Abnormal Manifestations

The attempt to characterize the behavior and expressive activity of the insane as the meaningless product of neurochemical disturbance is nothing more than the most recent expression of the terrifyingly intense need felt by some psychiatrists to put a stop to all "abnormal manifestations. -John McGregor, quoted in Darkness Shining Wild by Robert Augustus Masters

I have often been disturbed by the perceived need of some to keep mental activity and brain functioning within "acceptable" or "normal" limits. This is not to say that there aren't people who need help functioning in their lives or in society as a whole, but I think we're going way too far. I know one guy who took Zoloft for a year because he was having troubles in his life; during that time he did nothing to change his situation or work on his issues. Finally after a year he got tired of being drugged, went off the Zoloft - and promptly had a needed breakdown, lost his job, and started to come to terms with things he needed to deal with. A woman I used to know confessed to me that she wouldn't be able to stand the married-with-children life she had chosen if she wasn't taking Prozac. She noted how it blunted her emotional responses; for example she felt that she hadn't grieved properly when her mother died, because the drug didn't let her deviate much from calm complacency. I found this horrifying. A final example: the psychiatrist Kalindi was being "treated" by was prescribing various psychiatric drugs to her (mostly SSRI's) on the theory that her brain chemistry was abnormal and needed to be brought within acceptable parameters. He explicitly said to her (according to her report to me) that although she could do years of intense psychotherapy instead, chemical adjustment was equivalent. I believe the various drugs might have made her brain chemistry more chaotic and contributed to her depression and suicide - a possibility that seems to be supported by some research released a couple of years after she died, which showed an increased incidence of suicide in young people taking antidepressants. (She was twenty when she died.) It's nice to know that pharmaceutical companies were aware of this possibility for years before she was treated with those drugs but suppressed the research findings to that effect. - and of course it didn't help that the psychiatrist in question was treating her across state lines (weekly phone therapy) and prescribing drugs without seeing her face to face to check up on her.

Let me be clear: I think that SSRI's and other psychiatric drugs can be useful tools, what I object to is the pathologization of all "abnormality." Following Kalindi's suicide in 2001, I descended into suicidal depression myself, and I'm sure I would have done it if I hadn't taken Celexa for about a year. I was plunged into an abyss with no way out, and Celexa seemed to magically levitate me just above the abyss - it was still there, and I still had to deal with it, to change my life in a way that could continue, and to get various kinds of therapy. What was most extraordinary to me was that within a day of beginning the Celexa I started to connect to the world again - I noticed myself really looking at my mother when I was talking with her, and realized in contrast that I had not been connecting with the world or other people - it was as if everything was behind a thick pane of glass. When I had been taking Celexa for about a year, it started to feel different to me, and I became aware of side-effects that either hadn't existed before, or that I hadn't noticed. I think what was happening was that my brain was returning to normal functioning (perhaps largely because of all the inner work I'd been doing during that time). So I then gradually weaned myself off it.

However, I tend to gravitate towards ways of approaching these issues that involve deliberately inducing (temporarily) a very "abnormal" state of mind by changing your brain chemistry radically, and doing work from within that changed state. About two years after Kalindi died, I had the chance to go to Peru and do an Ayahuasca retreat, drank that traditional medicine, and went into intense altered states of consciousness which were very beneficial (albeit often unpleasant and grueling while they were going on). At other times in my life prior to that altered states were beneficial in various ways. I wish that my society recognized the potential value of such techniques and did not only recognize the value of imposed conformity to a certain range of mental or brain activity that is taken to be the "normal" or "acceptable" one. I believe this is slowly changing, but we have a long way to go, particularly in the mainstream.