The emasculating effect of antidepressants
After a few breakdowns, and mood swings that went too far, I finally sought medical advice and was prescribed antidepressants. Whilst it calmed me down and returned me to my previous equilibrium, it didn’t stop me from a destructive stop-start approach to medication.
I have only begun to realise just how much of a profound effect my Dad passing away has had on me. But it wasn’t just grief, my mood swings often displayed themselves in large bouts of melancholy and despair piercing through my everyday life. But why, knowing how well medication worked for me, and how debilitating my depression was, did I still push the pills away?
For years, as a society we’ve talked about the stigma of mental health, a barrier society has largely overcome, but there’s also the cold, hard reality of what that means for many with mental health struggles; medication. And it’s the medication, and the baggage that comes along with it, that really hampers your mental health journey.
Dr Alex George, of Love Island fame, and now the Government’s Youth Mental Health Ambassador, posted on Instagram last November a photo of a small, white pill with the hashtag #postyourpill. In the post, he highlighted the stigma many people face when taking medication to help their mental health, particularly those in professional jobs like Dr Alex. It’s the shame that you need mediation, with no clear timescale, to just function normally. It’s coupled with the cockiness you experience when you feel better and then you think it was all in your head all along, like finishing a course of antibiotics a little too early.
It’s also a stigma that I feel men acutely suffer from. There’s nothing more emasculating than having to pop a pill to stop yourself from crying on the tube. In fact, according to the CDC, the number of American women taking antidepressants is more than twice the number of men, with medication like Prozac becoming a cultural phenomenon in its own right.
The idea of antidepressants, for far too many, possesses a weakness in a way general mental health struggles do not. We’ve managed to remove much of the stigma when talking about mental health in the abstract but the idea of taking medication to manage your mental health still has an alien stigma attached to it.
So you’re at the start of your mental health journey and in the phase of feeling both embarrassed about taking your medication, whilst having the cockiness of thinking you don’t need them. My advice, from my experience, is to ride through that wave and resist it. One of the hardest things for me to realise was how do I marry up being a full time, professional man with my need to take medication.
It wasn’t until I watched Alistair Campbell’s documentary “Alastair Campbell: Depression and Me” that I began to realise that, if a hard-nosed bruiser like Campbell still takes medication, whilst working in Downing Street and beyond, it doesn’t undermine your professional life, your manhood.
Going back to the antibiotics, antidepressants are just like any other medication, without gender, without strength or weakness. As Dr Alex says “[it’s] not about saying medication is the ‘answer’ for everyone, rather say that for those who need it should have access without barriers or shame.”.
If you have been prescribed medication, take it, because trust me, you’ll kick yourself over those broken relationships, the mental anguish, in those lost months.
