Kicking

By next week it should be done. After seven years, my participation in one of the great pharmacological experiments of our time will conclude.

I’ll take my last half-dose and I will be free of the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors that I’ve taken daily since the bleak summer of 2016. At the end of my tapered withdrawal plan, I will take my leave from a giant, largely silent community of SSRI users numbering around 8.3 million adults in the United Kingdom alone. That’s close to a fifth of all adults nationwide.

Smarter people than me will explore the societal questions posed by the prevalence of SSRIs across the UK: why do doctors prescribe them to so many of their patients? Why are women twice as likely to take them than men? What aspects of modern life, with its fearsome blend of conspicuous consumption and material precarity, render so many citizens clinically depressed or anxious? I can only share my experiences.

For seven years a single Sertraline tablet, accompanied by Rennie or Gaviscon to guard against the acid reflux it often provokes, has been the one daily constant in my life. It has been the sole consistent ritual amid upheavals in jobs, love affairs and rental properties.

I was prescribed the medication after a prolonged period of depression, anxiety and occasional suicidal ideation in my mid-twenties. The NHS, to their credit, had granted me a place in group therapy sessions before moving me on to the tablets, but after a few meetings I decided to play in a basketball league on Wednesday evenings instead. Ironically, my decision to seek further treatment would be clarified a few weeks later, after I threw a Nike trainer at the gym wall in a blind fit of rage after conceding a technical foul.

Other seemingly innocuous events would send me crashing towards a crisis point, like when I walked up and down the 92 spiral stairs of Elephant and Castle underground station four times, silently agonising over whether to buy the new pair of jeans that would render me irresistible to a particular office colleague. Or when I stepped in dog shit on a first date in Battersea Park and returned to my Camberwell council flat convinced that romance, let alone love was for other people.

So at the age of 25, with a promising graduate career in telecoms still ahead of me, I started taking the pills. The early side effects were prodigious: a light-headedness that left me literally bouncing into the walls, coupled with the kind of violent diarrhoea usually reserved for seafood restaurants in exotic holiday destinations. There’s a curious photograph of me from this time, moon-eyed and spaced out at a company awayday, silently terrified of other people knowing about my medicine.

In the intervening years, after the side effects largely subsided, did the tablets work? I feel better now, and never reached same kind of sustained low as in the summer of 2016 again. My life has improved materially and spiritually: I’m in a more fulfilling job and have found enjoyment and community through a band and a cricket club. I’m still in a privately-rented former council flat, but this one has less mould and pretty wooden floors. I’ve also found not just romance, but love, which is a blessing every day.

The pills also gave me a quiet sense of contentment, a slightly eerie feeling of a weak winter sun shining on my back. Perhaps my life would have improved without the medicine, and I occasionally worry that this sense of contentment may have stopped me from pushing myself further. Did the drugs blunt my creative edge? How many more words might I have published if I hadn’t been medicated?

In retrospect, there were scant alternatives to my SSRIs: cripplingly expensive private therapy or wacky hallucinogenic treatments where I’d have to risk one-shotting my brain with ayahuasca or magic mushrooms. Maybe I could have stuck grimly at it, riding the raging tides of my emotions even as I felt last vestiges of self-esteem crumbling around me.

So now I’ll move on without the daily doses, facing the joys and challenges of the world more or less unalloyed and unvarnished. Over seven years I’ve become estranged from the harshness and chaos of daily life, soothed by a comfort blanket of medication. The prospect of leaving SSRIs behind is daunting, given my past struggles and the tumult of the current day, but I’m glad to have the opportunity to live without them again.