A Society on Prozac? Oh, That’s Depressing
I called it Vitamin P.
Prozac, that is. The little green-and-cream-colored capsule that I took to dodge the blues. I didn’t think of it as a serious psychotropic drug. I thought it belonged on the food pyramid.
If Time magazine proves prophetic, that may turn out not to have been such a far-fetched idea. Before long, we may all be taking it. In a Jan. 20 special mental health issue, several articles present startling new evidence that depression can exacerbate or even cause physical ailments like heart disease, cancer, diabetes and epilepsy, which could prompt even the occasionally heartsick to start popping mood stabilizers as if they were Tic Tacs.
Another article, titled “If Everyone Were on Prozac,” reports that some physicians are asserting that even people who don’t suffer from depression can get a mood boost out of antidepressants.
So why not, right? Back when I was on Prozac, I would have endorsed that sentiment wholeheartedly -- not because it’s a good idea but because when you’re in the throes of what psychiatrists call hypomania, as Prozac poppers can be, the phrase “bad call” just isn’t in your lexicon. You do a lot of things you shouldn’t and think nothing of it.
Which is why, despite having battled clinical depression for years and despite having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disorder correlated with high rates of depression, I made the difficult decision six months ago to take myself off Prozac.
It’s also why the notion of an entire society being medicated as I was is both frightening and, ironically enough, depressing.
Frightening because the manic side effects of Prozac can be dangerous. Prozac makes you feel better by disabling those crippling doubts and inhibitions that are the hallmarks of despondency, but it often does so at the expense of your better judgment. You stop over-analyzing, but you also stop thinking things through, and that can precipitate some pretty bad behavior from otherwise mild-mannered people.
Picking fights with or propositioning strangers, betraying friends, lying to family, stealing, cheating and engaging in road rage were things I did with alacrity on Prozac but contemplate now with shame.
And I’m not alone. Ample anecdotal evidence and expert testimony link reckless or even criminal behavior and mania induced by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors -- the class of drugs to which Prozac and other antidepressants like Paxil and Zoloft belong. This should give us all serious pause, especially now that the Food and Drug Administration has approved these drugs for children.
That’s the scary part. But there’s also the depressing part, which has more to do with the humanistic and cultural, not the sociologic value of critical thinking.
A society jacked up on Prozac, especially one in which nondepressed people are using it for kicks, is one that is filled with people who have renounced unfiltered self-scrutiny and embraced the unexamined life at the behest of a semi-euphoric drug. That is truly a civilization in decline.
Except in extreme cases of biochemical imbalance, giving over your brain to chemical tinkering is the ultimate act of nihilism. It amounts to a denial of the soul or at least of consciousness, awareness, struggle -- and a dismissal of everything about the human condition that is not organic, including art, religion, philosophy and love.
Antidepressants are not the devil, but they are certainly not a panacea either. They were never meant to be the lazy person’s spiritual aspirin, designed to make bad days a thing of the past. They were meant for clinical depressives and have helped many people, including me, overcome true emotional torpor, though often not without exacting a considerable price in self-awareness and self-restraint.
Even the decision to use antidepressants by people most afflicted and medically at risk usually comes only after long and deliberate consideration of the risks and losses entailed. Society at large must do no less.
