Coming of Age on Zoloft Read Online Free PDF Page B

ride.” So I went downstairs and I asked my mom, like, “Can you take me to the hospital, I just took all my pills.”
    —Heather, age thirty-nine
    Heather told me that her crisis seemed to come out of nowhere. “When I was fifteen, bipolar just kind of hit,” she said. Other people pegged their crises to a triggering event, like a breakup or a major life transition. Shannon, a brassy former fashion model who grew up in Wisconsin with her sister and mom, was an excellent student but hated the high school environment. She dropped out six months early and spent a couple of years moving around the country with her boyfriend, arriving in Massachusetts when she was nineteen. “It was there that the adult part of my life really hit me,” she said. “ ‘I need a job, I have to pay bills,’ that sort of thing. He and I had an apartment together, and I was doing temp jobs.” She continued:
     
    I decided I needed to do something with my life, so I went to a community college. But I had the same issue I had with high school; it was slow, it was tedious. So after one semester, I decided not to continue. And that’s when the depression really started to set in. It began with the reality that I was nothing at that point. I didn’t have a career. I didn’t have much to live for, so to speak. My relationship with my boyfriend was falling apart, and I was nervous because there was this intense pressure, at least in the city where I went to high school—by the time you were twenty-three, you were married, you had kids, you had a car, you had a house, you were successful, all this kind of stuff, so that pressure was somewhat ingrained in my head, and I just kind of lost it.
    I fell into a horrible depression. I was so nervous I couldn’t answer the phone. I couldn’t even walk outside to get the mail. I was terrified of anything and everything that was outside of the living space that created the comfort zone. I didn’t know what to do. I was at the end.
    —Shannon, age twenty-six
    Other times a situation can seem like a crisis precisely because there’s no identifiable triggering event, and the seemingly illogical nature of the problem is part of what’s disturbing about it:
     
    When I was fifteen I was really sad and anxious, and I was tearful a lot, I would cry in school and I couldn’t—I would just lie on the floor in my room and I couldn’t get up. I did have this kind of generalized anxiety thing, where I would just look at something and a visual something would snap in my brain that would make me feel horribly anxious. Like, it didn’t matter, like a tomato in a commercial, it didn’t make any sense. And that was horrible, it was like anything could throw me off and it didn’t have any sensible story to it.
    —Rachel, age twenty-eight
    But without exception, everyone who talked to me about their crisis described a sense of isolation. Heather felt compelled to “withdraw” from her family and even became alienated from a sense of her own feelings, which were replaced by numbness. Shannon became depressed when she was having trouble finding a way to fit into the world as a productive adult, and in an unfortunately typical piece of irony, being depressed made it even more difficult for her to connect with others. Lindsay suffered partly out of a sense that she couldn’t burden anybody else with her suffering. “By the time I was sixteen, I was definitely struggling with some clear depression,” she said.
     
    It’s kind of a tough year, I think, for anyone; you’re a junior in high school, and that’s known to be the really hard one. And then my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, right before Christmas that year. I was spiraling more and more depressed but just keeping it really to myself. I didn’t feel that, in spite of my very loving and supportive family, that at that particular moment I could share any of my pain or contribute to the burden that anyone was under, because my mom was so