After my week in New York with Annie, I had a lot on my mind when I came home. Foremost were the conversations we’d had about mental health – my own, in particular. See, Annie’s been medicated a long time, and I couldn’t help but notice, spending so much time with her, how quickly she bounces back from things – especially in comparison with myself, whose day (or even week) can be derailed by the most minor of disappointments.
I’m an idealist and a romantic. This has always been the case, though when I was younger it was more on-the-nose; I’d buy roses for girlfriends, write poems and whatnot. A little older, and this romanticism turned to politics: I became enamoured with the narrative of it, fighting the good fight to overcome evil and oppression. When that grew wearying – how could it not in this day and age – I gathered my romantic nature and applied it to travel, literature, and visions of greatness. This train of thought led to what I might call The Great Derailment, in which I exploded my own life several times over – after which I turned my romantic gaze to ideas of redemption, to figuring out what it meant to be a good person.
Disappointment weighs heavy on an outlook built around aspiring to ideals. At first it’s just the big things – the wrong person gets into power, the world’s heating up, there’s plastic in our bodies – but to be honest, they’re not enough alone to sink you. What sinks you is that, gradually, the disappointment seeps into everything, like a thousand pebbles slowly filling your pockets. Litter on the street. Drunks in crowds. Bland supermarket food. Poor manners on public transport. You begin to see apathy and idiocy and badness everywhere – and all of it, each tiny, sigh-inducing outrage, globs onto this great ball of black tar, growing it inside you. What began as hope slowly turns to hate.
In New York, Annie told me I seemed anxious and depressed – and knowing her own struggles with mental health over the years, I trust her opinion. I asked her, as we walked through the West Village one warm evening, what she would be like if she didn’t take her antidepressants.
“Dude,” she told me, “during Covid I couldn’t get my meds for like a month. I would cry at the slightest thing. It was awful.”
More than anything else we discussed, that conversation played in my head over and over upon my return to London. Annie has always seemed so fine. She gets sad like anyone, of course, but it passes and then she’s okay. But she doesn’t drag herself around the rest of the time; there’s always a spring in her step and a sparkle in her eye. I, on the other hand, sounded much more like the unmedicated version of Annie she’d described – the one overwhelmed by life, lachrymose and wilting, incapable of handling even the slightest hardship with any stoicism.
During my first week back at home, I ruminated on the heavy fact that if I could fly to visit my best friend in the coolest city on earth and still feel the dread-pull of despair, I would feel it anywhere. The final nail in the coffin was when I attended my usual improv class on a Monday evening, after several missed sessions. The class, which involves learning how to act in improvised sketches with a group of friends, usually leaves me feeling euphoric and dreamlike – you laugh until you cry, most sessions. This time, however, I felt cobwebby, brittle, afraid of the watching eyes of my friends as I took the stage.
That did it. I called the doctor, explained everything, and asked for a course of citalopram, an antidepressant. It didn’t take long to get prescribed; I’d taken it for just a couple of weeks in 2023 before deciding I didn’t need it (probably a sign the medication was starting to work – silly). At that time, it had felt like a huge deal to go to the doctor. I was deeply reluctant, only going as a result of my family’s gentle persuasion.
Depression, you see, has a warping quality. It tells you that what you’re seeing is real, and that everyone else – happy people – are only so because they’re not perceptive enough to see the world as it really is: horrifying. If they were aware of the things you were aware of, they’d be depressed too. And therefore, logically, there comes a resistance to medication. Why take a pill, you ask yourself, just to numb myself to reality? Why pretend this is all okay? Why join the vapid crowds in their fake happiness? Agonising though this may be, there’s nobility in seeing the world as it really is – in carrying the weight of it.
It took me a long time – a long time – to realise that these thoughts were the depression talking. I didn’t truly know what antidepressants did, but I’d read stories of people losing their creativity, their libido, their joy – everything that made them them. Plus, I thought, if I took a pill that made life feel okay, surely I’d just fester in it – stop striving for more, end the search, and simply lie back like a heroin addict and admit defeat: this is all I’m gonna get.
Well, I’ve been taking citalopram daily for two months now. And the reason I’m publishing this article – which I know isn’t exactly a knee-slapper – is that if anyone reads this while in a similar place in their life, I want you to know: fucking hell I wish I’d done this sooner.
The first couple of weeks, for me, were a bit placebo-y. I thought I was feeling better, though chemically it’s unlikely they’d had much time to do anything. I was sleepy and a bit zoned out while my body adjusted – but then, I was sleepy and zoned out with depression anyway. I was excited, however – keen to see what would happen, to discover what life might look like on the other side. I knew the risks and was a little anxious about them, particularly the libido loss, but thankfully I seem to have had next to none.
