Antidepressants are magic. I still hate them.

Disclaimer: The following post has been written vaguely in the midst of a spiral. I needed a way to get my emotions out somehow because other ways are failing. I have not proofread or properly thought about this while writing whatsoever. Proceed with caution?

This is I think the first time I’ve written about mental health on this blog. It’s been a big part of my life for many years, but I’ve always kept it very close to my chest, and only over the past few years properly started talking about it and how it affects my life.

Just over six months ago, on the 22nd January, I sat down, scared, in the waiting room of my GP. For some reason, talking to professionals about my mental health (or really any kind of health) has always terrified me - am I making too big a deal out of this? will they just think I’m an idiot wasting their time? - and this was the first time seeing the GP as an adult, without one of my parents there to reassure me. My name was called, I went in to see the doctor, he read the brief notes I had written when making the appointment, and he launched into what I think is a standard spiel. About 15 minutes later, I walked out of the GP with a prescription for fluoxetine, which I picked up from the pharmacy and started taking.

That was probably one of the best decisions I could’ve made.

There’s a lot more over many years that led up to that decision, and many friends along the way who supported me towards eventually making it, but that’s not what I’m writing about today. This is about what happened after.

The first week or so was hell. Expected to happen, warned that it would happen, had a long conversation with medic friends to understand why it would happen, but still hell. Worst depression that I had felt in a long time. I would wake up every morning and just want to break down crying for absolutely no reason. I would drag myself to the shower because I had a lab or something I had to get to that morning, and then would spend the entire time in a weird state of trying to hold back tears except the tears would never come out anyway even if I wanted them too.

And then, one random day, it all stopped. I got up. I went outside. I felt the sun on me. I saw the trees. I heard birds. And then I fucking smiled. I felt happiness. Proper happiness that I hadn’t felt in a long time. And from there it only got better. The random sadness out of nowhere stopped taking over my life. I could actually focus on my work without having to hold back tears and wonder what the point of any of this was. The smallest twinge of sadness would no longer make me spiral and want to cry for the next 6 hours. I could actually get on with life without having to think about bringing things to social situations for when the sadness hit and I just wanted to sit in the corner and break down. They were literally magic.

Yet now I’m sitting here, listening to a selection of sad songs¹, holding back tears. So what changed? Honestly, I’m not sure anything really did.

Emotional blunting is something that seems to be often mentioned as a side effect of antidepressants, and was brought up multiple times at followup appointments after starting. But until I started actually looking for it specifically, people only seemed to talk about it as an effect of muting all the highs. That was never an issue for me - the last 6 months of being on antidepressants have probably been one of the happiest times of my life so far, and I’m decently sure a huge part of that was due to the antidepressants.

What seems to rarely mentioned is that it blunts the lows too. There’s a difference between depression and sadness, and while (at least in my experience so far) it fixes the former, it also completely breaks the latter. Humans get sad sometimes, and I’m fairly sure that’s supposed to be normal and healthy. At some point the sadness builds and you need to release it, and in the past I would’ve done that by breaking down in tears, maybe finding a friend to talk to through the tears, and just let it all out. Except now I can’t. I’m physically incapable of actually being able to properly cry anymore. I have all this pent up sadness and crying that I haven’t been able to vent at all, and I just want to let it out somehow, and all I could manage over the past hour of writing this was barely even countable as a single tear. And I hate it. I need to cry, just not in the way I used to.