splintering into different KYC-walled shards in the name of “protecting kids.” Not when we’re moving from cleaner energy back to coal… Everything is so fucked up right now.
I’m telling you right now, if there’s ever some kind of ban on SSRIs, we’re in for chaos. The likes of which no one has ever seen on such a massive scale. Bigly.
Imagine if just nicotine or just caffeine were outlawed. The country would turn upside down overnight. Now imagine if something that turns completely dysfunctional people into productive members of society was cut off.
Personally, I’m willing to go into a Mad Max world where I, and people like me, all go back to the worst versions of ourselves. I can raise a lot of hell when I’m unmedicated, and I would inevitably make it everyone’s problem. Now multiply me by about 37 million and that’s how many people will be in withdrawal from the thing that turned their life around. Even for people who don’t get discontinuation syndrome, they’re still going to revert back to the version of themselves that was hopeless and unmotivated. No amount of hard labor on a farm upstate can fix that.
More than 1 out of every 10 Americans are on an SSRI.
But RFK Jr. is probably right; they’re bad and should be outlawed, just like life-saving vaccines.