As when the depression first crept in all those years ago, it was a slow build. I remember walking down the street one day last month, and a thought popped into my head: that sun feels lovely on my face. It was such an unusual thought that it actually threw me for a minute. When was the last time I’d actually thought about that? More such moments followed – feeling satisfied looking at a pretty building, enjoying a breeze at a bus stop, liking my outfit for the day – and I began to realise that my perception of antidepressants had been completely wrong. They weren’t numbing me to the badness of the world. They were allowing me to still see, feel, hear, smell and taste the good that was still there – that had always been there, that the depression had hidden from me.
Antidepressants, I have found, have not numbed me, Soma-eque, into thinking the world is wonderful and everything is rosy and I shall want for nothing. My beliefs remain unchanged. I know there are problems to fix – both on a larger societal scale (duh), and in my own daily life, on my own character (also duh) – but crucially, I once again have the heart to get up and begin making those changes.
What’s more, the anti-anxiety effects of citalopram are nothing short of miraculous. I did not realise how anxious I’d become over the past five years. Again, it was a gradual thing – a sort of shrinking self-induced penance, I think, for hurting people in the past. I noticed myself struggling with eye contact. I struggled to stand up for myself. I stopped taking up space, stopped contributing to conversations. I analysed every sentence I said, and every sentence said in response – down to the intonation of their syllables, searching for approval or annoyance.
I became physically timid and non-confrontational, and then at times would explode unexpectedly with repressed anger, often at moments that seemed completely mystifying to those who witnessed it. And of course, it doesn’t matter how much you explain that you’re repressed, that you’re struggling, that you’re trying your best to manage your emotions – once people see you losing control, voice raised and cortisol-flooded, they can’t relax around you in quite the same way. People feel the anxiety emanating from you, and it puts them on edge too – and you sense that in kind, and it becomes a horrible, jerky feedback loop.
The medication has released me from this prison. I don’t feel any physical effects from the daily pill anymore at this point, beyond a little yawning when it first kicks after I take it in the morning – but mentally, socially, I can hardly believe how comfortable I feel. I can hold the gaze of my friends and colleagues comfortably. I can sit in silence. I can speak my mind freely, without fear of judgement or reproach. And I know this sounds a little zany, but I genuinely think the medication – or rather, the curing of this sorry sickness – has made me funnier. I’m quicker in conversation, and can happily trade quips without feeling my ego bruise and crumple internally.
I can stand up for myself, too. Not in any aggressive sense – but what I found during my long, deepening period of depression is that if you shrink, if you stop taking up that space, others will move to fill it. You get walked all over, eventually, if you don’t assert yourself. This idea used to crush me, before I began the citalopram. Why is the world so competitive, I used to despair. I shouldn’t have to assert myself. People should just be considerate. Now, it’s no trouble: if someone pushes, I can push back, then go about my day without dissecting it through long sleepless nights. I can’t tell you how good it feels for someone to say:
“Jesus you look rough today.”
And rather than saying something like:
“Do I? Oh man. Yeah I should probably get a haircut.”
I can just say:
“Fuck off, I look fantastic.”
I was in a pub last month with my old school friend, Alex, watching England play Ghana in the World Cup. I hadn’t told him about my medication prior to that evening, though I’d seen him several times recently. I think I was a little nervous as to what he’d say; I know he wants the best for me, of course, but I wasn’t sure of his opinions on anti-depressants – and anyway, telling someone you’re on anti-depressants is essentially admitting to them that you’ve been desperately sad in secret for the longest time, which, in male friendships at least, constitutes a rather daunting moment. Alex knew I’d been having a hard time, but perhaps not the depth of it. There’s still something quite embarrassing about being seen to be struggling with your mental health.
When I finally told him – as the footballers walked onto the pitch to start the game – he didn’t smile, and he didn’t frown, and he didn’t shake his head. He just listened. Prior to my seeking help, most of our hangouts were strained. We’ve been friends since we were 5 years old; we have a brotherly relationship, and I believe it hurt and frustrated him to see me sinking so low, shrinking so small.
“So yeah,” I said. “Since I went to the doctor, it’s been night and day. I feel like me again.”
In an amusing coincidence, at the precise moment I said these words, the national anthem started playing on the big TV screen. Alex smiled at me then – his expression somewhere between relief and pride – and we said cheers to that.
*****
If you’re reading this and struggling in your own way, I hope it can offer a little sliver of hope. Things can get better. The idea often feels, in the thick of it, like nonsense – but I’m living it as we speak. You can find your way back. If you’d like to chat about any of this, drop me a message any time <3