Today I will start going on anti-depressants. This is quite a significant moment for me. It doesn't feel big or anything, 'just' significant. I've been considering them on and off over the last few years but various reasons have put me off (all personal, before anybody thinks it's for cultural, religious, or social reasons).
As my mental health got particularly bad in these last six months or so, especially the last couple of months - so much so that I almost took physical action. On a few occasions during a particularly rough week of my PhD Intermission, I considered using a hammer to bash my head in whilst lying in bed (it was close enough to the baseball bat fantasy I mentioned in an earlier post). And on a few other occasions, I just thought about driving to Seven Sisters (some beautiful chalk cliffs nearby) at night under a clear sky because you can make out the Milky Way amongst countless other stars, plus there's hardly anybody around, and just walk off them and fall. Eventually (it was probably only a matter of moments, but felt like ages in my head), I decided against the former as I thought it would be a rather messy and visually-traumatising affair for my housemates/landlord, and the latter out of logistics. In both cases, though, I still do wonder (as I do each time I consider actually taking action to "end it all" and then refraining from doing so) if I actually want to take my own Life, and if I actually have the 'courage' to do so. That's not to say it is a brave and courageous act or that these are inherently good things and the opposites are bad, just that those are the thoughts and feelings that go through my head. Anywho, the reason I say all of this is because being aware that my mental health was getting pretty bad made me consider anti-depressants (clinically known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or "SSRIs" for short) more and more.
Now, my first two experiences of going to the doctors about this weren't particularly helpful or comforting, and it was only at the behest of a colleague/friend (thank you to them for reaching out) that I decided to go to the doctors again to consider SSRIs, and request them regardless of the experience. The first time I went was when I was an undergraduate at the University of Southampton, and went to one of the campus-based General Practioner (GP a.k.a. "doctor"). I did that multiple-choice test that's meant to gauge if you're depressed or not (personally, I don't think the test is great, since there's no "Why?" questions to understand the motivation behind the symptoms of one's depression, but hey, I get it's trying to get an objective measure of something that is, as far as I'm aware, highly subjective) and 'passed' it with flying colours (woo!). This then led to the GP informing me about the various 'solutions' to my "depression". I say "depression" in quotation-marks because, to me, I don't feel low without reason, it's the fact that things objectively seem to be bad despite my attempts to be optimistic, and so I feel describing how I felt as "depression" does a disservice to others I know who have been diagnosed with depression and objectively seem it, and so helping them deal with their stuff is a higher-priority than me with mine. Anywho, when they asked me if I considered anti-depressants, I said I was apprehensive about it. Their reply was along the lines of "Yes, that's understandable due to the stigma associated with it in South Asian culture."...-_- That immediately switched me off. Not just hearing such a prejudiced statement, but in this context of mental health, and from a doctor =/ Don't get me wrong, there certainly is a stigma around depression, anti-depressants, and all things related, in South Asian culture (though certainly not exclusive to it, sadly) that definitely needs to be addressed. But to immediately assume my apprehension towards taking something that can supposedly make me feel better was due to cultural traditions, and then not even verifying that assumption ("Is that the reason why?") really ticked me off, probably because I have to put up with this kind of prejudice so often, no matter how wrong it may be. So that happened and I switched off and didn't feel like I was with somebody who was trying to understand my situation enough to help me with it (as a doctor should, in my opinion), but just somebody with no interest in my actual well-being and wanting to get through a list of names. I ended up going to counselling instead of taking SSRIs.
The second time was at the start of my Intermission. I went to a campus-based GP here at the University of Sussex, but you get seen by a nurse first. I get that they're busy, and generally understaffed and overbooked probably, so there may also be a mentality of "Just get through every patient as quickly as possible.", but when you're asked if you've considered hurting yourself or even suicide recently, and you answer in the affirmative, and then the reaction to that is "consider going on SSRIs, here's some information about it, read it, only a GP can prescribe them so book an appointment to see them but next week is the earliest, okay bye" it all seems very...heartless and dismissive =/ Yes, objectively, they've ticked all the boxes (talked about possible solutions, provided relevant information about them, described how to get them), but doing so in a manner that seemingly lacks a willingness to understand and empathise can be really problematic for some people (myself included, of course). I get that, in both cases, the relevant persons may have seen this kind of thing countless number of times that it's almost become a routine for them and they're desensitised to the whole process, but it's pretty much guaranteed to not be the case for the other person =/ That's why I think the "Why" is so important to find out. All of these problems (cold, impersonal, and dismissive, approaches) are probably a consequence of limited resources (another example to demonstrate why we really need to support the NHS) and having too few appropriately trained/qualified staff for the number of patients, so I do feel bad for complaining about this, but still think it's a problem that needs to be pointed out and resolved properly as soon as possible.
As for why I've been apprehensive towards anti-depressants:
It's pretty much down to the idea that I've generally been able to think my way through most of my problems, and being afraid of not choosing how I think and what that may entail. Nothing to do with religion or culture (maybe some culture in terms of how people at school talked about depression/anti-depressants, but then that'd be, given the school I went to and who I was predominantly influenced by, "Western" culture rather than South Asian...), but my own internal influences. I could go on about it in greater detail, but that's pretty much it in a nutshell. It's not to say others who took anti-depressants are "bad" or "failures" or anything negative - I'd often recommend it to others who had already tried alternative methods (counselling/therapy) which I wouldn't have done had I thought it to be a bad thing - just that I thought I could 'think' my way out of it. In a way, that hasn't changed, but I think I care less about what effects it has on me than I had before, in that I think "Oh well, let's see what happens." (though I still am wary of the potential side-effects and how they may affect others around me =/). Maybe that makes sense, though I'd not be surprised if it didn't. Like I said, I haven't been in a great place recently and still feel like I'm there, just that I'm more apathetic about my situation now than I was say a couple of weeks ago.
So, here I am, about to take my first SSRI, with no idea how it'll affect me, but I thought I should try to post regularly throughout this whole experience to write about any changes I notice or even if changes I don't notice myself become noticeable in how I write. We'll see.