Coming of Age on Zoloft Read Online Free PDF

and I did outrageous things to get attention, like I colored my hair pink. I started getting the rep for being the weird person, and that never bothered me.
    —Shannon, age twenty-six
    Many of those who described a sense of apprehension, difference, or awkwardness in childhood referred to their feelings as an “it.” They were aware of these feelings but didn’t yet conceive of them as a specific problem. “I know when I was forced to give it a name, when I felt like I had to contend with it as something ‘other,’ ” wrote Anne, a twenty-five-year-old, looking back on the experiences that had led her to start using antidepressants five years earlier. “But if I get to reflecting, then it starts to seem like there isn’t really a starting point. Like my life has always been informed by the presence of melancholy and anxiety, and only the intensity has changed.” In other people’s stories, as in my own, “it” takes on a name and a meaning after a crisis event nudges them into the mental health care system.
    Functionally, crisis events are all the same: they mark the point at which someone decides that the problem is serious and requires help. But they come in all shapes and intensities. Some may be recognized as such only in hindsight. Others, like Heather’s, are unequivocal.
    Heather grew up in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta. Both her parents worked corporate jobs, and Heather and her brothers lived in a comfortable house. Heather is bipolar, with depressions that have been more pronounced than her mania. One afternoon while we sat around her kitchen table in Brooklyn over a snack of crackers and baba ghanoush, she told me the story of her especially spectacular crisis. The year she was fifteen, she explained,
     
    my brother and I went to ski camp in Italy. And when I was there, I was the only girl and there were a million guys, so I think that had something to do with it. I was a little bit manic, and then when I came home, my mom just sort of barked out that this kid in my class was killed in a car accident, was run down by a truck, and that just set off this horrible reaction of depression. I was beside myself, kind of. That was the summer I was fifteen. I started drawing all these depressing things and I started writing poetry. Just totally withdrawing, and I feel like everything changed drastically.
    Heather didn’t know what was happening to her or even whether the things she was feeling were out of the ordinary, but she did know she was miserable. By fall, she said, “I used to go to a cemetery far away from my house, so I used to walk miles to a cemetery, and I used to sit there, and I used to cut my wrists.”
     
    I had my head all shaved, and I shaved off my eyebrows at one point, I just made my mom cry so many times. Or I’d bang my head on a wall. I was like, “I’m so miserable, I can’t feel anything!” I think that’s why people do that to begin with, you’re just so numb.
     
    The cutting?
    Yeah. Cutting’s just like, “Do I feel this? I don’t even feel this.” And the fact that I can do this to myself is horrifying. And it’s also like, “Please fucking help me! This isn’t normal behavior.” You’re not supposed to self-destruct. You’re supposed to keep trying to survive, not trying to like kill yourself.
    Within a few months, Heather reached a breaking point. “I was totally depressed,” she said.
     
    I was just a zombie. And in December, I overdosed on [the anti-anxiety medication] Klonopin. I took them all, and I remember thinking “Okay, I’m going to die now.” I remember lying down on my bed. I was like, “I don’t really want to die, I’m just so unhappy, I don’t want my life to be like this.” So I called Poison Control, and I said, “What happens when you take a whole bottle of Klonopin?” And she was like, “You’re going to have seizures and heart failure.” She said, “Do you want me to call the ambulance?” And I said “No, I can get a