Read Online Coming of Age on Zoloft by Katherine Sharpe - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Katherine Sharpe
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herself well; it’s entirely possible that you’ve read something with her byline. Her experience exemplifies many of the questions that people who come of age on antidepressants ask themselves—about what the real self is, how medication affects development, and whether or not to stay on medication as adults—as well as the ways that they arrive at personal answers to these questions.
I met Emily on one of the first crisp fall mornings of the year, at a café about halfway in between our respective neighborhoods. In a casual, floppy sweater, with her blond hair pulled back from her face, she looked cute and cool, as if ready to audition for the part of schoolboy crush or loyal best friend. I asked her to tell me how she got started on antidepressants, and she began by describing herself as someone who felt from an early age that there was something a little different about her. “I was always sort of depressed, even as a little kid,” she said. She remembered feeling tense often, “having the same crazy anxiety feeling that I have about things now, but about childhood things.” She smiled self-deprecatingly. “Things that, with hindsight, I think ‘That’s not normal.’ ” In elementary school she could worry all day about the fact that she was going to have to go home and do her chore (at the time, scooping out the cat litter); the feeling of responsibility, however inconsequential, filled her with dread.
The word paralyzed came up a lot in Emily’s stories about herself. “I remember having paralyzing nostalgia as a kid,” she said. “Like being eight, and looking at pictures from when I was five, and crying.” She frequently worried herself sick over things that most people go months without giving a passing thought to. In middle school, she could lie in bed and think about the universe expanding, about Earth’s tiny size and relative unimportance, until human life began to feel completely pointless. “I’m saying this now laughing,” she explained, “but back then it was awful. It was completely, paralyzingly scary and also just made me feel like I never wanted to do anything. What was the point of getting up?”
Around fifth grade, Emily’s worries began to center more and more on schoolwork. “I was always good at school,” she said, “but I would come home and spend five hours on homework that probably should have only taken me half an hour. It’s not that it was too hard or anything. It would just overwhelm me, and I would obsess about it, and get really anxious. I would overthink questions until they became, I don’t know, impossible meta-quandaries.”
In ninth grade, Emily had a crisis. “I had mono, and it went undiagnosed for a while,” she explained. “And I think that constant exhaustion, coupled with my anxiety over schoolwork, coupled with my obsession over friends and my mom being volatile—I really just lost it. I got super depressed. I think I stayed out of school for three weeks. I would run to the bathroom crying in the middle of the day.” Emily’s mother took her to a talk therapist, and also to a psychiatrist, who prescribed Prozac. Emily remembers not liking the idea of taking medication at first. “I was fourteen, so I didn’t have a choice of whether to take it or not,” she said. “I remember throwing a fit, and my mother just making me. But I think that as soon as I saw and felt the difference, I became much more okay with it.”
Still, Emily’s uneasiness about medication led her to go on and off Prozac a couple of times in high school. During a year spent as an exchange student in Spain, she didn’t take it and felt fine; social life kept her busy, and in a foreign environment, she said, schoolwork didn’t cause so much anxiety. She became more committed to antidepressants in college. “Freshman year I was off it for a while,” she remembered. “And I remember in some kind of writing 101, the most basic writing class, we had to write a paragraph
I met Emily on one of the first crisp fall mornings of the year, at a café about halfway in between our respective neighborhoods. In a casual, floppy sweater, with her blond hair pulled back from her face, she looked cute and cool, as if ready to audition for the part of schoolboy crush or loyal best friend. I asked her to tell me how she got started on antidepressants, and she began by describing herself as someone who felt from an early age that there was something a little different about her. “I was always sort of depressed, even as a little kid,” she said. She remembered feeling tense often, “having the same crazy anxiety feeling that I have about things now, but about childhood things.” She smiled self-deprecatingly. “Things that, with hindsight, I think ‘That’s not normal.’ ” In elementary school she could worry all day about the fact that she was going to have to go home and do her chore (at the time, scooping out the cat litter); the feeling of responsibility, however inconsequential, filled her with dread.
The word paralyzed came up a lot in Emily’s stories about herself. “I remember having paralyzing nostalgia as a kid,” she said. “Like being eight, and looking at pictures from when I was five, and crying.” She frequently worried herself sick over things that most people go months without giving a passing thought to. In middle school, she could lie in bed and think about the universe expanding, about Earth’s tiny size and relative unimportance, until human life began to feel completely pointless. “I’m saying this now laughing,” she explained, “but back then it was awful. It was completely, paralyzingly scary and also just made me feel like I never wanted to do anything. What was the point of getting up?”
Around fifth grade, Emily’s worries began to center more and more on schoolwork. “I was always good at school,” she said, “but I would come home and spend five hours on homework that probably should have only taken me half an hour. It’s not that it was too hard or anything. It would just overwhelm me, and I would obsess about it, and get really anxious. I would overthink questions until they became, I don’t know, impossible meta-quandaries.”
In ninth grade, Emily had a crisis. “I had mono, and it went undiagnosed for a while,” she explained. “And I think that constant exhaustion, coupled with my anxiety over schoolwork, coupled with my obsession over friends and my mom being volatile—I really just lost it. I got super depressed. I think I stayed out of school for three weeks. I would run to the bathroom crying in the middle of the day.” Emily’s mother took her to a talk therapist, and also to a psychiatrist, who prescribed Prozac. Emily remembers not liking the idea of taking medication at first. “I was fourteen, so I didn’t have a choice of whether to take it or not,” she said. “I remember throwing a fit, and my mother just making me. But I think that as soon as I saw and felt the difference, I became much more okay with it.”
Still, Emily’s uneasiness about medication led her to go on and off Prozac a couple of times in high school. During a year spent as an exchange student in Spain, she didn’t take it and felt fine; social life kept her busy, and in a foreign environment, she said, schoolwork didn’t cause so much anxiety. She became more committed to antidepressants in college. “Freshman year I was off it for a while,” she remembered. “And I remember in some kind of writing 101, the most basic writing class, we had to write a paragraph
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