Throughout my life, I have dealt with lesser and greater levels of depression and anxiety. I remember sitting on my bed and feeling a general, aimless sadness as young as the age of two. I was suicidal at nine. At fifteen, the voice of a young male resided in my head for several months. In my early twenties, my issues escalated to such a point that I finally found myself a psychiatrist and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. A second opinion pegged me as manic depressive, and a third as schizoid affective, all within a two-year period. I have been on and off several different medications in an effort to deal with emotions and delusions that are occasionally more extreme since my early twenties than they had ever been before that point.

I suffered intolerable side effects with each drug I was prescribed, and so from August 2001 until January 2007 I tried to live mainly medication free aside from a trial flirtation with St. John’s Wort. The sad fact about St. John’s Wort, according to my research, is that not only was I supposed to stay away from old cheeses, red wine, beer, yeast, and strangely enough, pickled herring, but it lowers the effectiveness of the birth control pill and increased my skin’s sensitivity sunlight. Old cheeses, red wine, and beer are three major comestibles that make my life worth living. I would never kick a wedge of blue cheese out of bed for drinking beer.

After living for five-and-a-half years without prescription medication, I found myself completely bottoming out last winter. During the day, I cried at work, thought that everyone I knew was talking behind my back, often believed I was too ugly to socialize publicly, and lost my ability to concentrate on tasks for any length of time. At night, I lay awake unable to stop my brain from running through all the ways in which I had failed myself and others during the day. Sleeping usually meant three hours of catnapping and trying to swallow the bone that seemed to be stuck in my throat. As is common when my depression and anxiety get the better of me, I lived in constant pain and had to take large doses of pain medications just to keep from weeping.

It was not until I spent a week at home sick because I spiked a fever every time I thought about leaving the house that I was willing to accept that I needed to try medication again. When your partner suggests that extended work leave combined with a hospital stay might be the answer, it is time. I made an emergency appointment with my doctor, and after talking with her about the length of my symptoms (since 1975) and family history (largely undiagnosed but obvious), she prescribed Celexa for my condition. It took me a lot of courage to fill that prescription and take that first pill, because I had visions of dry mouth, suicidal urges, and electrical zaps dancing in my head from previous medications, but I took a deep breath, threw the little white pill into the back of my throat, and swallowed.

So far, it is one of the best things I ever did for myself. I am generally happier, more creative, and more relaxed. I say generally, because this psychological lift has been tempered by my recent bout with cervical cancer, which has thrown in a whole world of complication, but that’s how life rolls. Before this medication, I could not have said that.

I am still skeptical of prescription medication’s actual usefulness in a lot of cases, but I am far less anti-pharmaceutical than I used to be. Any time that I have missed a dose or two and am treated to another taste of how I used to feel every moment of every day, I wish that my medication could take human form. Neither it nor I are perfect, but if it didn’t smell like paint thinner, I would lick it all over and ask it to go steady.