When I was 17 years old, and should have been obsessing about boys and A-level exams, I started to believe I was a serial-killing paedophile who had blanked out their crimes in horror.
I wasn’t – I was actually suffering from a form of obsessive compulsive disorder known as pure O – but the almost delusional belief that I might have done something terrible without realising it was so paralysing that I felt suicidal, and stopped being able to go to school.
An expert has since told me that I was so unwell I should have received psychiatric care. As it was, the only thing available to me was antidepressants; then, as now, the mental health provision available to children and young adults on the NHS was pitiful.
I remember the relief when I first took the pills prescribed to me by the GP, the vague glimmer of hope I felt when I popped the Prozac out of its foil and put it in my mouth. I remember thinking that maybe, because of these drugs, I might wake up one day and not immediately want to die. Perhaps the awful monster that seemed to have invaded my brain would be banished, and I could get on with the rest of my life.
They gave me an anchor when I desperately needed one and enabled me to start recovering.
I’ve been on antidepressants more or less ever since. For 28 years – well over half my life – I have popped a pill to keep myself feeling vaguely normal.
I’ve tried them all – sertraline, citalopram, fluoxetine – and have attempted to come off them several times, but the brain zaps, dizziness and loudness of the intrusive thoughts soon made life impossible again. Even in pregnancy, the doctor thought it safer for me to stay on medication rather than come off it.
Indeed, I have come to accept that I will be on these drugs for life. They’ve enabled me to be a useful member of society, a successful one even. Though I have also been hugely helped by therapy, I believe that it is antidepressants that have provided me with stability and stopped my life from being ruined by mental illness.
For 28 years – well over half my life – I have popped a pill to keep myself feeling vaguely normal, writes Bryony Gordon
Dr Toby Pillinger from King’s College London helped to conduct a study which, for the first time, created a league table of antidepressant side-effects
So my heart sank when I read the headlines this week that linked antidepressants to weight gain and heart problems. Not because I’m worried about the effect of antidepressants on my own physical health – the only side-effect I’ve ever had was a sudden drop in libido when I first went on them, which soon returned – but because I worry about all the severely anxious and unwell people who might read these headlines and think twice about using the drugs themselves.
To recap: scientists from King’s College London and the University of Oxford have, for the first time, created a league table of antidepressant side-effects, to show the variability between the 30 or so drugs that are prescribed to people in this country. For example, some patients gain up to 2kg of weight within weeks of starting some types of antidepressant; others have changes in blood pressure and heart rate.
‘The aim isn’t to deter use,’ said Dr Toby Pillinger, one of the study’s authors, ‘but to empower patients and clinicians to make informed choices and to encourage personalised care.’
But we know that despite the large number of people on antidepressants (8.89million people), there is still a huge stigma attached to these drugs. As a mental health campaigner, I hear all the time from people who are too scared to take them, or who are thinking about stopping their medication after hearing some codswallop from an influencer on social media who recommends taking an expensive supplement instead.
The leaflets that come in boxes of antidepressants – they tend to be the length of War and Peace and detail side-effects that include everything from seizures to suicidal thoughts – hardly encourage people to take the medication. And this latest news is unlikely to persuade a group of patients who are already anxious and living in fear.
But few people go on antidepressants unless they are utterly desperate, and everything else has failed first. And here is the stark truth about mental health care in this country: it has got worse, not better, in recent years.
In all the time I have been on antidepressants, neither science nor the health system has come up with a better alternative to these drugs when it comes to treating mental illness. For many people, they provide a vital foothold that allows them to get their lives together just enough to be able to find some extra help, either privately or via charities and community support services.
Do you know what the side-effects of not going on antidepressants are for those who are mentally ill? I wish people would talk about this more – about how terrible it is for your physical health and general wellbeing to be stuck in a depression or an anxiety disorder, with no effective plan in place for the future.
If these headlines have made you question the drugs you are taking, please talk to your doctor before doing anything rash. And please know this: that I would far rather be mentally stable and a few pounds overweight than experience the hell I went through at 17 again.