“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita.”
-- Dante
Inferno
I was 33 in 1996 and life was going pretty well. I had a good job, was running my own small business, and was just starting a new relationship. I was in a good psychotherapy where I was growing by leaps and bounds. I was dancing socially every week.
In the middle of this decent path through life, I came across a temporary situation that caused me a lot of anxiety, and I was unfamiliar with anxiety, being a person from a depressive family.
I had always been against psych meds. I believed them to be iatrogenic, and I thought most mental distress would respond to good psychotherapy (although it might have to be intensive and inpatient for some people).
But, I had recently become more blasé about psych meds because I was working in an underfunded community mental health clinic in a big city where people in severe and chronic distress were offered medication and a teeny bit of psychotherapy. Period. It seemed better to give them meds than to do nothing. This contributed to inuring me to psych meds.
I decided that, in the current stressful moment, it would be the self-loving thing to do to ask for and accept some extra, temporary help, and to not be so fanatically psychological in my approach. So I went to see a nice psychiatrist, who was very respectful, and I started Paxil.
