Coming of Age on Zoloft Read Online Free PDF Page A

the past in light of the present, searching for patterns. If what I’d just been through was depression, then what about those times back then? Seen from this new perspective, they seemed like evidence toward the conclusion that Sam had been right—that there really was something wrong with me, and that I had always been this way.
    Medical anthropologists speak of something called “illness identity,” the sense of oneself as sick that parallels the actual experience of being unwell. Without meaning to, I was combing back over my life and revising it into a slightly new story, one that incorporated the idea of my being at least a little bit afflicted. I found that not only was this kind of editing not hard to do, but it was also almost irresistible.
    Taking antidepressants is a complicated activity because it takes place on at least two levels. There’s the literal level of feelings and actions: we suffer; we see doctors; we receive treatment and feel better, or don’t. But there is also an invisible level on which we assign meaning to these experiences. We develop theories about why we felt bad in the first place, why we have chosen the treatments we did, and why they help. Along the way we subtly adjust our self-understanding to incorporate what we’ve been through.
    David Karp is a sociologist who has pointed out that in every experience of depression and treatment, the patient moves through a series of predictable stages—from a vague sense that something is wrong; through a crisis; to the recognition that he has a real problem that must be defined, explained, and managed. Each stage, says Karp, invites revisions to one’s sense of self. 1 Talking to people about their own antidepressant stories made me appreciate the simple brilliance of Karp’s idea. Dividing the experience into steps allows us both to see what every antidepressant experience has in common and appreciate the variety that is possible at every turn. In this chapter I’ll use a collection of my interviewees’ voices to talk about how other people got started on antidepressants and began to modify their own identities in response.
    WHEN I BEGAN to conduct interviews for this book, I realized I was far from the only antidepressant user who described feeling different from a young age. Christine was in her mid-thirties when we spoke. She had grown up in Denmark, attended graduate school in the United States, and returned to Europe to live before her children were born. I reached her one afternoon on a grainy video-Skype connection that revealed, with a transatlantic time lag, a pretty woman with dark hair, whose slight Scandinavian accent only seemed to make her speech more expressive.
    “I’ve been battling with anxiety my whole life,” she told me, “all the way through childhood.” Christine felt that her difference was both rewarding and troubling.
     
    I was very emotional, and sensitive I guess, to everything. To life in general. More sensitive than other kids. I always pictured myself as this person in black and white, who was almost see-through. Everyone else was like colorful and alive, and I was just this black-and-white, fragile person. But I could feel everything; I could feel everyone around me, all their ups and downs.
    —Christine, age thirty-six
    Others expressed a similar idea:
     
    Some of my earliest memories are of being afraid of things. With a lot of fear and anxiety around what I would think are pretty common activities for a child. And all I really knew was that my mom was frustrated with it and that other kids around me didn’t understand it; I got teased a lot about being afraid and being sad.
    —Ben, age thirty-nine
     
    My entire life I was always kind of the shy one. I wasn’t very social, and that’s just kind of the person that I’ve always been. And as I got into high school, I tried to push myself out of that comfort zone, and tried to be social, but it was still very difficult for me. So I was awkward,