Eat, Pray, Love

Still, I never relaxed into taking those drugs, though they helped immediately. It never
mattered who told me these medications were a good idea and perfectly safe; I always felt
conflicted about it. Those drugs were part of my bridge to the other side, there’s no question
about it, but I wanted to be off them as soon as possible. I’d started taking the medication in
January of 2003. By May, I was already diminishing my dosage significantly. Those had been
the toughest months, anyhow—the last months of the divorce, the last ragged months with
David. Could I have endured that time without the drugs, if I’d just held out a little longer?
Could I have survived myself, by myself? I don’t know. That’s the thing about a human
life—there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if
any variables had been changed.
I do know these drugs made my misery feel less catastrophic. So I’m grateful for that. But
I’m still deeply ambivalent about mood-altering medications. I’m awed by their power, but con-
cerned by their prevalence. I think they need to be prescribed and used with much more re-
straint in this country, and never without the parallel treatment of psychological counseling.
Medicating the symptom of any illness without exploring its root cause is just a classically
hare-brained Western way to think that anyone could ever get truly better. Those pills might
have saved my life, but they did so only in conjunction with about twenty other efforts I was
making simultaneously during that same period to rescue myself, and I hope to never have to
take such drugs again. Though one doctor did suggest that I might have to go on and off anti-
depressants many times in my life because of my “tendency toward melancholy.” I hope to
God he’s wrong. I intend to do everything I can to prove him wrong, or at least to fight that
melancholic tendency with every tool in the shed. Whether this makes me self-defeatingly
stubborn, or self-preservingly stubborn, I cannot say.
But there I am.
Eat, Pray, Love