Death Grip Read Online Free PDF

listening to myself.
    I kicked myself in the ass and changed the basic message. I changed it from, “You, Mr. Samet, have a lifelong anxiety disorder that must always be treated,” and, “We need to approach this benzo withdrawal from a place of strength, with other medicines on board” and, “It’s very dangerous to stop your antidepressants. What if you become suicidal?” and, “Meds give you choices,” to, “You are a whole, functional human being and not just the sum of your symptoms and diagnostic labels.” I changed it to: “You do not need these meds.” I changed it to: “The choice to live chemical free is a good and a necessary one.” Choices: It’s all about making choices. The five times I’ve been hospitalized—four of those for what I now realize was benzo withdrawal—the psychiatric establishment always offered more “choices.” This blue-green pill or this white one, this pink pill or this yellow one. This useless support group or that one. This endless, navel-gazing talk therapy or that one. Their choices have given me rashes, headaches, dry mouth, a deadened libido, dampened creativity, palpitations, head rushes, electrical zaps to the brain, slurred speech, glassy eyes, sleepless nights, rage … “Choices.” Without such choices, I might have healed years ago.
    Writing this, seven years after “the incident,” with a drug-free mind and hard-earned lucidity, I will say that the “choice” to trash my car and slash my wrists beneath a beloved cliff, in front of a beloved friend, is not one I will make again. I won’t take another med; I’d rather swing from a noose. Try me: I will end it before I let the brain-vultures spiral in again. I will endure every thunderous brainstorm and the filmiest wisp of depressive fog, knowing that this is my lot and that here, in darkness, rests my core, authentic self. I will sit with depression when it comes and listen, to decipher its barbed and cryptic teachings.
    Now, listen: I’m not some rabid coyote ululating from the badlands. I’m just a guy. I have a graduate degree, grew up on middle-class streets, held jobs, paid taxes, flew in airplanes, went grocery shopping, slept with women, brushed my teeth, tied my shoelaces. And whether you admit it or not, you do know someone like me. A friend, perhaps, who has trouble sleeping and ended up on three different pills that came to worsen her insomnia. Aunt Betty who lost her husband to cancer and was given “a little something” for her grief, and soon that something snowballed into a polydrug cocktail and she can no longer leave the house, her face a jelly of twitches and tics. Your nephew, an overly plump “bipolar” five-year-old taking an antipsychotic drug to control “irritable outbursts” and to temper the side effects of the ADHD drug he’s been on since age three. Grandpa Tom benzo-anesthetized at the nursing home so he’ll be less belligerent, less prone to sclerotic frissons, though now he can only count stucco dots on the wall, his mien gray-washed and slack. A co-worker who ghosts white during meetings and escapes for a high-potency benzo, only to return composed; but now, five years in and three milligrams deep, she has a constant tremor and must carry a pill vial from which she never separates.
    Do these characters sound familiar? Are you one? Do you believe that these people have been given “choices”?
    Surely the cure outstrips the disease.
    Welcome to the Psychiatric Death Machine—hospitals, doctors, the FDA, and their bedfellow Big Pharma—which has created an ever-expanding universe of dependency-fostering, side-effects–laden pills and profitable “mental illnesses.” If we are to take certain facts at face value, there has been an explosion in mental illness in America in the past quarter century, an epidemic